Vacation time, 150th post, and three $1 deals!

The Sapelo Island lighhouse!

So, we've made it down for our annual trip to GA - just a 13 hour drive - and I have finally recovered from the driving part! Aside from visiting family, we'll also be spending a few days in Savannah and a few days on Sapelo Island. I'm excited to go to Sapelo, because it's one of those places off the coast of GA where there are no street lights, no businesses really, it's not a tourist destination, and you have to take a ferry to get to it!

So in honor of my vacation, the end of the month, and this being my 150th post I've decided to put three of my products up as dollar deals for the rest of the month! Summer is a great time to create, so hopefully these will help with that! The sale ends at the stroke of midnight on July 1st, so grab them while you can! Just $1 each! Get all three and save $5!

       

 I'll be chiming in again soon with another Back from the Archive post! See you then!

Favorite Forgotten Series From Childhood?

Anyone else read every. single. one. of these bad boys when you were a kid? Last year I wrote a donorschoose.org proposal to get a huge set of these books for my class library! My kiddos love them as much as I used to. 

What is a long forgotten series of books you've revived (or want to revive) for your own class library?

And, don't forget to link up sometime this summer with my Back to the Archive Linky! Just grab my sweet linky button here and then link up any time!

An InLinkz Link-up

Summer Bloggin' Two for Tuesday 50% off deal!

Howdy all! I'm chiming in really quickly to share a ridiculously good deal with you! I'm joining in with a bunch of other teachers for the Teaching Tribune's Two for Tuesday linky party!

So, for today only you can grab up two of my newest products for 50% off! That's a ridiculously good deal because I'm super proud of both of these products, and both of them are a STEAL at full price imho!

The first is my newest writing product, which is meant to be used with the book "The Day the Crayons Quit." It's a set of templates you can use to have your students write their own book, only this one is "The Day the School Supplies Quit." It actually includes two versions of the templates! There are 26 different school supplies, with two versions of each paper. The clip art was custom made by my brother, Peter! (Check out his TpT store!) The pack could be used by just about any grade level, because your writing expectations can be adjusted for every kiddo. Now's your chance to get this ready to go writing project for just $2.50! 

The second item I'm featuring is for my Math peeps out there! I love to teach using long term project based learning projects and simulations. As an avid gardener and farmer's market attendee myself, I just had to find a way to bring that into the classroom. I spent quite a while working on my gardening/small-scale farming simulation, How My Garden Grows. This project covers a TON of math skills in the 4th - 5th grade range. 

What's great about this product is that it can keep kids engaged in math for as long or as little time as you want. The difficulty is easily adjustable too. Want it to be a bit easier? Let the kids use a calculator for some parts, or walk them through some of the steps, etc. Have a kid that needs a real challenge? Let her work on it relatively independently! 

I used the project this past year in my class, and my students loved it! Several of them asked me for a blank copy so they could redo it over the summer...FOR FUN. What?! We used the project as an extension, so I still taught all of my regular math stuff, kids would work on when they were fast finishers, at home (by choice!), and then I'd set aside 10 minutes here and there to work on it with them. Grab it up here today for just three measly bucks!

And I haven't let my international friends out in the cold! I was asked to make a metric version, and that one is half off too! 

Back to the Archive Linky!

Aaah, summer is in full effect here in Central PA! The Netflix binging and home improvement projects have officially begun! I've also been spending some time working on wrapping up some new products, and revisiting some old ones!

In the spirit of a stress-free summer, I've decided to pull some old posts out of the closet, dust them off, and put them out there for all my new readers to see! For most of you it'll likely be the first time!

I'm calling it "Back to the Archive!" And if you have your own blog, I hope you'll link up with your own flashback! You don't even need 1.21 gigawatts of power...Just grab the image above and link up!

So, without further ado, here's a post from way back in March of 2013! It only got a measly 57 views back then! At the time those were amazing numbers for me, but hopefully more people will tune in this time around.

I've been waiting for a good time to share a few cool websites I recently stumbled across! The Techie Tuesday Link Up from Technology Tailgate is perfect for that! I'll be back tomorrow with a Workshop Wednesday Linky for literacy!

These three sites all branch off of the same main site, which belongs to the University of South Florida

http://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/genres/

This is an awesome collection of public domain stories that have been converted to audio and pdf files. Includes favorites like Aesop's Fables, Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, Sherlock Holmes, Tom Sawyer, etc. Great way to implement a listening center into an upper grades classroom. 

http://etc.usf.edu/clipart/

This link leads to a great collection of black and white clipart for non-commerical use. It's kind of amazing how many images are on here. All free to use for educational purposes. 

http://etc.usf.edu/presentations/

This one is a link to a great collection of things to use for sprucing up powerpoint and keynote presentations. I imagine the frames, borders and buttons might have other uses as well. Again, all of the items are free for educational purposes. 

The last site is one that I'm super intrigued with, but haven't put to use in my classroom yet. I'd love any ideas or suggestions on how it might be used with students. It used to be called Wallwisher, but has changed its name relatively recently to Padlet.com.

Padlet allows you to have a virtual shared "wall" that people can post things on, kind of graffiti style. You can post text, images, files, etc. It's pretty cool. Check out the wall I made just for this post. It took literally 2 minutes.

Created with Padlet

Now, I hope you'll come back to link up or visit some of the links that others leave for you! The linky will be open all summer long!

An InLinkz Link-up

Last Day of School, and a Bittersweet Goodbye!

Our End of Year All School Gathering!

Today was our last day of school with students for the year! It's hard to believe that this year is already up! My first year teaching a 3rd and 4th grade multi-age was full of fun, surprises, challenges, and learning opportunities. I like to think that we did a pretty good job with our kiddos this year! 

Ending the year was a little different this time around. For the last two years it was really bittersweet because I was sending fifth graders off to middle school. This year, half of my kids will be with me again (looping up to be my fourth graders) so while I'll still miss them this summer, I know that it won't be long before I see them again. The other half will just be a few doors down in their new 5th grade room. And I'm almost certain to run into a few in the neighborhood over the summer! 

Chelsea, with her Thank You Gift Basket from the
kids and I!

One person that won't be coming back is my intern, Chelsea. She's officially graduated and completed her internship, and will hopefully be offered a classroom of her own somewhere very soon! A smart principal will snatch her up right away, because she will be an amazing teacher! This year wouldn't have been the same without all of her help, for me or the kids. I'll really miss her help, perspective, and ideas...but mostly I'll miss her friendship. But I know it's time for her to continue her teaching journey (and to finally get paid to do it!) She did an amazing job this year, and I'm super proud of her. I'm hoping for only the best for her and her future. I love knowing that by mentoring her this year I'll be touching the lives of all her future students. Those students will be lucky to have her!

On a happier news front, before the kids left for the year, I was able to unveil a new addition to our school grounds that I'm super proud of! Teacherspayteachers has been such a blessing to me, that I wanted to do something to give back to the students in my school (who always serve as unknowing guinea pigs for my products). I'm a BIG reader, often reading a few hours every night, and I know that reading in the summer is one of the best things kids can do to avoid summer slide. So I decided to donate this Little Free Library to my school! It was installed and presented to the kids today! It's already been stocked with books, and I'm looking forward to seeing those books disappear into kids' hands when they visit the playground, the local pool just down the hill, or even if they just drive right up to grab one! If you're interested in putting a LFL in your neighborhood or on your school grounds, check out the link!  

So now I've just got two more days of professional development and meetings and paperwork to go before finally kicking up my heels and binging on Netflix shows! I've got lots of home improvement plans, like the basement flood-proofing that is going on right now! And of course, I'll also be popping in to update throughout the summer! Have a great one!

Book Blowout Bundle on Educents!

 I have teamed up with Educents with some instant downloads for you! It includes activities for so many of your favorite stories you will be reading this summer and for school years to come! There are  even a few downloads you can use with any book!  

I've contributed my Fake Mustache Novel Unit and Lapbook Activities to the bundle. This pack is for the really fun book "Fake Mustache" by Tom Angleberger! He's the same guy that writes the Origami Yoda series. And we all know how much kids love mustaches!

This book is unique because their are two main characters that share the role of narrator. It's a fun book, and has a lot of opportunities to practice lots of different reading strategies. Hopefully this unit will help with that! Check out the product description on Educents to see what all is included! 

For a limited time it is $19.99 from Educents which is about 78% off! 18 instant downloads with over 700 pages of materials perfect to accompany your summer reading list! What a great deal! Grab it now and be ready for next school year!

You can also take peek at some of the other products included in the bundle at any of the links below!

An InLinkz Link-up

School's ending, new products, and Monday Meet Up!

We're also pulling together our final terracycle shipments!
This is just about half of it! We're getting the last bit ready now!

So, we are officially wrapping up the school year finally! Just seven days to go! We've got a lot of fun things coming up like Field Day and the last day of school gathering. In the meantime, we've got our 10 days left countdown going. Each day I reveal the activity for the following day. Last year we popped balloons, this year I've taped a bunch of envelopes to the board and we open a new one each day.

I've spent my last couple weekends working on a couple new things for my own classroom and my TpT store. I'm really excited about them, and I hope they'll be of use to some of you!

The first is this set of writing papers to use to make a class book based on "The Day the Crayons Quit." There are 26 different school supplies quitting this time! Have your kids write a letter explaining why their school supply is quitting and then put them all together for a cool class book! There are two versions of the book pages, one realistic for fancy color printing, and the other for the more frugal black and white printers!  ;) Grab both versions together for just four measly bucks!

And if you haven't checked out my latest novel study unit yet, then you must! It's for one of my favorite books of all time, The Invention of Hugo Cabret. I can't wait to use this next year as my novel study while we study simple machines in Science! 78 pages of goodness for just $6!

Both of these items have clip art from my brother in them! Don't you love the school supplies? Grab the set (with happy and sad faces) in his store for just $4.50! Perfect to spruce up a school supply list or your parent newsletters!

I'm also linking up with the Teaching Tribune for their fun Monday Meet Up. I'm sharing about my BBB Michele from Coffee Cups and Lesson Plans!