Nursery Sneak Peak

Yesterday, April 4th, was one month from baby girls due date! I know due dates are just estimates, but if it is accurate, baby girl could be here May 4th! :) 

To celebrate that baby girl will be here soon, why not share a few pictures of the nursery?!?! It is just about done and ready for her arrival.

If you follow me on Instagram then you already know I LOVE monograms. So with that being said... of course there had to be a monogram somewhere in the room (meaning it became the focal point, just above her crib).

Her name will be Madeleine Maria.  It just so happens that her initials are symmetrical when made as a monogram ;) We will be pronouncing Madeleine as Mad-e-lyn. Her middle name, Maria, is a middle name that has been passed down for many generations on my mothers side of the family.  So Maria is my middle name, my mother's middle name, my grandmother's middle name and so on. 

The monogram came from FromMeToYouMonograms on Etsy. I ordered it unfinished and painted it once it arrived. I was definitely happy with the quality of the monograms and highly recommend that you check out this store. 

When starting the nursery, we bought her bedding first. It is from Pottery Barn Kids, the Harper collection mixed with the Lara collection. The bumper is Lara but the quilt and crib skirt is Harper. The curtains also came from Pottery Barn Kids and is their "sailboat" cloth. 

The glider we ordered from Babies "R" Us.  It is the Kersey upholstered swivel recliner that we ordered in 'burlap'. I shopped around and I was definitely happy with this purchase! It is super comfortable and I love the burlap color.  

It took me forever to figure out what I was going to put above the dresser/changing table that we bought from Ikea's Hemnes collection. At first I was going to do a collage of different frames but after hours of searching on Pinterest, I decided to keep it simple with these three frames below. I ordered these water color prints from TheDaisyFields on Etsy. She was great, she can customize the colors in the tree to match the colors of your nursery. 

I originally saw her print with a coral tree but wanted a bit more light pink for the room. After ordering she sent me a proof and they arrived a few days later. I definitely recommend checking our her shop if you are looking for something for your nursery.

I ended up making the alphabet picture with my Cricut machine. I bought paper from The Paper Source for the background and then cut the letters out on white and silver paper.  Then I glued the letters on to the pink paper and ta-da! Of course this teacher has the alphabet in the nursery! 

I had to share this little guy... he was a gift from baby girl's Great Aunt Donna. It is an elephant chair that came from Pottery Barn Kids and she added the little bows to match the nursery! I love it! 

 And last but not least I had to add this photo...

 When I was taking all of the photos of the nursery Dillard came in and brought his pink pig, "Squeakers"! :) He wanted to make sure he got to make another appearance on the blog! 

If you have any questions about where I bought anything please feel free to comment below. I am happy to share anything about the nursery with you!

Thanks for stopping by!

A STEM Project Just in Time for Earth Day

I must admit the very first time I ever attempted a STEM lesson I was a bit nervous...but once I saw how hooked my students were I knew it was something I needed to implement more of! If you haven't heard too much about STEM, here is a quick rundown:

1. STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics
2. STEM lessons provide hands-on experiences for your students that involve real world problems and students LOVE to get working right away!
3. STEM lessons are guided by the engineering design process. (see below)
4. STEM lessons incorporate 21st thinking skills such a communication, collaboration, and critical thinking.
5. STEM lessons allow for multiple right answers and provide an environment for students to generate creative solutions.

   

   Click here to get your copy of this poster in my TpT store!

One thing you must know is that sometimes students projects will fail, and their design might not work. Students may experience some disappointment but that is also when we gain those teachable moments.  When using the engineering design process in a STEM lesson, students can learn from what went wrong and make improvements to try again! 

So if you ready to try a STEM lesson in your classroom or looking for more STEM lessons to add to your collection I have one just in time for Earth Day (April 22nd)! This lesson focuses on the real world problem of littering. In this lesson students design mechanical grabbers to help their community become a cleaner, litter free place! 

Stop by my TpT Store to get your copy of this lesson.  It includes a lesson plan, teacher prep instructions and and activity lab book for your students to use throughout the challenge. I hope your students love the project, just as much as my students did! They definitely were excited about Earth Day so that they could use their grabbers to help clean up our school and teach other students about recycling!

Virginia is for Book Lovers Blog Hop

Looking for new books at add to your classroom collection? Well you have come to the right place because I am joining my fellow Virginia teacher bloggers for a blog hop dedicated to books! Each of us is happy to share a book and resource that we love to use in the classroom for this very special hop. You'll find a book giveaway on each page of the hop, with a super huge giveaway at the end! 

Now I love a lot of pictures books so picking just one was hard. But then...I came across the new 2015 Caldecott Award winner: The Adventures of Beekle and I feel in love! This little gem stole my heart immediately, and I knew after reading it for the first time I had to share it with my students.  It is an amazing book told from a new perspective...the perspective of an imaginary friend. It is such a touching picture book with vibrant colors and a terrific story about bravery and friendship.  If you haven't read this book yet here is a little preview (the music gets me every time): 

Are you ready to have your students fall in love with Beekle? You're in luck because I am giving away a copy of The Adventures of Beekle in the Rafflecopter below.  

a Rafflecopter giveaway

To go along with the book I have also posted a character trait FREEBIE on my TpT store. This freebie includes printables for 3 different Kagan Cooperative Learning structures that will allow students the opportunity to examine the character traits of Beekle. By working in teams of 3-4, your students can brainstorm using the Jot Thoughts structure, record their teams brainstorming with the RoundTable structure, and then reflect on the character traits through journaling. 

If you love using Kagan Cooperative Learning structures in your classroom you might also like my sequencing cards, discussion cards, and "how-to" writing activity that also go along with The Adventures of Beekle.  In honor of the blog hop this weekend, this product is on sale in my store for only $0.99! This price will only be good through Sunday night, so get grab this product now!

To celebrate our love of reading, Virginia bloggers have also put together an additional mega-giveaway. One lucky winner will win ALL of the books (that's 19 terrific books) in our hop! Click on Mrs. O Knows to read all about her recommended book and enter for your chance to win all 19 books in the hop!  Good luck! 

Don't forget to check back on Monday to see who won their own copy of The Adventures of Beekle! Thanks so much for stopping by! Happy hoppin'!

Five for Friday!

Happy Friday! It's been a big week, so what better way than to celebrate with a Five for Friday link up with Kacey at Doodle Bugs Teaching!

So let's get this party started!

Wahoo! We finally made it to the100th Day of school this week.  On Tuesday, we celebrated the 100th day with the Aging Booth app.  My kids had a blast taking their pictures and fast forwarding 100 years.  We did a side show of all our pictures and it was the funniest thing to watch.  Every time a new picture came on the screen the screamed like we were in the theater watching a scary movie.  After viewing our pictures, we wrote about what our life will be like in 100 years.  It was by far my favorite 100th Day activity that I have ever done.  I highly recommend downloading this app!

This week was my first time being a part of a big sale on Teachers Pay Teachers. It was really exciting! It made me grateful to be starting this journey working with Teachers Pay Teachers as they honored all those amazing teachers out there. After all, teachers are...neat, sweet and hard to beat.  I defiantly took part in the sale too and got lots of goodies! Buying clip art and font can be a bit addicting. 

Last week we only went to school one day because of all this crazy weather.  So, we had a lot of catching up to do in order to celebrate President's Day.  A teammate of mine made a great QR code scavenger hunt that we used to learn all about Abraham Lincoln.  We examined pictures of Lincoln, read books about him, and even made our own little book to honor him. 

I downloaded this writing book freebie from TpT on Sailing Through 1st Grade's store.  

Speaking of snow days, it has been too cold to go outside this week and our playground is still covered in snow.  Recess has been inside all week!  However, thanks to GoNoodle we are officially indoor recess survivors.  Thank you GoNoodle for helping to get the wiggles out! 

AND FINALLY...In baby news: this week marks WEEK 30! WAHOO! I feel like we have hit the big 3-0 and are in the home stretch. 

PS. My husband took this photo right after I got home from school...I am a little sleepy, can you tell? ;) 

I am going to be working on a big freebie coming up next week as I link up with some fellow VA bloggers! Keep an eye out for a giveaway too!

Happy WEEKEND!

Teachers Are HEROES Sale!

Starting at 12:01AM, February 25th a sale will be going on at teacherspayteachers.com! Visit my store and other tpt stores to get your favorite products made by teachers just like you. All of my products are marked 20% off. Then enter the promo code HEROES during check out to receive additional savings! After all, it's teachers that are Neat, Sweet & Hard to Beat! Thank you for all you do teachers! Hope you enjoy this great sale in honor of you!

Now go empty that wish list you have been filling up! Happy shopping! 

Informational Book Authors

      4 Weeks ago we started on our journey to become nonfiction authors! It has been an exciting time in writing workshop.  
      My writing workshop is usually about 50 minutes long and that always start with a 10 minute mini-lesson.  After the mini-lesson, my students get about 30 minutes of writing time to try something from the mini-lesson or continue their work from the previous day.  The last 10 minutes of our workshop is for sharing, and we like to share in all sorts of ways.  Sometimes we partner up with a buddy to share what we tried that day, and other times I choose two or three students to display their work under the document camera.  (If you don't have a document camera I highly suggest trying one out, it is amazing!)  I use a single sheet paper instead of a writing notebook, and students keep all of their work in writing folders.  We have been building our stamina as writers since the second week of school. My students truly value this block of our day as a quiet time to express themselves through writing.  I usually turn off a few lights in the room and turn on Gary Lamp's Music for the Mind.  His music is 60 beats per minute to support focused and fluid thinking.  
      During the last few weeks we switch from writing small moment stories into nonfiction writing.  We started the writing unit off by comparing a nonfiction book with a fiction book.  From this we discussed that fiction stories have characters, settings, problems, and solutions.  Then we noticed that nonfiction stories do not have these elements.  We decided as nonfiction writers we had to become experts at a topic in order to write about it. So we took our weather unit in science and focused on extreme weather.  We researched blizzards, hurricanes, tornadoes, and thunderstorms. The kids loved it! Weather is such an exciting topic for them to learn about. Blizzards and tornadoes were the favorites in our class, because many of them haven't experienced these types of storms here in our area. We did a lot of our research on the IPads with QR codes that I provided them. They also had a big bin of weather books to read through. While reading, they kept their notes in a research notebook I made them.  After a few days of research it was time to turn all we had learned into complete sentences for our books!  
    We spent about a week turning our research into writing while still examining other nonfiction books to learn how to "hook" our readers so they would want to read our books!  After that we worked on revising and editing.  Finally, we learned about nonfiction text features to make our books even more interesting! We added a table of contents, diagrams, captions, and a glossary.  Before we knew it, about three and a half weeks of writing had flown by!  We laminated our covers, bound our books together, and finally it was time to share our books!  We invited parents and other 2nd graders to our room and it was a BLAST! Our room was packed full of readers!

We welcomed our guest with a letter we wrote for them during morning meeting.  We even had a guest book for our visitors to sign!   Check out a few of our published books! 

     After 4 weeks of hard work, each and every student had a wonderful book to demonstrate their understanding of extreme weather.  They were so proud of their hard work that they couldn't stop cheesin'! :)  
    To try this writing unit out in your own class visit my store for your very own copy!  This product includes the following:

• 4 weeks of writing plans
• Suggested book titles
• QR codes for research
• Recording pages for research
• All of the pages to make your own informational nonfiction book
• Invitations to invite guest to your author open house
• Guest book
• 3 anchor chart examples

This unit covers over 10 common core standards for reading and writing! 

Hope you enjoy watching your students turn in to authors! 

Go for the Goal! Student-Teacher Conferences & Goal Setting

This week my school has been focusing on student-teacher conferences.  We just wrapped up the end of the second quarter last week and to kick off the start of the third quarter our grade level had a sub day yesterday in order to meet with each and every student!  It defiantly was a day full of reflection and goal setting.   

Last year we started student-teacher conferences school wide so that students would get this opportunity to receive feedback from their teachers year after year.  If you didn't know this already...I looped from first graders up to second grade this year.  With that being said, it was so interesting to see how much more reflective they have become in just a years time. Last year in first grade our conference was much more basic with discussions of what their favorite subject was and hopes and dreams for the second half of the second year.  

However, this year so many more of my students had a deeper understanding of what subjects came easily to them and what subjects were more challenging for them.  From this discussion we started focusing in on what they found challenging in certain subjects that weren't as natural for them.  Then we started setting goals to become more proficient writers, readers, and mathematicians.   Some of my students even decided that instead of focusing on a subject for their goal they needs to focus more on citizenship skills such as responsibility or respect.  

We have had a focus on feedback at school because of its importance in leading students to success. Acknowledging that they are doing well in certain areas gives them a sense of achievement, motivation and drive.  Recognizing what areas students need to improve in is also important so that they can grow as learners.  Just a simple "good job" or "this is incorrect" is not necessarily effective feedback that will help them grow as students. Effective feedback requires that the feedback given to them is something they can learn from and even direct them to start setting goals.  

When conferencing with my students I wanted them to leave the conference with a goal in mind.  So I had them do some simple self reflection before meeting with me.  This included giving themselves a thumbs up, thumps down or thumbs to the side based on how they feel they have done in math, reading and writing.  I also had them reflect on some basic citizenship goals such as staying on task and following directions.  Once they did this reflection I ask them to write two simple sentences about what they feel they are good at in school and what they feel they could get better at in school.  This helped guide and focus our conference time because I was able talk with them about what I saw as their strength and areas for growth in the classroom.   Leading up to the conference I also read a lot of read alouds with characters that set goals and worked to achieve different dreams.  

After conferencing and setting goals together we read SUPERDOG! The Heart of a Hero by Caralyn Buehner.  From this I modeled how the main character, Dex, set a goal to be a superhero and we discussed what actions he took to reach this goal.  The students loved the book and it helped them understand that goals don't happen over night.  My favorite quote from the book was that "wanting and being are two different things." This lead to a powerful conversation with my students about the difference between wanting something and becoming something through hard work.  The book demonstrated that reaching your goal can be very rewarding.  From this we wrote down our goals to help remind us that we have a purpose and a plan while we are at school. In a few weeks we are going to check in with our goals.  Here is our example of Dexter the Superdog's goals:

If you are interested in doing student-teacher conferences with your class or even goal setting visit my TpT store and download your copy of my goal setting pages.  

Hope you enjoy and happy goal setting!