August Calendar Songs

We go back to school on the 24th, and I don’t usually start calendar book with the kids until September, but I thought I would post these calendar songs just in case some of you need them for August!

Again, it is from Jessica Meacham’s site.

I’m heading off to the lake today, but I’ll be back soon with a big announcement!

Lettering Delights Sale ends SUNDAY

Here’s  your last chance to catch that great clearance sale over at Lettering Delights! Lots of fun clip art, alphabets, and fonts on clearance for only 50 cents!

Click on the little monkey on my sidebar to take you there! (Sign up for their newsletter while you are there, and you get tons of FREE stuff!! Who doesn’t love FREE?!)

Procrastinating…

Okay, peeps, I saw this quote on Pinterest a couple of days ago, and I’ve just been DYING to make it into some subway art for all of you … (you know when you get a vision in your mind…)  I really think we are ALL GUILTY of this!  This is my first “go” at subway art, so be gentle!

Click on the image if you would like a copy of it! It’s a jpeg so just size it to your preferred size in your photo editing software – I love Picasa

So….procrastinate away!

PS – My hubby didn’t get it….do you?!

Update 7.29 – I just saw this sign:

From this site.

Raise your hand if you’re busy reading blogs or creating cutesy stuff for your classroom when you really should be planning and organizing!!??  (I’ve got my hand raised high!)

Super Easy Alphabet Ideas

We all have extra magazines laying around right?  How about putting those to good use in your classroom?! Just make sure they are child friendly – no Cosmo or Glamour here! Parenting magazines work great (but make sure to go through them before you give them to kids!)

Here’s what you do:  Give your student this alphabet sheet:

and a pile of magazines…

and put them to work finding letters to cut out and glue on their sheet! Fun? Easy? Keeps them busy for a long time? Yep!!

Here’s another alphabet activity that I found on Pinterest.

Click {here} to read the original post! Awesome, easy idea! Prep it now while the sun is still shining!

How about these great cards?

These are the cards that Doodle Bugs Teaching made from the free download over at Mrs. Saylor’s Log.

What else have you found or made for easy back to school alphabet ideas?

It’s back to school time…what about dinner?

I have to admit, I am NOT a cook.  I don’t mind the actual cooking process, but I have a BIG problem deciding what to cook, and honestly, I hate to clean up the mess! So anything that I can cook in one pot or in the microwave is good to go for me!

In addition to the lack of desire for cooking, the time factor comes into play.  I generally get home around 5 {exhausted}.  But the kids are still hungry.  In addition to his 8-5 job, hubby teaches Norwegian in the evenings at the university.  He has been doing this since we have been in college, so I’m used to not having him home much during the school year.  So, I am usually just making dinner for me and the two {picky} girlies. Generally, it’s something simple – sandwiches, soup, ahem..cereal…

Here’s where you guys come in.  Link up with your favorite, easiest weeknight dinner.  Let’s all add to our recipe books!

Rules:

1. Link up with a recipe on your blog – if you want to cook it and take pictures as you cook – even better! After all, some of us are visual learners, right?!

2. Make sure you link to the exact page of your post, not to your whole blog.

4. Be sure to grab my button and post it to your blog!

3. If you CAN, copy and paste your recipe into a word doc, pdf it and link it to your blog post.  That way we all can just click print and have a plethora of recipes at our fingertips!

I’ll start us off with a recipe my hubby (yep) made the other night that I thought was just delish…

From Unclebens.com:

Chicken Enchiladas

INGREDIENTS

2 chicken breast poached and shredded
8 (8-inch) whole wheat tortillas
2 cups red enchilada sauce
1 cup Monterey Jack cheese shredded
1/4 cup cilantro chopped
1 box UNCLE BEN’S® Whole Grain White Taco Style
1 cup yellow onion diced
1 cup corn kernels
1 cup black beans

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Prepare the UNCLE BEN’S® Whole Grain White Rice Taco Style as instructed on the box.
2. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
3. While rice is cooking, sauté onion, corn and black beans. Add shredded chicken. Set aside.
4. When rice is finished cooking, mix into onion, corn, bean and chicken mixture.
5. Heat tortillas in microwave for about 15 seconds. One at a time, lay 1 cup of chicken mixture in middle of tortilla. Add 1 to 2 tablespoons of enchilada sauce. Roll tortilla closed, and then lay seam side down in a deep baking dish. Continue with all 8 tortillas. Add about 1 to 2 cups more enchilada sauce over the top of the tortillas. Cover with Monterey Jack cheese, and bake for 20 minutes, or until internal temperature is 140 F degrees.
6. Serve enchiladas hot, topped with fresh chopped cilantro.

 

Need Some Smiles :)

The past few days have been rough as I follow the news in Norway.  Thank you all for your kind words of support.  Norway is a country in grief right now, but they are strong people, and together they will make it through.

So…. I wanted to share with you something that I found stashed away from MANY years ago! I don’t even know how long ago they were in the newspapers!  If you have school age kids (mine will be a 4th grader), I think you’ll appreciate these comics!

Are you smiling?  Yep, totally my kid

I went to Jo-Ann’s today to pick up some fabric for my bunting and found some super cute stuff!

I am going to use this little basket for my pointers.  It was on sale for $5.99

Here is my fabric for my bunting! Can’t wait to work on it!

And these sweet little cups were $1.99 each.  I’m sure I’ll make some sort of popsicle stick game with them – I’m sensing an alphabet one and a number one?? 

Any ideas?  I’ll certainly share when I get them done!

With a heavy heart…

For the last 2 days, I have been glued to my computer following the news of the tragedy in Norway. If you have been reading my blog for a while now, you may remember that I am married to a wonderful Norwegian man.  We just returned from Norway on Tuesday, and on Friday, terror shook the tiny Nordic country.  The people of Norway are shocked and devastated.  This is the worst disaster the country has faced since the occupation of Norway in World War II, and possibly one of the worst massacres by a gunman the world has ever seen.

Thankfully, all of my husbands family is safe. His brother, who lives in Oslo, is still away on his honeymoon. 

Oslo holds a very special place in my heart.  As a student, I studied for 5 months at the University of Oslo.  I became a citizen of that city and it was {my own} for the time that I lived there.  I love that city, and I love Norway. 

Norway is a place unlike any other.  The people are friendly and trusting.  Police are unarmed and politicians {and sometimes royalty} take the subway just like anyone else.  King Harold told the people of Norway, "It's now important that we stand together and we support each other and we do not let fear conquer us."

It is the darkest time in Norwegian history, and the country is mourning a great loss.  I ask that you send up positive thoughts and prayers to the country.  It will take a long time to recover from this, and I fear the city that I love so much will never quite be the same.

More {Supply} Labels!

I found some more labels for you! This time they are supply labels.  I use these to label the shelf that the baskets or cups of extra supplies go.  I use community supplies in my classroom, but I don't have everything on the tables.  On the tables, I have a basket of crayons and a basket of pencils.  If the children need anything else, they take it from the supply shelf.  This year, I'm changing things up just a teeny bit -- each child will have his/her own cup of crayons and they will be stored in a basket on the center of the table.

Here are the labels! Enjoy!

Math Manipulative Labels

I was searching through my computer and I found these labels that I made a couple of years ago for my math manipulative bins. I thought I would share with you all!  Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures of them "in use" in my classroom, but I think you'll get the gist of it!

They are sized to fit these containers:

I hope you can use them! Click on the image below to download. 

Be sure to leave me a little note or follow this blog if you download.  Comments make the blogging world go round! :)

Promethean Tutorials?

I am thinking of doing a series of basic tutorials for those of you that are using Promethean Interactive White Boards and ActivInspire.  What I need to know is....what do you want to know how to do?  Leave a comment below telling me what kinds of tutorials you would like to see!

Where I am now...

 

(Yes, this is an actual road that we drove on)

 Enjoying my brother-in-laws wedding in the beautiful landscape of Bergen, Norway.  (Not to mention the beautiful bride, and my two beauties...the groom isn't so bad himself, either!)

Phonemic Fun!

Here is a fun and easy phonemic game that you can play with your kinders at any time of the year!

You will need a bag of some sort - it can be a gift bag, or a bag like this:

 

You could decorate it all cute with some puffy paint and ribbons.  Since I'm on vacation, I don't have access to the supplies! I'll try to make one up when I get home!

You also need some small manipulatives or picture cards.  I really love these teaching tubs from Lakeshore Learning.  They come in handy for so many things!

And finally, you need this little diddy:

 (Click on the image if you would like to download this to put in the bag or attach to the bag!)

What do you think? Sounds fun, huh?

The Right Number Of...

Have you ever asked your students to tell you "how many" of something you might need?  What kind of answers to you get?  100! 1,000! 1,000,000!  This activity introduces children to the idea of "resonable numbers."  Reasonable numbers are defined by Chris Confer as "quantities of things that come in particular ranges."  A person might have one or two dogs, but not 20 or 30.  Confer shares in her book, Teaching Number Sense, that the concept of reasonable numbers (and the understanding of them) are based on the real life experiences of the child. 

This is as fun little lesson that introduces the idea of reasonable numbers. It also comes from Chris Confers Book: Teaching Number Sense.

You will need this book:

This is a silly non-fiction book, but it provides lots of experiences for counting - something that those little babies need a lot of in the beginning of the year!  As you read, encourage the children to count the number of elephants on each page.  Guide them to notice the number pattern in the book as well - the numbers decrease as the pages increase. 

When you are finished reading the story, allow the children some time to brainstorm the "right number" of various things.  (This time though, it will be real, true things!)  Children may vary in their answers as in, "The right number of earrings on an ear is...."  Some things will have definite concrete answers, while statements like the one above will vary based on what the children have experienced.  You want to guide children to understand reasonable numbers - it wouldn't be reasonable for a person to have 30 earrings on an ear, but it might be reasonable to have 4.

In her book, Confer provides a writing frame and the children fill in the sentence that they have brainstormed together.  I have made up a little book for you with the complete sentence frame.  I think this would be much easier for the kiddos at the beginning of the year to complete!  The children can complete the pages with pencils and crayons or make construction paper pictures (these are always so cute!)

You can grab the book here:

Be sure to leave a comment or follow my blog so I know that you all are enjoying the free downloads!

Terra Firma

After an exhausting two days of traveling, we have finally made it to Norway.  This is an annual trip that we make to visit my husband's parents.  This trip was a tough one -- we had awful roller coaster turbulence coming out of Minneapolis - my poor daughter got sick.   And of course she's not used to the twisty turny roads here, and got sick on the way home too.  Poor girl!

Anyway, we are here, safe, on solidi ground!  I hope to find some time to work on some things for all of you while I am here.  There was a list started on an earlier post, but if you could continue to post your wish list or questions that you have here, I will try to answer them!

I also hope to be able to get into my mother-in-laws school to show you what a Norwegian school and classroom looks like!

One more thing....if you find the time...I would love for you to vote for my blog in the Really Good Stuff blog contest!  I am in the first column of the K-4 blogs.  Thank you! (just click on the image below!)