"Pumpkin Smash" - a free 2nd grade sight word game

Holy moly. How is it already parent-teacher conference time??? This school year has flown by on the wings of crazy. Anyway, in honor of conferences and all that goes with this time of year (being too busy, having a million things on your mind, etc...), I have a freebie sight word game for you. This one is called "Pumpkin Smash", and my kiddos got a kick out of it.

To prepare this game, copy it on cardstock and/or laminate and cut apart. Each group will get a stack of cards.

Students will shuffle the cards and lay them out, facedown, on the table or ground in front of them. Students will then take turns to play. When it is a student’s turn, he/she will choose a card, and he/she will read the word aloud. That student will then continue to draw cards, reading each word, until he/she gets a pumpkin card. If a student picks a pumpkin card, he/she says, “PUMPKIN SMASH!” (some students seem to think this is hilarious - how little it takes to entertain a 7 year old...), and it is the end of his/her turn, and the next player will go. Play continues until all of the cards have been chosen. The person with the most cards is the winner! They seem to think it's pretty funny when a student will draw a pumpkin card right away. Dear me...

Hope your students enjoy this game as much as mine do. J This is a great game to use for word work during Daily 5 or guided reading, or students could practice it at home or play it together any other time.

Enjoy! To download, click HERE, or click the picture below.

 



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Free Pumpkin Thief 1 Before and 1 After Game

Happy Thursday! We our taking our sweeties to the Pumpkin Patch today - so excited! I just love going to the pumpkin patch, and taking the students and seeing their joy and excitement makes it so fun. We have a great day ahead!

Anyway, here is a math game freebie! 

This game is to be used for helping students practice 1 more and 1 less (1 before and 1 after) with a hundreds chart.

To play, each student will place his/her chip on "Start." They will take turns flipping a red/yellow counter. If the counter lands on red, the player will move 1 spot. If he/she lands on yellow, the player will move 2 spots. For whatever number the player lands on, he/she must say the number before and the number after, and the other player should check his/her answer. If a player lands on "Splat", he/she loses his/her her turn (I tell them that means they dropped their pumpkin). If they land on a "Hidden Passage" spot, they get to take the shortcut down the arrow. The first person to make it to the square marked "Finish" is the winner (we always go over good sportsmanship in our classroom).

Hope you can use this game in your classroom or with a small group of kiddos! It's a fun way to practice those math skills. :-) To download, click HERE, or click the picture below. Enjoy!

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Text Dependent Questions

The Common Core State Standards for reading ask that students analyze, grapple, and linger on parts of complex text in order to better understand what they are reading. To do this, students are now answering questions that can only be answered by explicitly referring back to the text being read. These kind of questions are called text dependent questions.

As we implement the CCSS ELA, we will become better and more comfortable at writing and developing these kinds of questions for our students. Hopefully this document will help you to understand how to do that.

This document has tips for you, the teacher, and it also contains 20 generic text dependent question prompts/stems (I cut these cards out and hang them on a ring for easy access, but you could post these in your room, keep a copy in your plan book, etc).

To buy a copy, head on over to TpT! Click HERE or click on the picture below.



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Office Max - A Day Made Better

Aside from fighting a nasty cold, I had a great surprise this last week. I was nominated for the Office Max A Day Made Better Award, and I had no clue! Here I was getting ready to teach math, and my coworkers told me that the principal was coming down to talk to our students. I was thinking to myself, "Why didn't I get that memo?" Lo and behold, in walks my principal pushing a brand new chair, and following her are some Office Max representatives with flowers and a gigantic orange box full of presents. Now, anyone who knows me knows that I get ridiculously embarrassed when the attention is on me (I even dread Christmas morning every year when the whole family stares at me while I unwrap a present - yes, my family does the one present at a time thing - lucky me). So, as my cheeks turned red, and I started making awkward comments, the attention continued while they bestowed upon me all of these gifts. In spite of the mortification, it was a really cool surprise. Thanks so much to Office Max for providing this treat, and I am very grateful for the new supplies and things I got for my classroom! Check out my new chair below (take a long at the old nasty one - when I moved into my classroom originally, I didn't have a nice comfy roller chair like I was supposed to - it had disappeared!).

Here is the gigantic orange box (almost as tall as my mini-fridge in my room):

And here is the "loot" that was inside of the orange box. It was so much fun to go through with my coworkers! My students will certainly enjoy the sparkly folders that were included (my girls will anyway). Check out the laminator in the back - pretty cool!

Hoping for another great week ahead! :-)

 



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Dropbox - to download or check it out, go to http://db.tt/OhtmcAo6

I am in love with Dropbox. Dropbox is an online file storage site. As a teacher, and as you can all relate, I have to work on school work all the time at home. However, our drive space at school is kept on a server that can only be accessed in the district on district computers. So, for years, I was traveling back and forth with a jump drive (multiple jump drives actually, because I tend to lose those pesky things all the time) and/or e-mailing myself constantly. It was quite a pain! Then, our district moved to Windows Sky Drive, because it came free with our district Outlook e-mail. I thought that was pretty cool, at first, because it meant I could access my files anywhere. However, I found it difficult to download and sync multiple folders, and it wasn't an easy process. I would have had to manually set up folders within the Sky Drive. I've also tried Google Docs. I do like Google Docs just fine, but when a friend recommended Dropbox, I was blown away.

 

Dropbox is the easiest file storage/backup site I've ever encountered (and it is completely free). You can carry your photos, documents, and videos anywhere. You literally just download it, and you choose which files to sync, and it will sync them for you, exactly as you have them set up. Then, you can download Dropbox on however many computers you want, and it will sync to all of those computers. I can now access my school files at home on my laptop, at home on my desktop, at school, and on any computer I ever encounter (even if you don't "download" Dropbox, you can still access your Dropbox from the internet). I even have Dropbox downloaded on my phone. Dropbox automatically saves my items to all of my computers, my phone, and the website - it does it all for me, and I don't even have to worry about it.

 

One cool feature about Dropbox is shared folders. My coworkers all downloaded Dropbox so we all have accounts. We can now share files and folders in a secure way where we can all access them. It's like having our own 2nd grade drive that is accessible right at our fingertips, wherever we go.

 

My explanation will not do this tool justice. I would recommend just trying it! Just think - no more flash drives, no more e-mailing documents back and forth to work, just easy peasy and free. If you are interested in checking it out or downloading, please please please click the link below, click the picture below, or click here (you can get free upgraded space if you refer others and if they use your link - easy way to get more space)!

 

http://db.tt/OhtmcAo6

 

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