Spring Break Give Away

The CONTEST IS OVER! Congrats to Emily!!

Hey all! Congrats for making it this far in the school year without having a heart attack (or at least I hope you haven't had one.....that would be bad and insensitive of me)!! Here's a fun giveaway just for you.  You can win any 2 products from my TpT store as well as from Kitty Kitty Kidergarten and Class Of Kinders! All you have to do is enter the Rafflecopter below:

a Rafflecopter giveaway

GOOD LUCK!!! 

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

This is such a fun time of year.  In my classroom the leprechauns visit every year and reek havoc EVERYWHERE! There's green toilet water, to glittery foot prints, to upturned chairs and flipped name tags.  We stay super busy with holiday themed lessons. We complete searches for sight words, ABC order activities, puppets, read Leprechaun stories, graph Lucky Charms, and so much more!  One of my favorite stories to read this time of the year is the Leprechaun's Gold by Pamela Duncan.

It has great characters for character study and the story of events is easy for the minis to follow and retell.  PLUS this book has a hidden mystery.  Inside it has about 18 four leaf clovers hidden in the illustrations! Talk about FUN! The kiddos go nuts trying to find them searching through all the detailed drawings.  Then of course when it is writing time they ALL try to hide details in their illustrations and stories for me to find!
I wanted to add a bit of fluency practice for the kiddos so I created a fun Readers Theater with this holiday theme in mind. The kids have a blast acting this one out! It is all about a boy who catches a Leprechaun and tries to get his gold.  If you would like to take a peek at it you can find it here: The Leprechaun's Gold. {Note: It is nothing like the above story, just share's the same name}

It comes in color and in black and white!

Plus it has a storyboard and characters for a retelling activity.

Thanks for reading to the end! One more quick thought, to celebrate the holiday I am throwing a sale for 3 days! My store will be 20% off!

Do you have any crazy St. Patrick's tricks that you pull on you kiddos? I would LOVE to hear them if you do!

Do you wanna build a snowman? {How To Writing FREEBIE}

How do you teach "How-To" Writing? I use tons of my own ideas, different ideas found all over Pinterest, and ideas from blogs.  This year I began the unit like I usually do each year, by writing a whole class story about How To Brush Your Teeth.  This is super interesting because the kiddos forget all the little details involved in actually brushing your teeth. Of course I brought my own toothbrush and tooth paste in and proceeded to brush my teeth following their steps. They thought this idea was hilarious.  It's like they thought I NEVER brush my teeth.  As the lesson goes on I do exactly what they say to do in order to model how to slow down and THINK ABOUT every little detail involved.  They were laughing historically throughout the whole process but, when they got to the part where you spit it out, they forgot to mention to spit it IN the sink.  Can you just imagine what happened next? YEP, I SPIT ON THE FLOOR!!!! They were insanely excited at this point of the lesson, telling me how wrong I was.  Of course I had to point out that I only did what they told me.  It was amazing to watch all the little light bulbs come on ALL around the room with comments like, "oooohhh" and "we forgot"! Their faces were PRICELESS!!! (Of course after this we went on to learn about steps, materials, more details, comparing How To stories to other stories and publishing. This was so much fun that I thought I would bring in a sweet treat for our next lesson on "How-To" writing.  I began by stating, “ How would you like to build a snowman?” and after several excited SCREAMS and “NO WAY'S" (because we live in FL and have NO snow) I pulled out several materials: (We completed one whole class before they received their own.)

1 long rope twizzler, 3 large marshmallows, 2 toothpicks, ten mini chocolate chips, 1 small orange tic tac, 2 pretezel sticks

After several more excited screams, we worked together to build this little guy. Then we listed the materials and the steps we took to build the classroom snowman on chart paper. (Of course there was lots of turning and talking to discuss those tricky missing steps.)

Day 2:

I gave them all their own materials and off they went to build and write. Of course at the end of today’s lesson they got to eat their yummy snowmen!

Days 3-7:

We wrote some more, talked some more, and learned to transfer from the planning sheet to the “Fancy” sheet.

You can get this writing FREEBIE by clicking Do You Wanna Build A Snowman?