What a week!

This has been a __________ week!  What would you fill that blank in with??  Well this sister says "exhausting!"  We had PD on Monday so it should be a short week but....yes there is always a "but." But my mom had to have surgery.  I am sure most of you can relate to a family member having surgery. It is truly the most scary, stressful time....and add on to that I am a worrier.  Can any of you relate to that as well??  I worry, worry, worry.  Today was surgery day so I took a personal day.  Taking time off is not easy when you are a teacher but being with my family during this time is #1 on the important list right now.  So I made sub plans and prepared for a few hours to make sure everything was ready to go so my class was in good hands.  I am so thankful today's surgery went well and my mom is resting.  I decided I am also taking tomorrow off to be at the hospital...didn't totally plan for that but that is the only place for me to be SO....ENTER emergency sub plan pack!  I absolutely love posting things on TPT that give ideas to/help others but wow when it helps me out and I realize just how useful something is, I am double happy!  Tomorrow my kiddos will be working from our Rainbow Fish Emergency Sub Plans.  They can be found here. The best part is all I had to do was provide a book and all of these activities from my sub tub and tomorrow is a GO!  The second best part is we are learning about the "theme/message" in a story and this is a GREAT story for this!!  Perfect. Time. For. This!

As you may have read, since break, we have been engaged in many new things....especially fluid earth and weather!  Tuesday we made those adorable precipitation umbrellas one of my sisters blogged about last week!  I had to post some of my kiddos working on them because they learned so much and they turned out super cute....a plus for an elementary teacher like me!

Grab our fluid earth review and test here!

A focus for our kiddos this year is INFORMATIONAL text!!  I don't know how it is in your school, but our district would like us working toward a 50-50 split between fiction text and informational text.  We decided the best way to make informational text meaningful to students was to make it learning it FUN!  Next week we will be working on a TON of great penguin activities from our Penguins unit.  I will take some pictures so you can see just how fun using informational text can be!

Don't forget Groundhog's Day is almost upon us as well!  I am wishing, hoping, pleading that the groundhog does NOT see his shadow so this winter chill can start moving out of here!  We decided that next Friday will be a groundhog day for our students. No, no...we won't be doing 1 thing over and over and over...ha ha!  We came up with some great math and literacy activities that focused on groundhog's day.  Some of my class didn't even know what it was when it came up in conversations!   We aligned our activities to some of the standards of the common core and threw in an adorable writing craftivity!!  Check it out here over and over and over....ok sorry that joke is getting old eh? :)