The Most Fun Week of the Year!

Yes, you actually read that title correctly.  A teacher who loves Halloween week....can you believe it?? I don't know how you feel about it or how the teachers in your building do, but I can say I hear a lot of dread and complaining.  Come on people!  We loved Halloween when we were kids.  It was a magical night of dressing up and getting more candy than we had the whole rest of the year!  So teachers this is a friendly PSA--Let's not forget that excitement WE once felt....whether it was on a Saturday or a Wednesday!  Let your kiddos get excited....maybe even join in.

Anyway...the sisters and I have a fun week planned and I wanted to share a little overview with you!  Between beginning of the year stuff, reading testing, teaching behavior expectations and routines, and our rigorous math program, we haven't exactly had a ton of "free" time for fun things.  My room was looking B-A-R-E.  Let's face it, kids need some down time to have a little fun here and there between all the "must-dos" and my class needed a Halloween face lift!  So last week I squeezed in a simple craft of making pumpkins.  Believe it or not, the class loved the simplicity and were so creative when they knew they could do whatever they wanted!  I got big pumpkins, small pumpkins, pumpkins with baseball hats, and pumpkins with eyelashes!  I loved their creativity and they loved that there were basically no directions!  I hung these on a bulletin board in the hallway and titled it "We're a Perfect Patch of Pumpkins."  I was starting to feel more in the spirit of the upcoming holiday.  I decided to also squeeze in writing Halloween stories.  As Amy has been telling you, we have adopted a new way of teaching writing so far this year.  It allows the students to write about whatever they want....I just slightly encouraged them to try a Halloween story when we were learning about question leads.  Of course they all got super excited.  They weren't masterpieces of perfection but they loved writing them so we did a final copy and they made story toppers out of our Halloween unit.  You can find that unit here or by clicking on the picture below if you want to make these or incorporate lots of different Halloween ideas into your learning this week.  

Now that these are hanging in my room, it's onto the BIG week!  We decided to put the regular routine on hold somewhat to have THEME week!  Each day this week has a theme that goes along with Halloween. We made sure to include all of the things we were going to learn anyway, just put a fun holiday spin on them.  Nothing says "exciting" to 7 and 8 year olds more than "special days."  We used to do a huge bat unit that we worked on for a few weeks.  We loved it, the kiddos loved it.  But then we realized Kindergarten did it and so did 1st grade and we wanted to do something new for them.  So last year we did a shorter study of spiders.  We loved it, the kiddos loved it but now we see lots of those in the halls already this year.....trendy perhaps?!?  So we came up with a way to still do a little of each.  Check out our themes for this week....

Monday- Spooky Spiders
Tuesday- Batty Bats (including Bat'tastic activities)
Wednesday- Pumpkin Play (including pumpkin science activities)
Thursday- Witch's Brew (including Room on the Broom strategies)
Friday- Halloween Fun

We will check back in with you to show you a little of what we did for each theme day....and include some pics!

I have not been more excited about a Monday since last June! :)

Now you tell us....what's your favorite way to incorporate Halloween into your classroom learning?

~Tina

Scary

That moment when a coworker buys one of your products.

It happened. Today.

We have not promoted the fact that we started a TpT store at our school. There are only about 3 other people who actually know we have this blog and a store. We were a bit apprehensive to share our venture, you know... it case it was a flop. Well, it's been a year [!] and we are going strong. We feel so blessed.

For those of you who blog and/or sell, did you tell your coworkers?

Hehe

So this week has been everything scary! 

Monday we made a list of scary words.

However, the scariest thing about this picture just might be my spelling! UGH how embarrassing!

After we made this list and the students copied the words into their Writer's Notebook (whoops... they all spelled tarantula and slime wrong!) we used the words to make scary sentences. Every year after we do this lesson I think to myself, "Tell the kids they can't write about Bloody Mary." Then the next year rolls around, I forget, and I get 20 sentences about her.

Because we like to turn activities into friendly competitions we decided to find the person who wrote the scariest sentence of all! I set the writing timer for 12 minutes and the spooky music went on. [We had to set the mood!] After our timer went off I had each student reread all their sentences and star the scariest. Each student shared their scariest sentence with their table. The table then voted who had the absolute scariest. That person when came up to the front of the room. We have 7 tables in our classroom so we had 7 sentences about Bloody Mary to vote on. We found our scariest writer and applauded them. It was a fun!

Yesterday, we turned those scary sentences into stories. I had a sub so my stories were, well... not so good. However, Tina's turned out cute so she had her class turn theirs into a final copy today.

I feel like this is the first year in a while that I've really been excited for Halloween. I'm attributing it to the baby! I bought her 3, yes 3, costumes. I'm seriously going to return 2.. I just can't decide which one to keep. Piglet? Strawberry? Ladybug? They are all just TOO cute.

I have been lighting this candle every night! I just LOVE it.


-Amy-

Five for Friday

Time management has never been one of my strengths… like last week I started this post after school on Friday and of course got side tracked. This weekend I've spent a lot of time researching the safest baby car seats and looking for bedding to decorate the cutest nursery. ALL super important but my school work has taken a back seat. I'm not complaining at all! But I knew I had to get back to this post.

Soo….

Here's a peak at some of the things we've been up to the last two weeks!

Thankfully Halloween is behind us. But it preparation for our festivities we all made a candy bag. (Like they needed anymore sugar!) We used foam sticks, stickers, and markers to decorate our bags. They turned out so cute!

Unfortunately, after Halloween comes "falling back."  I am having the hardest time getting use to such early darkness. Ugh, I'm ready for bed at 6 every night! Or maybe it's the pregnancy??? Who knows! 

The day after Halloween is always so quiet... until we asked them each to bring a peice of candy to school! What were we thinking???? Ohh that's right, we want to spark their interest with activities they are excited about! We did "The Day After Halloween" graph, which can be found in our Halloween unit. We sorted all the candy first. We talked about the different ways we could sort them. Then we talled each type of candy on our tally sheet and graphed them on the back page. It was a blast!

Career Day! Last Friday we celebrated the end of our communities study with community workers. Each student researched the career they would like to have when they grow up. We had quite a variety from McDonald worker (I do LOVE their french fries!!) to archeologist to teacher to chef. They have some wonderful aspirations!

We also practiced using a thesaurus this past week. The kids could spend hours looking up new words. One of our activities was to use the thesaurus to find new and exciting words to replace dull words. Grab this activity now… Wow Words Freebie!

Our RtI program is finally underway. We do Monday through Thursday, 20 minutes per day. This year we decided to focus on informational reading. Between the three of us, Sister 2's WONDERFUL student teacher, and our three parapros we have pretty small groups! Each week we print off an A-Z pocketbook for each student. We spend the whole week working with that one book. The kids are intrigued and learning to love informational text. WIN WIN. 

Have a great upcoming week everyone!!!

Pre-Halloween Fun!

Halloween is in in full swing around here! Our classrooms are looking spooky and the kids are acting even stranger. Please don't tell us it's just our kids that have Halloween Fever!?!

This morning one of my little cuties brought me this adorable bracelet! Can you believe his mom made it?!?

Today the Candy Corn Bandit paid us a visit. Gotta love Babbling Abby! The Candy Corn Bandit took our treat but left us with some clues. After he made us trek around the whole school we ended up back in our classroom where the treat was waiting for us. This lesson on making preditions is absolutely adorable! You have to check it out.

Today we also had our annual pumpkin fun! Sister 2 and I had a full house of parent volunteers, poor Sister 1 didn't get any. She made it work tho! We weighed, measured, and counted our pumpkins. Then we carved them... this year they got pretty fancy! Grab our pumpkin fun worksheet here!

Now, this momma-to-be is ready for bed! Too bad it's only 3pm...

Have fun tomorrow at all your Halloween festivities!
-Sister 3-

Five for Friday on Sunday

It's Friday again.... or Sunday?, when I'm actually able to finish this post! Better late than never!

#1. Halloween is seriously right around the corner!! I mean, really... where is this year going? It's def been a whirlwind, for me at least! Our Halloween projects and activities official started this week. Our classrooms are really starting to look "spook"tacular. 

We started our week with some scary stories. Each child picked to write a spooky story about either a witch, vampire, or Frankenstien. We had them work through the writing process and turn their stories into final copies. We used our writing toppers from our Halloween unit to jazz them up a bit! They turned out adorable super scary.

We also did some opinion writing this week with some inspiration from Amy Lemons' spiders. We are just amazed by her! We read a ton of informational spider books throughout the week. The students then had to use their new information to answer: Do you think spiders are creepy or cool? Some just couldn't decide because the creepy things about spiders makes them so cool! lol, second graders are so insightful sometimes. Check out some of our finished products...

#2. This past week we also started telling time. Our cuties got o'clock and thirty without a problem but were really struggling with the five minute intervals. Sister 2 whipped up this cute Halloween inspired I-Spy. Grab it from our TPT store here... free!

I also pulled out our brand new telling time floor mat for some additional practice. I had my students go out into our pod with a parent volunteer to practice telling time.

#3. This week we were also working on making visualizations. We have two poems that we just love for this strategy. One is about a pencil and the other is about an unusual pet. Grab them both here. Our students were so surprised to find out what the poems were actually about!

#4. My wonderful room mom knows just what this mom-to-be craves and popped by this week with my FAVORITES. Kind of random but my baby loves soup and McDonald's breakfast sandwiches.

#5. Remember how last week Big Boy swung by school with ice cream sundaes?? This week Olive Garden came to my classroom with salad, breadsticks, and pasta! They brought chef hats and name tags... the kids (and their very hungry teacher) were in heaven! MMM thank you Olive Garden!

Now I just need to get Sister 2 to give Chili's a call back! I'm hoping they want to bring their famous (and our favorite) chips and salsa!

The Lions are on so I'm off to relax before our weekly Soup and Sandwich Sunday dinner tradition!
-Sister 3- 

Time to Catch Up

Where has the time gone?!? About a week and a half ago we said we had another major announcment... sorry to leave you hanging!

I'm having a baby!!! Lots of big news on my end this year.  My students are beyond excited! Every day I find sticky notes on my desk with potential baby names.

In the mist of wedding and baby planning I am managing to get some teaching in! hehe... Thanks to my two lovely sisters, of course.

We have our bat unit under way. We have to say we are very excited about this unit because it was our launch into TPT. It's our first Sister Secrets "baby" if you will! Check it out if you're interested in studying bats this year. Here's a writing craftivity from the unit.

We are also starting our Halloween inspired activities and lessons. Today our cuties began rough drafts of scary stories... look for pictures of the finished projects soon! We also have been enjoying Halloween Bump! in our Math Menu rotations. You can grab a year of bump here, for free!

This week we've been doing all sorts of visualizing. It's one of my favorite strategies! Yesterday, I read See the Ocean.. it's such a sweet story. I stopped about half way through and had the kiddies go back to their desk and draw what they saw when they heard the words on the page, in their Daily 5 Notebooks.  Then we did a gallery walk. Here are a few of their visualizations!

And finally the highlight of last week was a visit from Big Boy! Our students had written resturant letters a few weeks ago and Big Boy wrote back saying they wanted to bring an ice cream sundae treat to ALL of us! 90 ice cream sundaes!! Such sticky fun. :)

I'm off to meet a contractor... we're wanting to renovate the bathroom. Wish me luck!
-Sister 3-

And we're back!!! Halloween, Happiness, and Headaches!!

First...let us start by apologizing to all of you!!  We have been MIA for the last few weeks with SO much school stuff.  You get it right?  SOOOO much school stuff!  The beginning of the year is just plain exhausting.  We love the excitement of back to school but we must forget how tiring it is.  Have we mentioned the SOOOO much school stuff?  Anyway...boo hoo enough about us!  You are all in the same boat and so we can sympathize with each other!

So forgive us for being absent for so long!  But we are back!!  Things are finally settling into a routine and we can get back to what we love....blogging, our teacher friends, and TPT! :) All three make the three of us very happy ladies!

We've worked on a few products in the last few months to prep for the fall season. Somehow working on TPT is like therapy that relaxes us...yes, we need help! :)

Check out Apples, Fall Writing, and Halloween!  All three are packed with fun for this season!

 

We have a new math series this year.  It is the absolute DEATH of us so far.  We know that new things come along and we always adjust what we do as the years change...however, sometimes we are forced to use things we don't think are the best materials for our students.  We are trying to stay positive that the farther we get into it, the more it will all make sense but....eeekk.  Right now all three of us worry about our math instruction.  We've decided to try to find a happy medium of the program we have to use and supplemental materials...for the kids and for maintaining our sanity.  We don't want to give out the name (to protect the innocent...lol) but out of curiosity...what math program do you use at your school?  More importantly tell us what you think of it!

Hope you are all having a wonderful beginning of the year and settling into your routines!  Halloween will be here before you know it!

Witchy Halloween Fun

Wow!  I was just stopping in to tell everyone about a great new product when I was thrilled to see many more adds to our "Linky Party!". This "party" has turned into something very exciting.....thanks to Sister 2 for getting this party started....ha ha (music trivia anyone?).  It's also great to "meet" our new followers and check out the happenings on their sites.  Thank you to everyone who has linked up so far.  What creative items we've been seeing! 

Keep the good "links" coming!

Speaking of creative.....you all know how much we love Halloween and today we added a new product to our TPT store!  It's a super cute witch craftivity that comes with many ideas of how you can use it in your classroom.....a glyph perhaps?  Or my personal favorite is to use it as a countdown to Halloween!  "Witchy Halloween Fun" can be found here.  

Check it out "my pretties"....little witchy weekend humor for you!

~Sister 1

Pumpkin Fun!

The sisters and I love Halloween! Last year we had our first annual "Pumpkin Day."  With our second annual pumpkin day quickly approaching (tomorrow!) we thought we'd share some of our favorite activities! 

Last night, after school, to get in the spirit we picked up a Pumpkin Spice Latte...mmmm...and stopped by the grocery store to get our classroom pumpkins.  Everything was going smoothly until Sister 1 spotted the most perfect pumpkin...of course it was at the bottom of the pile. As she was trying to pull it out Sister 2 and I were standing behind her giggling. I bet you can guess what happened next!!! Yesssssssssss, next thing we knew that large display of pumpkins were rolling around the floor. After a few dirty looks from other shoppers we managed to pick up and put away all the pumpkins.  The great news is she got that pumpkin!  Sister 2 and I are a little jealous of how "perfect" it truly is!   

Tomorrow morning our plan is to start with a pumpkin book read aloud, then move into pumpkin centers, and finally do an expository writing titled "How to Carve a Pumpkin." 

After lunch is when the real fun begins! We recruit 4 parents each to come in and join our fun.  We split our classes up into 4 groups to complete the Pumpkin Math and Science page.  Grab this TPT freebie today!  Once they finish measuring, weighing, and counting the seeds as a group they decide how they want the parent to carve the pumpkin. As the parents and students are carving the pumpkins the sisters and I run down to the oven.  We pop the pumpkin seeds in and enjoy them as a little afternoon snack!  Our kids love setting their newly carved pumpkins around the room to add to our spooky decorations.     

What did one jack-o-lantern say to to another?

Cut it out!

Have a spook-tacular time!