A Sweet Week!

It's time for my Five For Friday....yes, I know, it's Thursday. Is that even allowed? I'm headed to New Mexico in the morning for my brother's graduation from Physician's Assistant school! Isn't that awesome?! We are all so proud of him. So, blogging definitely won't be on my agenda for the weekend.

I couldn't leave you hanging...I'm sure you've all been wondering what room 16 has been up to this week:)! So, here's my Five For Friday (on Thursday).

We came back to school on Tuesday from spring break! The kids were so happy to be back and told me all about their adventures over break and how much they missed me. Have I mentioned how adorable first graders can be? Tuesday was also Earth Day! We talked about all the ways we can show love to the Earth! 

...Yes, of course we did a craft:)! Not without reading an Earth day book and completing a mini writing assignment first. After all, what kind of teacher would just have their students painting and crafting on a Tuesday morning after vacation:)? Hehe.

See, look at all that writing:)! I bet you were thinking we just spent the morning crafting, didn't you:)? You can pick up that cutesy writing template here.

After helping the kiddos with the directed drawings we got out the water colors!

Aren't these sweet?!

Artists in the making!

Happy Earth Day!

Wednesday was my birthday. I have the BEST grade level team who made my birthday extra special! This is what our grade level PLC meeting looked like:

My grandma (Gram as we all call her) volunteers in my classroom every week! The kids LOVE her!! She recently had knee surgery so she's been out for a few weeks. She surprised the kiddos by bringing cupcakes to celebrate my birthday! She was greeted with lots of hugs, smiles, and cards! So sweet. 

Cupcake party outside! 

Fractions, fractions, fractions! We worked so much on halves and fourths this week! Here are a few of the math activities from the week!

Each student was given a cookie that they had to decorate. Then, they had to cut it into two equal parts. After they figured out how to create two halves they had to find a friend to share half of their cookie with.

Next up... Sharing cookies equally within a group! The kiddos figured out really quick what the word equal meant. They all wanted to make sure they ended up with the same number of cookies. Without giving too many directions, I placed a pile of cookies at each group and told them they needed to give each group member an equal number of cookies. It was very interesting watching the various ways each group divided up the cookies.

It's time for pizza! I gave the kids all the "ingredients" to make a pizza. Once the kiddos made their pizzas they had to figure out how to slice their pizza into fourths. 

Hard at work!

Last, but not least...a little impromptu shaving cream spelling! The kiddos needed some extra practice this week!

Much more fun than using pencils:)!

I'm tired. It's time for bed. Look, it's after midnight...which means it's Friday! 

Happy Five For Friday!

Ramona Recommends Turns 30!

Happy Easter!

I'm so excited that Courtney, from Ramona Recommends has asked me to be part of her 30th birthday giveaway! She is just the cutest! I'm even more excited because this is my birthday week too! Make sure you enter to try and win some AMAZING products! Without further ado....

To say thank you, I have invited my TOP 30 favorite sellers on Teachers Pay Teachers to share in my birthday excitement. A HUGE thank you goes out to all 30 sellers. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for making my 30th birthday celebration ROCKIN! I am so excited to introduce who the "birthday presents" will be from...

Every time I look at this picture, I get excited. So! I hope you are too. Here is how the giveaway will work. It will start bright and early Monday, April 21st and go through Friday, April 25th at 11:59pm Please make sure to read this section as there are a few ground rules to enter. Because this is a huge giveaway, I broke down the presents into three groups. You may enter all 3 giveaways. Please do what is asked of you to enter. I know it can be a little daunting if there are 10003 (or 30) tasks for one giveaway; that is why I made 3 different giveaways. I just ask as a gift to me you follow the rules. I want my Top 30 sellers to get love as well. ***If you enter all three giveaways, you only need to do Ramona Recommends stuff once.***The 3 Winners will be announced and emailed that weekend (possibly Monday). Those three winners will receive emails from the donors with the birthday present they won. For example: If Rita Book entered Birthday Present 1 and WON, she would get all those treats only. So! I suggest entering all 3. You never know you; could win all three! :)

 Inside Birthday Present #1
Schroeder Shenanigans in 2nd loves Parts of Speech Scoot and More
Teaching and Much Moore loves Cooking Up Comprehension
Teacher to the Core loves Comprehension and Fluency 101
A Kindergarten Life for Me loves Winner's Choice
Easy Teaching Tools loves Summer Literacy Handbook K-3
Sparkling in Second loves Spin a Modifier (Activity for Adverbs and Adjectives)
Laugh Love Learn loves Sun, Sand, and Math
All Y'All Need loves A Unit Inspired by Goldilocks and the 3 Bears
Meet Miss Parker loves Spring Differentiated Reading Comprehension Passages
Mrs. Peterson Loves to Teach loves I can Statements Common Core 1st Grade
a Rafflecopter giveaway

 Inside Birthday Present #2
Ramona Recommends loves The Scoop about Close Reading
Teaching with a Mountain View loves Addition and Subtraction Task Cards
Oh Boy 4th Grade loves Winner's Choice
Melonheadz Illustrations loves Beauty Bundle 
KG Fonts loves One Font Single Font License
Ideas by Jivey loves Because of Winn Dixie Novel Unit
One Extra Degree loves GLUE IT! Multi-Step High Order Thinking Interactive Journals
The Library Fox loves Winner's Choice/$5 or under clip art set
Lesson with Laughter loves Winner's Choice
The Brown Bag Teacher loves ROOTS Hands On Activities for Greek/Latin Root Words

a Rafflecopter giveaway

 Inside Birthday Present #3
The Science Penguin loves Science Notebook Activities
Teaching in Room 6 loves Is it Summer Yet Palm Poet-Tree
Free to Teach loves Figuartive Langauge Unit
Teach. Inspire. Change. loves Position Research Paper Unit 
Beach Lovin' Teach loves Mr. Brown's Precepts Classroom Posters
Fourth & Ten loves Spelling Contracts Through the Year
Sailing into Second loves Spring into Learning 6 Literacy and Math Centers
For the Love of Teaching loves Editable End of the Year Candy Bar Awards
4th grade Frolics loves Rounding, Rounding, and Ordering Too Math Activities
Where the Wild Things Learn loves ELA Common Core Review and Test Prep a Rafflecopter giveaway

Thank you so much for coming to my birthday party aka 30th birthday giveaway. It was a pleasure to be your hostess. Go check out these amazing seller's blogs and Teachers Pay Teachers stores! Many of these sellers have Instagram accounts too. If you want to follow me on Insta CLICK HERE!

Side Note: There will be no Tuesday with Ramona Recommends blog post  this week, but I will post some of my new favorite picture books on Instagram throughout the week.

Spring Fever!

It's my first official day of spring break! It was really nice not hearing my alarm clock go off at 5:30am this morning. I don't have any big exciting plans for the week. Just relax. I think those are the best kinds of vacations!

Last week was a busy week! We had parent conferences, I had laryngitis, pink eye, and I think every kiddo had a case of "spring fever!" :)

This month is "safety month" at our school. The kids have been learning about ways they can stay safe on and off campus. Here is our door banner for our school-wide contest.

We also finished up our unit in solid & plane figures this week! The kiddos were able to use all the plane figures they learned about to create these awesome robots! I was very impressed with their creativity. I didn't give them an example ahead of time because I wanted to see what they could create all on their own! Didn't they turn out awesome?!

Look at the creativity!

Meet "Frozenfly!"

Meet "Frozen!" Can you tell my little firsties are obsessed with Frozen?:)

So cute:)!

Last, but not least, meet Sebastian!:)

I couldn't let the kids go home on Friday without some kind of cutesy craft for spring. I saw this cute idea on Pinterest that used pom pom balls to decorate eggs. It was awesome...and super easy!

Here's the set-up!

Easy-peasy! 

Happy spring break!!:)

An Egg-cellent Week!

It's after school. I'm sitting here in my classroom preparing for parent conferences next week. Well, I was. I took a blogging break. Blogging is much more fun, right?!

Here is my Five For Friday this week!

We started the week off with Open House! It was so much fun watching my little firsties show off their work to their parents! Almost all of my kids came. I may have used some incentives to get them all there:). I had a basket full of goodies up for raffle, a book mark making station, and picture collage made for each kiddo to take home! The picture collage was definitely the highlight!

Here are some of the parents creating a bookmark with their kids. We are always promoting reading:)!

This week I was able to add a couple new math stations to our math center time. I added my telling time center and this awesome solid figure center. We just started solid figures this week-more fun to come this next week!

This week we did some "egg-cellent" writing! The kiddos had to decide which eggs they thought were better; hard-boiled eggs or plastic? After they finished their final drafts the kids decorated a "cracked egg" and glued it to each end of their paper. They thought this was pretty awesome and that they had the coolest teacher, ever! 

Who likes marshmallows?! Room 16 does! We actually used marshmallows and toothpicks to create cubes this week as we learned about solid figures. My little firsties know all about vertices now! The fact that our math lesson was taught with marshmallows made it "super fun" (according to one of my students)! The kids did a great job with the marshmallows. There was no sampling. No throwing marshmallows. No biting the ends of the marshmallows off. Ok, maybe there was a little sampling and I may have noticed one flying across the room. But, they are first graders. They did awesome! More importantly, they can build and describe solid figures!

So focused!

Look at these lil' guys helping each other!

My number five doesn't exactly have to do with my classroom. I was asked to make a table centerpiece for a parent dinner at our high school. So, if you're ever in need of an educational themed centerpiece, here's an idea!

Have an awesome weekend!