Five for Pi Day!

I'm linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching for another Five for Friday! It's been an exciting week! But it's not over yet, there's a lot still going on, so check it all out!

I'm joining in with some of my BBBs and throwing a special Pi Day Sale! That's 20% off all of the math products in my store. That makes some of them cost a mere 80 cents! This is a great time to grab up some projects or games!

My big celebration ends tonight at midnight EST!

Head on over to this post to enter for your chance to win one of the four prize packs! 

So I was looking around instagram the other day (do you follow me? My username is reitz2001) and I saw a great idea from a fellow PA Blogger, Autumn (user firstgradetchrlady on instagram) from the blog First Grade Teacher Lady. She had taken the free Red Apple Teacher calendar from Scholastic and turned it into a cool banner. Well, I happened to have the same calender from a recent book order taking up space on my counter. I knew I'd never hang up or use the calendar as an actual calendar...so I turned it into a banner like Autumn's and hung it up in my classroom library! I think it turned out great!

Cool, right?!

This week I introduced a new feature on my blog! Each week I'll be posting a new time-saving, efficiency-bringing lifehack! I'll be keeping them all in one handy spot, which is accessible from my new tab bar at the top of the page! Stop by each week to pick up a new tip!

Another cool feature that I'm bringing back from the dead for a brand new life is Tunes Tuesday! Now each month will have a new theme! The first link-up will be next Tuesday, March 18th! The topic is science! I hope you'll link up a post showing how you use music to teach Science!

In other news, we've got a lot going on at school right now!

In writing we're working on poetry. We study many of the different types of poetry, and of course we have to cover Haiku! I've already read Dogku and If Not For the Cat. So this past week we read Haiku Hike (written by kids!) and Guyku (which should really just be called Kidku!) 

Our Mentor Sentence this past week came from Thundercake, and we just finished reading a kid favorite, The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane. 


Our newest read-aloud is a book that is new to me, but is really entertaining. It's being called a mix of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and A Night at the Museum. So far the kids are really into it and it is a perfect read-aloud to discuss foreshadowing!

In math we're doing a bunch of review before our big state tests. I don't believe in doing a lot of "test prep," so for me reviewing for the test is business as usual...math workshop with a bunch of math games, task cards, a good project to work on, etc. is enough prep for me!

One of the things kids really need to work with a lot are word problems. 

These task cards have the kids solving multiplication and division problems. But there's a twist! Each word problem has too much information! The kids really have to read the problem carefully to determine which operation is needed and which numbers they need to use!  I put them here in my store! (Remember the Pi Day Sale!)  Placing the cards all around the room and letting kids wander and solve them is a perfect way to do a "worksheet that's not a worksheet!"

Whew! That was a lot! I'm looking forward to the weekend!

Sunshine Blogger Award!

Thanks to Diane at Fifth in the Middle for nominating me for a Sunshine Blogger Award!

The rules of the Sunshine Blogger Award are:


1. Post 11 random facts about yourself
2. 
Answer the 11 questions asked by the blogger who nominated you

3. Nominate 11 bloggers you think bring sunshine to the world

4. Make up 11 questions for your nominations to answer.

My 11 Facts

1. I've taught every grade level from Kindergarten through 5th grade.
2. I grew up and went to college in GA, where I taught for 7 years before moving to PA where I've been teaching for the last 6!
3. I've been reading comic books consistently for over 25 years.
4. I'm an avid reader of other things, and spend anywhere from 1-2 hours a day reading, every day!
5. I've been playing video games since I got my first Atari in the 80's!
6. I met my wife when she taught in the classroom next door to mine.
7. We've been married for just over 6 years!
8. My wife and I have two German Shepherds, two fancy rats, three corn snakes, two tarantulas, a bearded dragon, a crested gecko, and three bettas!
9. My dad is a middle school teacher, one of my brothers is a high school english teacher, and my other brother just moved away from teaching Sociology at the university level.
10. I drink a ridiculous amount of coffee each day. Approximately a full pot or more most days.
11. I love gardening, and every year my wife and I plant a ton of vegetables in our huge backyard garden.

Diane's Questions:

1. When did you start blogging?  Just a few days over a year ago!
2. Why did you start blogging?  I have been reading blogs for years and years, and I wanted to get in on the community aspect and finally felt confident enough to share my own ideas.
3. Are you going to Vegas for the TpT conference? I wish! We'd already planned our usual summer vacation to the GA coast before the dates were announced!
4. Which of your TpT products is your best work? That's really hard to pick...I put so much work into all of them, but currently (because it's so fresh) I'd have to go with my One and Only Ivan Novel Unit!
5. What is the "thing" that you're known for in your school? (In other words, when people have a question about X, they come to you.) Another toughie. I think I'm known for quite a few things, technology, math, reading, writing...but I probably get the most questions about going green practices!
6. If you couldn't teach, what job would you have? Something to do with conservation if I needed a paycheck. If I became independently wealthy I'd become a full time street artist.
7. Where is your favorite place to shop for your teaching wardrobe? Bwahaha. I am known for my "uniform" of khaki pants and a polo shirt at work. So...Target?! I've always thought that men's professional fashion options were too limited. And I'm NOT wearing a tie every day.
8. I need a new book to read. What do you recommend? I just finished "The Maze Runner" and it was really good!
9. What is your favorite TV show? This is really hard. Currently I guess it's Game of Thrones!
10. What is your favorite dessert? A good old fashioned doughnut!
11. Mayonnaise or Miracle Whip? Miracle Whip!

My Questions:

1. When did you start blogging?
2. Who's your favorite superhero?
3. Who was your favorite teacher?
4. What's your favorite genre of book?
5. Do you have any pets?
6. If you could have a longer or shorter school day, which would you pick?
7. What brand new "special" would you like to add to your schedule?
8. Do you have anything from your childhood that you've kept?
9. Are you afraid of anything weird?
10. Do you have vacation plans for this summer?
11. Do your colleagues know that you are a blogger?

My nominations: (since I've noticed a lot of people have already been awarded this one I'm not going to pass it along to 11 people, but instead to a few of my fellow PA Bloggers! If you've already got it, then no worries!)

Read With Me ABC

ABC123is4me

The Literacy Garden

Teacher Mom of 3

New Initiatives! Tunes Tuesday and Lifehacks for Teachers!

So, I've passed my One Year Blogging Birthday and my blog is growing! I'm excited to introduce something new and re-introduce something old in a new way!

First:

The first thing is something new I'll be adding to my blogging rotation! I'm calling it Lifehacks for Teachers. I'll be posting a lifehack each week that will hopefully help some of you out! 

What's a lifehack? Check out the definition! I've been really interested in them for a while, and I use a lot in my daily life. I'll be sorting through all of the ones I love and trying some new ones that are related specifically to teaching and bringing you one each week! So without further ado, check our Lifehack for Teachers #1!

Second:

I'm bringing back my Tunes Tuesday Linky! The last time I did Tunes Tuesday, it was all about using music and lyric sheets to teach grammar skills. Now Tunes Tuesday is expanding into other subject areas. Once a month I'll be having a new Tunes Tuesday Linky with a different focus area.

The first one will be all about Science. The linky will go live on Tuesday, March 18th. If you're a blogger, I hope you'll think about linking up how you've used music to teach science! Feel free to link up a prior post or a brand new one! I hope the rest of you will come back and check out all the link ups to get some great ideas about how to use music in your classroom!

Finally:

I want to show off the new bar across the top of my page where I am now showcasing Tunes Tuesday, Lifehacks for Teachers, and of course all of my fabulous Freebies! My freebies tab is a perfect place to check out some of the cool things you may have missed that I've offered up free in past posts! It took a little work to get them all organized, but I hope it'll be easier for my readers to see what's up for grabs!

If you missed out on my original Tunes Tuesday linky, all of the freebies are linked from that tab now too! And of course I'll be updating the Lifehacks for Teachers tab as time goes by as well!

And whatever you do, don't forget to enter my Blogiversary Giveaway!

My One Year Blogiversary Giveaway!

Woohoo! 

I can hardly believe it has been a whole year since I started this blog! It has been such a rewarding experience that I truly have to say that it is one of the best things I've done with my free time in a long time! Not only have I learned so much from other teachers and gotten a ton of great ideas, but I've met some wonderful people through blogging that I can now call friends! But what would my own blog be without readers?! So I'm throwing a giveaway to thank my current and new readers! 

Many of those friends chipped in to help make this celebration of one year of blogging a great one! So set aside some time now to follow some great bloggers and TpT stores and get a chance to win some awesome prizes while you're at it!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

a Rafflecopter giveaway

a Rafflecopter giveaway

a Rafflecopter giveaway

I'd love for you to share the news about my giveaway! Feel free to pin the image at the top and talk it up on social media! 

Speaking of social media...I promised everyone who was kind enough to stop by today a little something. I wish everyone could be a winner...and since I've been blogging for a full year now, I figured I'd give away something that represented that. So I put together this set of clip art (made by yours truly!) for all of you! One image for each month that I've been blogging!

The link looks like this!

Simply stop by my facebook page, and click on the link that says Fan Freebie! Or just click here to go straight to the freebie page! If you "Like" my page then you can grab these twelve images for free! Enjoy! And you'll want to like my page anyway because you'll want the skinny on any flash freebies and extra special sales that I have going on!

If you're new to my blog, I hope you'll look around and decide to stay! Thanks for reading!

Workshop Wednesday - Lit2Go

I'm linking up super quick with my BBB Jivey for Workshop Wednesday! I've had one heck of a work week, so this one'll be fast!The theme this week is websites for reading! I stumbled across a really cool website a while back, but never really got a chance to share about it. 

It's called Lit2Go and it is chock-full of free books in multiple formats. The books are in the public domain, and can be downloaded as .pdfs or in a lot of cases as audio books, all for free! That link will take you to the 4th grade books, but there are books from K-12 available. Definitely worth checking out to potentially use for listening centers, ready to use reading passages, or as a resource for kids to read at home if they don't have access to a broader selection of e-books already. And there just might be a few classics in there you'd like to have for yourself!

If you aren't keeping up with my blog (What?!) then you may have missed that my Blogiversary is THIS Saturday! Stop by for a great set of giveaways, a prize for everyone, and keep tuned to my Facebook feed for some flash freebies! The grand prize is a $50 Amazon.com gift card!

See you on Saturday!

Tried it Tuesday + some giveaways!

Hi all! I'm linking up with Fourth Grade Flipper for Tried it Tuesday!

My class finally finished our informational writing unit. We've been working really hard on some heavy duty writing as part of my Biography project. So I though it'd be great to do our poetry unit as a little bit of a break before delving into opinion/persuasive/argumentative writing.

I know, I know, April is poetry month. But so be it. We are taking our big state tests at the end of this month and I didn't want to do persuasive when my kids' brains were fried. Also, I have my kids submit an anthology of their poems to my school's SLAM Fair. That's our Science, Literature, Art, and Music Fair at my school, which is a really well attended parent night. So I wanted to have plenty of time to get that ready.

So, we started this week off by having the kids work on the cover for their anthology. While it's not a true form of poetry, I think it's fun to have the cover be a Wordle made up of words that the kids feel relate to them. It's kind of like a stream of consciousness piece!

Today we wrote acrostic poems. Now...I've taught acrostic poems to kids for years. But the bulk of that experience is back when I taught 1st and 2nd grade! I've never taught them to 3rd and 4th graders until this year. I have to say that privately I've always considered the acrostic poem to be the lamest of all poems. I'm really used to teaching them like this, almost acronym style:

Thoughtful

Energetic

Artistic

Caring

Helpful

Engaging

Respectful

In first and second grade the kids can barely spell the words they want to use, so you end up with O standing for Osome(awesome) and stuff. It ends up being aggravating to the kids when they want to use words that won't fit, and it ended up being aggravating to me because I don't believe instructional writing time is a time to be obsessed with spelling...especially poetry. And isn't one of the main points of poetry to express emotion of some kind? I never felt like the acrostics my kids produced really did that. So my history with acrostics hasn't been pretty. 

I decided to choose to have a new mindset when it comes to acrostics. I wanted to make the focus of writing them change from just fitting the formula of what an acrostic is, and focus more on the expressing of emotion. AND my intern found a great example of how they can be written as full sentences! So I started the lesson by reading Spring by Steven Schnur. (There's one for the other 3 seasons as well!)  

Then I asked for a word from the kids and of course I got "BURGER." We talked about how the words we choose to write these poems will be more meaningful as part of our anthologies if we choose words that mean a lot to us, but Burger would be fine for the example. I think the poem we came up with turned out great. If nothing else it expresses some humor. I especially like that we have referred to burgers as "edible treasures." And I have to say that both my kids and I have some newfound respect for the acrostic poem! My change of mindset really helped me frame the lesson better for the kids, and their poems were better as a result. 

In retrospect, I really think I could've been pushing those 2nd graders to do this years ago! Sigh! 

So, did I fool you or did you guess that my Tried It Tuesday is really that I tried changing my mindset about something, not just teaching acrostics! 

But anyway, in other news...

Have you heard? My one year blogiversary is coming up on Saturday! This little blog of mine will be a whopping one year old! Woohoo! I'm having a giveaway to celebrate of course! A $50 Amazon gift card and 17 other wonderful prizes from some of my favorite bloggers are up for grabs! Be sure to stop by!

And now you should rush on over to Fifth in the Middle because she is gearing up for her March Madness Giveaway, which begins later this month! She's having a pre-giveaway giveaway! What?! 

See you on the 8th! I'll end up with 4 lucky winners, but everyone who stops by will get a little something...hint hint, wink wink! And you might just want to "Like" me on Facebook so you're sure to get notified about some Flash Freebies that'll be happening that day!

Spark Student Motivation with Food and Tech!

So, thanks to all of the crazy winter weather we've had lately this past week was our first full 5 day week since December! Isn't that insane?! Keeping the kids engaged and motivated for a whole week when they're used to only sporadically coming to school is tough!  ;)  So I'm linking up with Joanne over at Head Over Heels for Teaching for her Spark Motivation Saturdays linky!

Luckily we had a lot of interesting things going on this week to help keep them engaged! 

Early in the week we finished our unit of study on Japan with a Japanese Foods Taste Testing! I went to a local Asian Market and bought a variety of Japanese snacks for the kids to taste. I was surprised by how many of them they actually enjoyed. I purposefully bought a few that wouldn't normally appeal to American kids' palates....like the green tea mochi pictured here!

Nothing motivates students like science experiments! My partner intern came and led the kids in a science experiment where they tested out different sized parachutes to try and understand drag. I think the kids will need a little more instruction, but they did enjoy making hypotheses and carrying out the experiment!

Using technology is always a big motivator too! It just so happened that I was going to be paid a visit by my superintendent and the school board on Friday, and they were coming expressly to see how technology is being used in the district! To compliment my students' current understanding of what we've been learning in our "Air, Aviation, and Weather" unit of study, I had my kids exploring several websites and doing a webquest that I created. I went ahead and added it to my store for anyone else who is interested for just a buck! I found it funny that when I rang the bell to signify that it was time for us to put the computers away the kids could hardly believe the entire science block was over. Technology really sucks them in!

Go check out some of the other ways to keep kids motivated! And be sure to stop by later this week for some details on my great big one year blogiversary giveaway! Woohoo!