4th of July Sale!!!

HAPPY 4TH!

Click here to go to my store!

I mentioned on Tuesday that I'm running my first sale on Teacher's Pay Teachers!  I'm offering 10% off all products over $1 (over 10 products total)

PLUS

I posted a patriotic FREEBIE in my store as well!

So, go on and do some shopping and grab yourself some new goodies for the upcoming school year!  The sale runs through Sunday, so if you're occupied with cookouts and fireworks today you'll still have time to shop the sale though the rest of the weekend.

Have a wonderful and safe 4TH OF JULY!!!  

TpT Tuesday

I hope you're having a terrific Tuesday!  

It's amazing how for it being summer I have been super busy over the past few days...  My weekends have been packed with weddings, showers, and birthday parties, so it's been a fun start to the summer.

I had a lot of extra time during my weekdays last week since my brother was away at camp, so I put in a lot of time on some new Teacher Pay Teachers products.  I don't know about any of you who are also on there, but it's sometimes a little overwhelming to see all of the amazing people on there and their fabulous and creative products.  I'm starting off slow and with some basics for the classroom and we'll just see how it goes from there!  

I have been making some classroom items in a cute bright pink, green, and blue polka dot design.  I'm still working on making more to go with this theme, but here's what I've got so far...

PS ~ I was having some issues with linking when I wrote this post (and was too lazy to try to change everything again), so if the image links aren't working here's the link to my store!

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Third-Grade-Rock-Star

My First Teachers Pay Teachers Product!

Happy Saturday!

I hope you all have been doing well since returning to school / work from the holidays!  I feel like this time of year is just jam-packed full of events and I hardly have time to even breathe!  

This past week I attending a workshop taught by my school's music teacher.  She's become to pro on Teachers Pay Teachers in the past year and shared with us her expertise on creating products and selling on TpT.  I've been interested in getting started on there for several months, but wasn't quite sure how to get things rolling.  This class was just what I needed!  She gave us all of the tools I needed to get started and I'm super excited about this new adventure!  

Reading Response Mini Pack

If you're on TpT, you can follow my store Third Grade Rock Star!

I've also started a new Pinterest that will be more focused on teaching stuff.  I'm going to try to post my creations on that page as well as on my own personal Pinterest.  

I plan on getting back to regular blog posts in the coming weeks and months.  Rest assured for those of you who aren't teachers it won't all be products and stuff like that...  I'll still be posting about all of my other life loves like clothes, makeup, shopping, decorating, and my other random thoughts!  

Whole Group Reading: Teacher Read Aloud

When we started Literacy First, I was kind of surprised that having a teacher-led read aloud was part of our whole group time.  In the past we'd had our reading series dictate the story we read that week and we had a few novel studies on top of that.  I always did a chapter book read aloud with my class on top of that, but I really didn't think that reading story books to third graders (or older) was all that necessary.  

I've come to enjoy our read aloud time a lot, though, and it's given me a lot more opportunities to read a variety of stories to my students.  We're supposed to incorporate a lot of non-fiction into our read alouds (about 50 or 60%). 

Here are some of the books / themes that we've done this year:

• Friendship
• Pets / Animal Heroes
• Christopher Columbus
• Elections 
• Presidents 
• Thanksgiving / Native Americans
• Christmas
• Penguins 
• Johnny Appleseed
• Martin Luther King Jr. / Civil Rights
• Inventors
• Titanic
• Butterflies
• Ramona Quimby, Age 8
• The Mouse and the Motorcycle
• Muggie Maggie
• Tales of a 4th Grade Nothing
• Charlotte's Web

There are even more I would like to try to do in the future, but I just haven't had time to fit in or plan for!  We also do some weeks where we just read stories and focus on a certain comprehension skill or text structure...  For example, we might spend a week reading books and focusing on a skill like retelling or compare and contrast.  Some themes extend more than just 1 week and the novel studies usually take about 2 weeks each. 

My kids really love the nonfiction books and learning new things through these books.  We're in the middle of our inventors unit right now and we studied old school inventors like Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell and now we're reading about Steve Jobs.  They're loving it!

I wanted to share the reading planner than I created last spring again.  It's been good for planning things out and it's definitely going to help me in doing some better planning for next year!

Reading Theme Planner.pdf 

One of my current goals for now and into the summer is better organizing all of my theme resources.  I'm considering some tubs like these:  

Image via Really Good Stuff

Target also has some similar boxes...  I think these would be perfect for putting my books and files for themes into one common spot and would be super convenient for sharing with my coworkers!

I'm hoping to get back into some school-related posts again in the coming weeks and months.  Sometimes mid-year I get sick of even thinking about school when I'm not there, so blogging about it isn't exactly at the top of my list!

Whole Group Reading: Vocabulary

 This week's focus for whole group reading is vocabulary instruction.  This is probably one of the hardest things for me to try to cram into 10 - 15 minutes of my 60 minute block!  

There's so much research that shows how a strong vocabulary helps students become better readers and builds higher comprehension.  So many of our students aren't exposed to higher level vocabulary outside of school, so it's important for us to give them opportunities to learn new words from a variety of content areas.

I teach vocabulary in several ways...  The first is through the Daily Vocabulary Practice book by Weekly Reader.  I found this at a teacher store when I was out of town, but I you can still find it online.  It has a half page for each day of the week, plus a weekly review.  Each week presents a new vocab theme and ties into a lot of my grammar instruction as well.  Right now, my class is finishing up a section of "science words," which is great for tying things into other subject areas.  

The other book I use is the Word A Day by Evan Moor.  This book just goes through a variety of words that students should be familiar with just for common knowledge.  There are different versions of this book for each grade level and it provides a "script" of sorts for each word of the day.  

My student teacher from last spring introduced me to this style of graphic organizer for vocabulary, so I whipped up my own and had our district copy center bind them into books for the students to use.  This is so convenient!  It took the kids a long time to get into this routine at the beginning of the year, but they're seasoned pros now!  (I'd like to get this into a Power Point or something for next year, but we'll see if that project happens this summer or not!)

I sometimes alternate the Word A Day book with content area words or vocabulary from our read aloud books.  I wish we had time to do all of it all the time, but that's just not possible.  (Although sometimes we do write in these journals during out science or social studies times and use them outside of the reading block.)  

You can see in the first picture an example of how I post our words of the week.  I use my super awesome Target pocket charts and Dollar Tree's word strips (I hoard those things) to post the words, adding them as we introduce them.  

I also use the Evan Moor Take It To Your Seat Vocabulary Centers during my work station time.  Those centers have some fun games and activities for vocab practice.  I'm hoping to incorporate more vocabulary work into my work stations next year since I feel so rushed to put it all in during my whole group block.

I hope this gives you some ideas on teaching vocabulary to your students!  I wanted to share my graphic organizer with you, so you can download the file here from Scribd.  (The cover is also included if you want to turn it into a book!)

Vocabulary 4 Part Organizer

Next week's post on whole group reading will cover our word wall time!  This was one part of Literacy First that I was initially very reluctant about, but that has ended up being a favorite in my classroom!

Happy Saturday!

Behavior Management Reflection ~ Freebie!

I've been going through files on my computer in attempt to figure out what I need to prepare for the beginning of the school year. In doing so, I'm also finding some documents that I'd like to share! Yay for freebies!

Behavior Reflection Sheet

  

I've used this sheet the past couple years with several behavior management systems.  It's a nice way for kids to reflect on their behavior and think about how they can work on making things better.  I have the kids fill this out when they have to miss recess.  I then write a sentence or two to their parents and they take the sheet home to be signed and returned.  I keep the signed papers in a file for documentation purposes.  It's an easy way to communicate with parents and help make students a bit more responsible for their behavior.  I hope that you can use this or it will inspire you to create your own that will meet you own classroom's needs!

Freebie ~ Folder Game Labels

I was going through my "Back to School" folder on my computer and found these labels that I made to organize my folder games.  I love free downloads, so I thought I'd share this one with everyone!

Here's the link to the PDF on Scribd: 

http://www.scribd.com/doc/98605691/Folder-Game-Labels-Avery-5160

This is my only photo of my folder game organization and it's pre-label days, but it does show how I have them sorted into baskets from Target (of course).  

For the most part, my folder games are the Evan Moor Take It To Your Seat center activities.  I have pretty much all of the reading and math activities for third grade.  I put mine in manila envelopes that I have laminated to keep them study.  It works really well in keeping all of the papers and pieces together.  (Small pieces are in plastic baggies within the envelopes.)  I do have some hand-me-down activities from my aunt, which are in just regular pocket folders.  

I went through all of my folder games and placed the labels in the upper right corner.  For each one, I have labeled the general subject, such as reading, math, language, spelling, vocabulary, or phonics.  Then, I specify the skill for each one.  For example, a math folder might be labeled "Subtraction w/ Regrouping" or a language folder might say "Action Verbs."  I found that labeling makes picking the activities a lot easier since many of the titles don't indicate the specific skill.  

The label download is for Avery 5160 labels.  Those are pretty standard size address labels, so if you're looking for a generic brand that's the number to look for.  The font that I used is from the very awesome site kevinandamanda.com.

Happy labeling!

Let's Try Something New... (Like something for you to download!)

I've been meaning to try to load some documents to share for a while now and haven't had the patience to figure it all out. I'm considering venturing into the whole Teachers Pay Teachers thing, but I don't feel like anything I've made yet is all that cool. For now, I'm just going to try adding a few odds and ends here to the blog and see how that goes! So, here's my first attempt at a printable for you!

Reading Theme Planner.pdf

  

Long story short, I need to clean up some things on Google Docs from back when I was getting my Master's and so I'm using Scribd for the time being.  I actually liked Scribd from the couple times I've used it, so I may just stick with it!  Who knows!?!

I found this pin on Pinterest and was inspired to make my own planner along the same lines.  My two third grade colleagues and I are planning on doing themes next year to drive our reading instruction and have been coming up with a list of ideas.  The next step is to plot out when we want to do these themes!  Some will go with certain times of year or certain seasons, but others we can mix and match whenever and share resources.  With making the switch to Literacy First this year I've struggled a bit in breaking away from our reading series and inserting in as much non-fiction as they want.  (They want 60% non-fiction!  Eeeek!)

Anyway, I hope this comes in handy to some of you and hopefully I'll get more into posting some goodies like this soon!  I figure if I take the time to make something I should share it so that others can benefit from my hard work!