Sick day, Fat Tuesday, and Valentine's

Today's a sick day for me. Poor Keagan has had a runny nose and a cough for the past week, but last night he woke up 4 times screaming! I went to check on him the first time, and he had a fever. So I called in sick and took him to the doctor this morning. He has an ear infection, so hopefully the meds they gave him will kick in quickly. I hate seeing him so miserable!

One of the nice things about my new position (well, for me) is that when I'm out, they don't give me a sub. So I don't have to write sub plans. The negative side is for the teachers I work with, I can't push into their classrooms or pull their students out for the day.

Tomorrow is Fat Tuesday, and my sweet friend, Andrea, from Reading Toward the Stars created this adorable unit that I plan on using with some of my kids. My favorite parts are the vocabulary cards (since everything about Mardi Gras is foreign to my kids up here in VA) and the main idea game. I think the kids will have fun with it. If I were in the regular class, I would have to also bring in a King Cake to see who found the baby. Mardi Gras is so much fun!

For the rest of the week, I'm going to be doing centers to work with kids on a smaller scale. At the writing center, they are going to work on my Valentine Writing Craftivity. I can't wait to see what they come up with!

You can buy this packet at my TN or TPT store.

I am also going to be using some more of my Monster Valentine centers. We've already done a few of them to go along with skills being taught in the classroom, but I'm going to have some of these out for students to practice with.

You can buy this packet at my TN or TPT store as well.

What are you using to celebrate Valentine's Day this week? And do any of you celebrate Mardi Gras?

Valentine freebie

I have been procrastinating racking my brain trying to think of the perfect freebie as a thank you to all of my wonderful followers that helped me reach the 200 mark so quickly! I wanted it to be something that would be useful for upper and lower grades, so I thought a craftivity would be perfect. Since Valentine's Day is coming up, that was the most logical theme. I have a confession though (please don't unfollow me!): I don't really care for Valentine's Day. There. I said it! Maybe it's the fact that I was single for every one of them until I met Steven in college. Or maybe it's that my parents never did any of the sending flowers or chocolates like my friends' parents in elementary/middle school. Or maybe it's that my heart is two sizes too small. Anyway, I'm not much for the whole cheese factor. But I finally came up with a craft that I could get on board with that was still related to Valentine's Day. Plus it's a little different since I'm sure there are MILLIONS of heart crafts already out there.

So this craft has students think about ways that they can show love to others. Yay for thinking about others and not what their favorite candy is or who has a crush on who! Sorry, Negative Nilly had to poke her head again. I stopped her, though! My helping otter (that's our 5th grade helpers - isn't it cute?) did this one for me to show as an example. I love it!

I'm putting this on TpT as a freebie UNTIL SUNDAY or until I remember to change the price! But I'm also giving my special readers a link here to the Google drive that will always work. (But that's our little secret).

And even though I'm not much of a sap, I really do LOVE y'all and am very grateful for all of your comments and ideas. You've made my short time on this blog great!

While you're downloading my freebie, go check out All Things Upper Elementary for their very first Friday Free 4 All linky party!

Valentine's Day already?

Can you believe that Valentine's Day is less than a month away? This time last year, I was at home with my sweet one month old (today he's 13 months - eek!) enjoying maternity leave. I came back right before Valentine's Day and survived the rest of the year. I didn't do well with missing time in the middle. It was too hard to get back into a groove. This year, I'm finally falling into a nice groove. One of my favorite things to use for centers during pull-out time is my literacy centers. I bought some of Amy Lemons' earlier this year and they were adorable, of course. My kids did well with them, but the centers focused on skills geared more toward 2nd grade (which Amy teaches). I looked for comprehension centers that I could buy by theme and couldn't find anything. So I began creating my own. This is my fourth set, and I'm in love with them!

Like the rest, I have a mixture of comprehension skills and word knowledge. This one has the following centers (bold centers are new skills I'm adding):

• Fact and Opinion
• Main Idea and Supporting Details
• Cause and Effect
• Drawing Conclusions/Inferring
• Synonyms
• Antonyms
• Prefixes
• Guide Words

I took out Author's Purpose and Suffixes to replace them with the others because I felt like there was more of a need for those two, at least at my school.

If you like these centers and missed the others that I've created, here are the pictures and links:

 

Snow themed - great for January

Christmas includes an extra Sequencing center for The Polar Express

Thanksgiving was my very first. I plan on adding more to it later!