Can you Help?

teamASHER 2011 Cystic Fibrosis Awareness Video from teamAsher on Vimeo.

Asher is the son of two of my friends from high school.  He is living with cystic fibrosis.  My tears well up each time I watch this video. 

Asher is now 4 and is an amazingly strong little boy.  Rachel, Jeremy, and Asher live in Arizona and I haven’t seen them for a very long time, but I was fortunate to reconnect with them over the past few years.  

In January, Rachel and Jeremy lost their beautiful little boy, Paxon, and I felt even more connected to them.  Many of you know of my beautiful Nora – my heart, my angel.  You can read {this post} if you are new to my blog.  My heart broke for them, but their amazing faith, their love of family and their fight to find a cure keeps them going.

When Rachel asked if I would be willing to donate some of my teaching packets to their annual auction to raise funds and awareness for CF, I didn’t hesitate to say yes.  I would willingly put all of my products together on a CD for the auction.  But, I thought I could do better – I KNEW I could do better.

This is where YOU can help. 

I told Rachel that I would put together a school themed basket chocked full of teaching supplies – anything and everything a teacher could use.  I’m throwing in my CD, the basket, and I’ll get it to Rachel in time for the auction, but that basket would be awfully empty if only my CD was in it. 

Can YOU help?

Do you have a TpT store and would be willing to compile all of your products on a CD and send to me?

Would you be willing to send some flair pens, lesson plan books, pencils, games, manipulatives, books, gift cards, etc.? (Nothing TOO heavy, since I do have to ship it!)

I think we could make a pretty fantastic basket.

If you’re interested in helping out, send me an e-mail at:

growingkinders@gmail.com

and put TeamAsher in the subject line.

You can find TeamAsher on Facebook as well.

As we are approaching the season of giving, let’s team up as an educational community and give as much as we can to help Asher and his family fight to find a cure.

A cure is out there. Find it.

November Calendar Pages

Some of you might have noticed that I posted this once already!  The links weren’t working properly, and I didn’t have time to fix them, so I just took it down again! Sorry!

I have two versions of a November song for you this time.  The first is a chant, that I got many moons ago from my cooperating teacher when I was student teaching.  It’s not a song, but rather, a chant.  I think you can make up the rhythm as you go!

The second is a song that I wrote.  I couldn’t find a November song that “fit the bill”, so I made one up!  It was rather funny in my office as my husband (who is very creative musically – he is in the other room playing my fave {Brandi Carlile} on the piano as we speak!) and I tried to make up the words. 

Here are some that we decided would probably not work – keep in mind we were trying to rhyme…

creeps are crawling (leaves are falling…)

we eat turkey, beans and tators

we watch movies with Tom Hanks (rhymes with thanks…)

buying bigger pants  (in reference to Thanksgiving dinner)

So, after about an hour (and a lot of laughs!) we came up with this beauty – hope you like it

 

PS – I would love a little note if you download  

Comments make the blogging world go round!

Monsters!

I guess I must have been busy the week we did monsters, because these are all the pictures I got!  (Could it have been our goal setting conferences? Yep, probably!) Oops!

Anyways, all of these fun goodies came from Julie Lee’s Monster Madness pack.

The kids had a super fun time with all of these centers! Thanks, Julie!

The weekly pocket chart story. 

M letter sort:

Reading and writing sight words:

Beginning sounds:

Hearing syllable parts:

The kids had great fun with this! We sorted and graphed cheesy chex mix! Yum!

Here are some other monster ideas:

 

This was a fun poem that we did that my friend Sheyna made!

This fun glyph is from Deanna Jump’s monster glyph.  You can find it {here}

This was a directed drawing that Deanna posted on her blog last year.  We didn’t get a chance to do it this year, and I was super bummed!

Here is some monster fun that I found on Pinterest! The link to the original post is above the picture.

Shape Monsters:
House of Baby Piranha

This one didn’t have a source, but they’re SOO cute! If it’s yours, let me know, and I’ll link it up for you! (P.S. – When you’re pinning, make sure you pin directly from the blog – don’t click on the picture and then pin it – we loose the source then!)

Lots of cute ideas here!

Katherine Maries

I LOVE this idea! (I might need to make it for my house! Who would have thought that a nine year old and a  4 1/2 year old would tattle on each other so much! phew!)

Giggles Galore n More

Here is a fun {FREEBIE!} monster unit!

2 Teaching Mommies

Here are some cute monster puppets you can make!
UCreate With Kids

Blow painting from Raising Sparks

Another freebie unit from: 1+1+1=1

Raise your hand if you would love this alphabet from Jared Andrew Schorr!

From Free Kids Crafts

And these little fellas from Craftser are adorable! Where are my crochet hooks?!!

Phew! I’m “monstered” out!  Hope you found some great ideas! Leave your url in a comment below if you have another great monster idea!

Fishing Up Some Fun!

Last week, we dove into the ocean!  We follow the Scott Foresman Reading Street series in our district and it was time for Life in An Ocean!

There is SO much that could be done with this unit, but I wanted to save some ocean fun for the spring too, when we’re all dreaming about the summer and the beach! (well, it’s a lakeshore – no ocean beaches around here!).

Our new science curriculum fits in perfectly to this book.  We are in the beginning stages of adopting parts of the FOSS curriculum, and the amazing K science team have come up with some great correlations to our SF curriculum.

So, we had some new arrivals to our classroom:

I don’t think you can really see them floating around.  We started with 5…then 4…then 3…ahem.  We have 2 little goldfish friends left.  Bubbles and Otto.  Fred went to fishy heaven shortly after this photo was taken.  But, we also have some guppy friends too! I don’t have a pic of their little home, but they live right next to the goldies.  Hopefully, after our 5 day break…they’ll still be doing just that…living.

We had fun learning about the structures of a fish, how to care for a fish, what living things need, and just observing these little fellas. 

We also had lots of fun in our math and literacy centers too.  Here they are:

(plus a couple of standard centers – sound sorting, and beginning sound roll and write)

and the Math Centers:

And the science and math center for free choice time:

Here’s my post from last year’s ocean unit too!

Apples!

It’s been a crazy 2 weeks here! We just finished up our goal setting conferences, my husband’s best friend from Norway was visiting, my girls (both of them!) were sick, and my hubby is gone again for the weekend.  I took my daughter into the clinic yesterday, and the poor thing has pneumonia!  Thank goodness for a short school week this week!

I’m still catching up on blog posts, so here goes!   Here is some of the fun that we had with apples!

Math Centers:

We practiced patterns with red, yellow and green apple die cuts. The children could decide which patterns they wanted to create – some were ready for more complicated patterns, and others stuck to AB patterns.

Counting apple seeds:  the children worked on 1:1 correspondence, counting and number writing with this center.

1:1 correspondence and counting again!

Number writing and counting

Sequencing 1-10. Sorry for the blur!

Literacy Centers:

My kiddos are LOVING the weekly pocket chart, and I love that parents are seeing the words that we are working on.  Thanks, Julie, for introducing me to this idea!

Sorting Sounds:

Roll and write with beginning sounds:

Reading and dobbing sight words:

Here are a couple of charts that we did when talking about apples:

The pictures are on velcro, so the kids can mix them up and sequence them in the correct order.

Again, the parts are on velcro!

I forgot to take picture of the kids’ science notebooks, but we also did a taste test, a float/sink experiment, drew an apple tree in each of the four seasons, and labeled the parts of an apple in our science notebooks.

This was one of my favorite projects that we did!  I saw it on {this blog} first! Thanks, Katie for the great idea!

We also did a super cute 10 Apples Up on Top activity that I forgot to take a picture of ….if you look closely in the right hand corner of the above picture you can see a tiny bit of one.

Have a great Sunday….all this apple talk makes me want to make some apple pie! It’s too bad our apple tree has not had apples on it yet! I keep my fingers crossed each year for blossoms, but so far, none yet!