Gobble, Graving and Giving Thanks - Math and Literacy Centers for November

Happy Tuesday folks!  Lindsay here . . .

Well, I have been experiencing some major technical difficulties over here on the Mrs. Messyhair side of Teacher Bits and Bobs and I have been SO frustrated to not be able to share with you all the things we have been doing in Room 17!  (Darn you Google for not letting me upload pictures and documents!! - insert angry shaking fist here . . .)

Soooooooooo . . . today I will be brief.  You will just have to take my word for it that October was amazing, that my kids and I did a unit of study on bats culminating in them filling out a bat outline and presenting their "research" to our neighboring kindergarten class, that we had so much fun with our Haunted House art and writing about our field trip to the farm.  Cuz it happened.

But alas, October is over, and I wanted to share with you some Thanksgiving goodness for you and your chitlens before its too late!  Hot off the press, I give you GOBBLE, GRAVY AND GIVING THANKS - Math and Literacy Centers for November (click on the image to check it out in my TPT store):

Your students will GOBBLE up these math and literacy centers for the month of November! Included in these centers are:

1. Giving Thanks Graph (sorting, counting, graphing, comparing numbers)
2. Turkey 10s (Writing, counting and sequencing by 10s)
3. Mashed Potatoes Measuring (measuring to the closest inch; recording data)
4. Gravy and Gibblets Sentence Scramble (write, cut and glue scrambled up Thanksgiving sentence)
5. Pumpkin Pie and Picture Puzzles (building Thanksgiving words)
6. Ten Little Turkeys reader (original text reader that will help students practice counting down from 10 to 0, numbers/number words, reading)

I used the Giving Thanks Graph, Picture Puzzles and Turkey 10s today in centers and they were such a hit!  Easy to follow directions, but the classroom was SO QUIET (as often happens when their little brains are being put to good use!!) 

Here are Pumpkin Pie and Picture Puzzles - building words...

 

Here is our Giving Thanks Graph: sorting the pictures, counting, graphing and answering questions about our data....

And last of all, the completed Turkey 10s!  I was so proud at my kiddos for getting this by themselves!  I had a volunteer mom cancel for centers at the last minute, but I explained to my kiddos what they were to do, and left them with some 100 charts (just in case!) and they did great!

Sorry that is it for now!  Hopefully I can figure out the problem with Google (maybe it just hates me?) and will be back with more soon!

Have fun watching the election results tonight!

Lindsay

Spandex, Space, and Symbols of America

Hello folks!  Lindsay here . . .

Well I hope you all have been soaking up the Olympic goodness this past week . . . the competition, the stories behind the athletes, the spandex . . . ah yes, the spandex.  And we're talking men's swimming spandex here folks.  You know what I'm talking about . .  .

Other favorites/weird fascinations of this year's Olympics include the Queen parachuting during the Opening Ceremonies . . .

 . . . the American gymnast guy with the lucky towel (Do you think he takes it on dates?) . . .

 . . . and, of course, beach volleyball players.  I heard they all have bodies like this.  Hmmm, maybe I will be a beach volleyball player when I grow up! ;)

Aside from showing pride in my country via sitting on the couch watching the Olympics, I have also been finishing up some goodies to share with you all!

First, as promised, I wanted to share with you all some of the goodies that I used during the America unit I did with my kinders at the end of the year.  My kidlets got to take their darling America books home on the last day after our graduation program.  Such wonderful keepsakes!

Here is a sneak peek at the inside our one of the America books - the art projects that went on each page was a mixture of TLC projects, projects from Deanna Jump's America pack, and step-draw activities that I did with my kiddos.  We did one symbol a day: we watched a video or read a story about each symbol, charted what we learned, and then my kiddos had to go and write about what they had learned - and they remembered such great details!

"Uncle Sam is on a poster. He is not really a person.  I wish he was alive. I love Uncle Sam."

 "The bald eagle is 6 to 7 feet long. The bald eagle is on the quarter. He is a symbol for strength."

"The President has guards. He lives in the White House. You can be the president. You vote when . . . (continued on second page) . . .

"The Liberty Bell cracked when they first hit it. They hid it when they had a war." (True story)

"The flag has 50 stars. The flag has 13 stripes.  I know the Allegiance.  Red = courage. I love America!"

"They plant (plant???) fireworks on 4th of July.  They only plant them at night. They plant them July. I love (continued on second page)."

"I know about the Statue of Liberty. It lives on the water. It's on an island."

Cute stuff, right?  I love, love, LOVE seeing my students display their learning in their own writing.  Soooooo . . . even though its the beginning of August and all of our patriotic holidays are behind us . . . I wanted to share my writing paper templates, book cover, and some color posters that I used to teach this units.  Hope your kiddos will impress you with their fabulous writing too!  Click on the heart below to head over to my TPT store and download this patriotic freebie today!

Secondly, I wanted to share with you my newest literacy centers thematic pack: There's No Place Like Space!!

Yes, I'll admit it. I get all excited to teach my kidlets about space every year.  It is SUCH a fun unit and my kids are always so intrigued by all of the planets in our Solar System!  They have their favorite planets, they love to act out a simulation of the planets' orbit around the sun, and they get the biggest kick out of trying to guess how far each planet is from the sun (usually the biggest number they can think of) . . . something like "Seven katillion twenty hundred and ten".  Close.  Sorry kid.

To help feed my students' apetites for all things amazingnly galactic, I created these fun, hands on and ready-to-print literacy centers. 

In this pack you get:

-Asteroid ABC order
-Scrambled Sentences Flying Through Space
-Blast Off! Sight Word card game
-No Place Like Space Making Words Activity

You can click on the spaceship below and head on over to my TPT store to pick yours up today!

And finally, just one more thing . . . Teacher Bits and Bobs is now on Pinterest!!  That's right folks, now you can check out our latest products, favorite blogs, and inspiring teaching ideas as you waste time  spend time gathering teacherific goodness from Pinterest!!  Sign up to follow us today!

That's it for now! I have a date with the couch and Micheal Phelps in about five minutes.

Night!

Lindsay

Book Match Literacy Center!

Happy Saturday, Friends! Kerri here...
I can't believe that one week of Summer Vacay is over already! Let me tell you what I did last week....


a whole bunch of NOTHING! and it was glorious!! Well, I did manage to find time to read, work out, go shopping, sleep in, and make green smoothies for breakfast, but my baskets of clean laundry DID NOT get folded for the entire week-HA! In your face, laundry!! :)

I have a little something to share today that is EASY PEASY LEMON SQUEEZY to make, and my kids ABSOLUTELY love doing (both Kinder and First Grade)! I call it "Book Match", but really what a boring name! I have never been able to think of a more clever name for it, but anyways, all this center requires are emergent readers (with 1-2 sentences per page), sentence strips, and gallon size Ziploc bags!


Okay, all you need to do is write out the story on sentence strips, cut the words apart, and store the words and the book in a large ziploc baggy, labeled with the name of the book on it, of course. During centers, my kidlets work in pairs to put the story back together correctly. I used this center ALL THE TIME in Kinder, and it is perfect for the beginning of First Grade too! 


A helpful tip: write a letter or word in pencil on the back of each word card for each book, so you know which baggy the word card goes into when your students inevitably come up to you 10 minutes later with a word card they have found! (DRAT!!) 


I don't even laminate mine, I have used these for years and they are still in perfect condition!

Another thing I have is varying levels of books for my different levels of students. Some of my books are VERY basic with only 1 sentence per page, and others have 2 longer sentences which makes it MUCH more difficult because there are so many more words to sort and put in order. 


In Kinder, I taught my kids to sort their cards by word, especially if the books are predictable, and this helps them manage all of those words cards. In First Grade, I let them just go for it, and use whatever strategy they want to!

I have used Sunshine books, Phonics and Friends books, and the Phonics Readers from Houghton Mifflin for this center, but really ANY emergent readers that have predictable text would be PERFECT, so get crackin' friends! Your kiddos will LOVE LOVE it, and this costs you NADA! 
YAY!!


P.S. Why are Yoga outfits so flippin' expensive?? I mean really, $79 for a pair of stretchy pants? Ridiculous! I'm gonna try TJ Maxx and see if I have better luck, cause LuLu Lemon is WAY out of my price range! :/

Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs . . .and More!

Hey friends!  Lindsay here . . .

Well, first of all, can I just tell you how fun Friday was with the leprechaun hunt I took my little kidlets on?!  We came back from Flag Deck to our classroom . . . which had been destroyed by a very naughty leprechaun!  (Sample picture below - more pictures to come later!)

Our little leprechaun friend led us all around the school . . . from the cafeteria, to the playground, to our Big Buddie's 4th grade class, to the computer lab, to the library, and finally to . . .(cue ominous music) THE PRINCIPAL'S OFFICE!!  Our little leprechaun left my kidlets brand new boxes of crayons (instead of gold - boohoo!) under the principal's desk.  The rest of the day my kiddos were SO funny.  Every little thing that seemed a bit out of place they blamed on the leprechaun . . . "My pencil's not in my box!  It was the leprechaun!"  "Look at this piece of trash I found on the floor!  It was the leprechaun!"  "I saw something orange move outside!  It was the leprechaun!"  Needless to say, it took awhile before we were able to regain focus and actually learn anything on Friday morning, but in the afternoon we did sequence our leprechaun hunt using this printable from my Lucky the Leprechaun TPT Unit (click the image below to view item in my TPT store):

It was a great day.  I had many more picture to share, but I left the CD at school on Friday.  Oh barnacles!!  More pictures to come, I promise!

Now on to this weekend.  This wet, sopping, I'm-so-glad-I-stayed-in-my-PJs-all-day-on-Saturday weather.  We had crazy weather all weekend, with some sun, hurricane force winds, some hail, and rain. Lots of rain.  So . . . being the Southern California girl that I am . . . I stayed inside. 

This weekend I spent lots of time on the computer (when Jack was asleep and I couldn't cuddle him) working on my newest TPT unit . . . Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs!!! 

Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs (hereafter referred to as CWACOM) is one of my favorite books to read throughout the year.  Every year I read it with my kidlets and we create a class book of our very own kinds of wacky food weather.  It is a story that the kids love year after year - it really gets their imaginations going!!  So this year I decided to take the story BEYOND writing, and to create some really great literacy and math centers as well.  Take a peek!

If you are interested, check out this meat-a-licious unit over in my TPT store HERE.  (That was for you Kerri . . . my dear vegetarian friend!)

Speaking of Kerri . . . she wanted me to pass the word on that she is working furiously on her Rainforest Art and Writing Unit and is 95% done.  So keep your eyes peeled folks.  It's on its way! 

That's it for me tonight!  Hope you all have a wonderful Monday tomorrow!

Lindsay