Summer Lovin' Find Someone Who

Anyone else feeling the end of year crunch? :-) It will be a short post today. Here is a fun end of year activity for your whole class to enjoy. Find Someone Who (FSW) is an easy, engaging, cooperative learning activity for the whole class, and the structure can be used for a variety of subject areas and concepts.

To use this activity, download/print the sheet out and give each student a copy. Students then walk around the classroom and ask their classmates if they will be doing one of the summer activities that are listed in the boxes. If so, the classmate signs his/her name/initials in the box. Students continue until all of the boxes on their page are filled!

Enjoy this team builder/end of year activity. Please let me know if you have any questions. :-) Click the picture below to download, or, you can go to my TPT store HERE to download for free.

 

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Anger Choice Cards for the Classroom

Wow, so apparently April and May are difficult months for bloggers. Being still fairly new to blogging, I guess I just had no idea how hectic it would be to try to stay up on blogging!! :-) I suppose after 7 years of teaching, I probably could have figured that out as the end of the year is always crazy, but I guess I just figured I'd be just fine, ha!

Anyway, a few posts ago I talked about how I had some students who struggled with expressing their anger and emotions appropriately. I finally made some anger choice cards, and I hope you can use them as well in your classroom. This is something I've needed all year, and I'm just so happy to finally have them. Hopefully they help over the next 3 and a half weeks of school!

These cards were created for use in the classroom for students to use when they are angry, frustrated, irritated, or upset. We teach students that it is ok to feel these emotions, but that they need to express them "appropriately." A lot of students don't have the social backgrounds or cultural understanding of what "expressing emotions appropriately" might look like. Hopefully these cards can provide your students an idea of some options that will help them calm down in a manner that will not disturb or affect others. I tried to include choices that would be easy to accommodate in a classroom and that would take light prep work. :-) Use these in conjunction with a mini-lesson on anger management. You can either cut apart these cards to put on a ring, or you can just laminate the whole sheet to make a choice board. Please let me know if you have any questions! As far as the quiet spot and cool down box options, I have a little rug that students can take to a quiet spot in order to calm down. I make sure they know that they are not in trouble (this is separate from a "safe seat"). My school counselor put together a little cool down box for my teaching partner and me, and it includes a squishy ball, a glitter jar, beads to string, buttons to sort, and a container of clay type stuff with marbles hidden inside that the kiddos have to find. Some other ideas for a cool down box might be: a puzzle to make, a braided string set to pull/untangle, a rubbing stone to rub, a stretchy toy to pull. Anyway, I think all of the other cards or pretty self-explanatory, but as I said, do let me know if you have any questions! Just click the picture below to download, or you can go to my TPT Store HERE to get it free!



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Animal Life Cycles

Well we've just finished our unit on animal life cycles in science, and we're just starting plant life cycles. Personally, I prefer teaching about the animal life cycles, but that's just me. ;-) I suppose plants are interesting to the kiddos since there is a lot you can do with experiments and such.

Anyway, we learned all about human, frog, butterfly, chicken, and honeybee life cycles. The students love this unit, especially as most of them are genuinely interested in animals. I was saved sad (for the kids only) this year, because we did NOT do the baby chicks. It was just too much with this big group, and with the way everything fell schedule wise, we just weren't able to do it. Oh darn. For those of you who don't know me, I have an abnormal hatred of birds. Weird I know, but when you have had tons of birds poop on you (I know, I know, it means good luck in England - well guess what, I don't live in England) or fall and die in your driveway, they kind of freak you out, ha!

In addition to reading tons of books, watching a United Streaming video, making/writing some of our own life cycle books, and some various other projects, we did a couple of neat things that turned out very well. The students did a great job on these butterfly life cycle pictures, and this was an idea I had found in Mailbox magazine a few years back. I slightly tweaked it so the students were doing their own writing, but otherwise the idea was in Mailbox.

These fabulous chicken life cycle projects were tweaked and modified from an idea that Rachel at I Heart Crafty Things had posted, and I actually found it on wonderful Pinterest. It seems that quite a few people have found this great project! :-) Here is a direct link to her original post: Original Chicken Life Cycle Project and you can see below how ours turned out in comparison (definitely not as fancy, but still cute!).

Happy Monday to all of you! Someone mentioned to me today that there are only 4 more Mondays left, and that is just crazy to me! The year is absolutely flying by, and we're really entering our "busy season", so I will try not to disappear too much. :-) 

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Busy Busy Teacher's Life :-)

Not that I'm assuming anyone out there in the blogging world is waiting with bated breath for my next post haha, but I did realize today that I haven't blogged since last Thursday, and I just wanted to assure everyone that I haven't forgotten about you all, but this week is just flying by somehow!! :-) Anyway, here is a confession. I have a couple of students with some serious behavioral and emotional issues, and some of the fits that they throw (never at the same time - it's like they tag team them) are very "trying." As in I "try" to stay calm and zen-like, and while I do succeed (98% of the time), I have been searching like a madlady for ideas to use to help them. One of the things I try to emphasize is that it is ok to be frustrated/mad/upset/etc..., but how you deal with that and express it is important. One of the kids gets upset over anything and everything, and it's like trying to play Minesweeper as far as guessing what will set him off. Anyway, while my school and district have provided support, I am still needing something more. Pinterest has been an awesome source of calm down ideas like the glitter jar and other sensory activities, but I need some just plain old strategies. That is where you all come in. I am going to try to make some "choice cards" for what to do/strategies for when he gets mad. For instance, "When I am mad, I can count to 10." So what do you all think? What are some good/appropriate strategies/choices for kiddos to choose when they are upset or angry? I will be happy to share the choice cards when I'm completed, but I'm just trying to get some ideas right now!!! :-)

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Dice Match Game with 10-Frames

Happy Thursday! I'm ready for the week to be over. :-) We are in the middle of our graphing unit at school, and this morning students got to graph jelly beans at 9:00am. Needless to say, the sugar got to my kiddos, and they were bouncing off the walls. Holy cow! Anyway, here is a new 10-frame activity for you. The Dice Match Game with 10-Frames is a game I created to help students learn to recognize numbers on a 10-Frame. To play, pairs divide 10-frame cards evenly between themselves. Students will take turns rolling two dice and adding them together. Whoever has the 10-frame card that matches the dice roll sum will record the dot and 10-frame patterns on his/her recording sheet. The first person to fill his/her recording sheet is the winner! If a student rolls an 11 or 12, he/she just rolls again. To find other 10-frame games/activities, and to get this game with the 10-frame cards, please visit HERE for a full version of the 10-Frame Math Pack. In the meantime, enjoy this free download of the recording sheet! To download the recording sheet, you can either click one of the pictures below, or you can click to go to my TpT store.

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