Reading Rainbow Anyone?

Okay, I have a question for you! Does anyone else's school library still have a bunch or Reading Rainbow videos on the shelf? Ours does! Our librarian has been weeding them out and moving to dvd's and United Streaming, but we still have a bunch! The funny thing is that while we laugh at how incredible outdated they are, our kiddos get so excited if we actually show them one! And somehow they ALL know the theme song. Confession....sometimes I "accidentally" have to rewind the beginning to "check" something, just so that the kiddos sing the theme song again! It is just so spontaneous and so funny to listen to them! So because we have these videos still and because we do sometimes show one here and there after reading a series of books, and because my kiddos love the book reviews I decided to try some in my classroom! I took my kiddos to the library and let them pick a book that they hadn't read before, but that they thought looked really interesting. After reading the book they wrote a book review and practiced sharing it for several days as they finished other work. They practiced by themselves, with partners, and for groups of friends, but never got tired After they had gotten some good practice in I pulled them one at a time during an indoor recess and used my flip camera to video them. Once we were all done I put the clips together into a movie and then we watched them. OH MY GOODNESS it was funny! They all tried different types of book review personalities, silly, funny, serious, etc. It was SUCH a hit!!! We had to watch the movie about 3 times in a row and I think they would have asked for more if it hadn't of been time for specials! I also was able to put the videos on my school website as podcast for parents to watch. If you are looking for something fun to do at the end of the year this would probably be a hit with your kiddos! I have found over the years that anytime I can video them and let them watch themselves they are SO much more motivated! I still can't figure out how to get spaces to show up in my posts!! Does anyone know how to make this work? I used to have them, and now no matter what I do, they don't show up!
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Upcoming Giveaway and Student Teacher idea

We are so excited that we are already at 40 followers! We have had so much fun doing this blog. We love that we get to share the things that we are doing and that we have gotten a chance to meet so many of you through your blogs. We are planning a giveaway when we get to 50 followers. We have a 31 consultant friend sharing an item, our End of Year Fun unit, and a school related item all ready to go once we get to the magic 50! Sooooooo.... if you want to tell your friends (bloggy & the ones you see often!) :) to follow us we will get to the giveaway even sooner!! My student teacher's last day is Friday. :( I have missed my kiddos and have loved having taken back over my class, but I will miss the chance to get so much done during the school day! I always love to do something fun on my student teacher's last day. One of my favorite things to do is to have my kiddos make an class book. It is full of what a 7 or 8 year old sees as great advice on how to be an awesome teacher. I always have some kids who come up with off the wall funny things. When I student taught my cooperating teacher had the kids make me a We Will Miss You book at the end of my time with them. One of the little darlings in that class wrote that I was the best student teacher she had ever had ( Aaaaawwwwww, how sweet!!!!) then she followed that lovely line up with..,"you are also the only student teacher I have ever had", Ha!!!! I still have that book and I love that page the most. I think that is when I knew that 2nd grade would be my favorite grade of all time. 11 years later I can still say I love this age!! Click here to grab your freebie student teacher class book.

***BTW...Is anyone else having trouble having spaces show up in their posts???? It shows spaces when I am writing, but no matter what I do it all runs together on the actual post!! Any ideas on how to fix this??? It is driving me batty! :)**** Enjoy, and we still love comments!!!
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Big shot visitor and busy, busy, busy!

I am lucky enough to live about 3 minutes from my school (no, not in the actual attendance area!) so Katie and I ran to my house to grab food for lunch and blog. Are we officially obsessed if we go home to blog during our lunch hour??? We had a big shot visitor today. He is the head of elementary in our district. He came by to visit and see all the wonderful, fun student activities amazing, original ideas we are implementing required district objectives being taught. He of course decided to ask one of my clueless darlings what they were doing that day during reading. My little cherub answered with, "our work". When prompted again he said, "writing stuff we are supposed to". When asked a different way he responded with, " using pencil, skinny black marker, colored pencil, not marker, on the pictures". Hmmmmmm...not exactly the objective we were actually working on. But on the upside he does know my expectations for good, detailed pictures!! Katie was teaching a great Nate the Great lesson with dictionary guide words. Super cute and she made all the materials herself. The kiddos loved it! Of course the big shot only stopped in long enough to see her reading a story to the kids!!!! Grrrrr... we really don't want someone to observe the whole day, but really, does a 2 minute walk through give an accurate pic of what we are really teaching??? On to more fun topics! We have been busy, busy, busy the past few days! We had a field trip to Science City on Thursday, which was GREAT! On Friday we had an inservice day, which was.....not quite as much fun. Are they ever fun??? We got to go were able to attend were required to go to a mandatory common core language arts meeting. We implemented common core math this year and will start the implementation of language arts next year. Then in 2014 we get a new reading series. I have a love/hate relationship with new series. It is so fun to get new stories, but so hard to say goodbye to the old favorites! Our favorite thing we learned at inservice was that we DON'T have to finish the last 2 stories in our current reading book! Yay!!!!! Both of us rushed back after the morning sessions and raided our school library for our favorite books to use for the rest of the year instead! That actually did get us really excited about the last month of school! We also have a freebie for you! It is a regrouping with subtraction activity. Click here to grab it!

We have also completed our End of Year Fun Unit. It has tons of activities that we love to do with our kiddos at the end of the year. Click here to check it out on TPT!

As always we LOVE comments! We are also loving that we have found some great blogs we didn't know about by reading your comments!!!
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Sick Day and a Freebie

Both Katie and I were MIA from school yesterday.
We are both blessed to have our families watch our kiddos while we are at work. This is the best, best, best thing in the world for us. We get to go to work every day knowing that our kiddos are being loved on all day by Grandma and Grandpa!
However, we both had family members who were sick yesterday! Soooo we got to stay home with our own kiddos! I love a sick day that isn't really a sick day! It is a legit reason to have to be home, but we get to just play all day!!!
My girls discovered a suitcase in one of the bedrooms and decided it was a a great new toy! So this is what I spent a good 1/2 hour yesterday watching.

This is where the suitcase started to close and these next few cracked me up!! Is it bad that I kept snapping pictures instead of helping???

This last one cracks me up too! Brylee couldn't figure out where Rylan had gone, but she wasn't willing to let go of her lovey to actually use two hands to lift the lid!
I know that Katie enjoyed her day off too, but her kiddos are WAY more mobile then mine are so she was too busy to take pics!
We are heading to Science City tomorrow for a field trip. This is, hands down, our favorite field trip! I have been in 2nd grade at my school for 11 years and we have gone on this trip every year! I really would be so devastated if we didn't get to go! We have TONS of parents come with us and we split the kiddos up into small groups. The best part...we don't have groups!!! So we can spend the whole day walking around just watching monitoring kiddos behavior! Seriously...it is a great trip that the kiddos like LOVE and we have never had a behavior problem yet!

In other exciting news...our BOE decided yesterday to delete a day from the end of the year because of a lack of snow days!!! WHAT!!!!!! We still have get to come, but the kiddos won't be here!!!! That drastically changes the countdown that we definitely don't have going on! Hee hee!

We have our end of year math and reading testing coming up starting April 30th so we are still reviewing skills that SHOULD be mastered, but are always tough! Enjoy a regrouping with addition activity that we made to help with some review! Click here to get the activity!

As always we love comments!!!


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It's Monday, Easter pics, Our first TPT unit, and a FREEBIE!

Hello Monday!!!
Monday, oh Monday, you are my nemesis! The only good thing about this Monday is that it is one of only 6 Mondays left in the school year. WoooooHoooo!!!!!
By the way, there is absolutely no count down going on here...we do not know that there are 28 days left of school, or that one of those is a 1/2 day, or that 4 of those days are either Reading Celebration Day, Field Day, a Talent Show, or a field trip.... No, absolutely no countdown going on here!!! Hee hee!!
You might have noticed that we have no pictures of ourselves on this blog. Hmmmmmm...are we being mysterious or do we really not like how we look in pictures currently?? We decided to give you a few hints of how we might look by sharing some pictures of our kiddos.

These are my girls (Lisen). If you picture them with hair (I so hate not having anything on their heads to attach huge bows to!!), taller, and a little more exhausted looking :) ...you might have a bit of a picture of how I look!

These are Katie's kiddos. If you picture them with auburn hair, flipped out at the end, a red head's complexion, and definitely exhausted then...you still wouldn't have a picture of Katie, because her kids are the spitting image of her husband!!! :)

In other news, we have our first unit completed for TPT. We do the story Dear Mr. Blueberry by Simon James and one of the skills we cover with this story is inferences. We couldn't find a lot of great things already made to use with this so we decided to make our own! This unit has lots of great inference ideas, anchor charts, student work pages, a craftivity, and lesson plans.
Click here to check it out at our TPT store!

We also wanted to give you a freebie from the unit!
Click here to head to our TPT store and pick up the free inference anchor chart!

Enjoy, and please leave us a comment if you like the freebie!




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Tagged and a Mother's Day Freebie Idea

We have been tagged by Kimberly at http://loveofteachingkimberly.blogspot.com! She has an adorable blog and we are so excited to answer her questions!
Here Are The rules:

* Post these rules
* Answer the 10 questions that the tagger posted for you.
* Create 10 questions of your own to ask the people that you're about to tag
* Tag 10 people and link them with your post (and let them know they've been tagged!)



1. Why did you become a teacher?
Lisen-I was actually going to school to be an accountant (what???) when my junior year God basically smacked me in the head and let me know that he would rather that I be a teacher! I put in a frantic call to my parents who supported me changing and with some fancy class arranging I managed to graduate only a semester late! It seems that no one else in my life was surprised when I switched my major though! I had always worked with kiddos and I'm SO glad that I finally realized what I was supposed to do for a career!
Katie- I honestly have never considered a different career. Since I was little, I would play school in my room. Confession: When I was younger, we lived down the street from an elementary school. My friend and I would actually "dumpster dive" through the dumpsters on the last day of school to get trash gems to play school with.

2. If you could have any piece of technology in your classroom what would it be?
Lisen- Uuummm...I'm not really sure! We are actually extremely blessed in our district and we have just about every fancy new thing that comes along! I'm sure we will have Ipads before too long, (we actually have a grant in right now!) but I would love to have those today...
Katie- I have to agree with Lisen. We have a lot when it comes to technology. I do wish that we had more laptops in our classrooms and wish for the ipads.

3. Favorite Snack:
Lisen- I should say some type of fruit, but really it is anything with chocolate and caramel or chocolate and pb.
Katie- Hahaha! Snack? As in singular, just one?? (I've been sitting here for about three minutes trying to think of just one...pathetic!)I am going to go with gummy bears. BUT, they MUST be Haribo gummy bears.

4. What are your plans for summer?
Lisen- Veg out with my twins (10 month old girls), travel to Texas, Florida, and a family reunion in Iowa on my husbands vacay time, and hopefully spend some time with girlfriends!
Katie- We have swimming lessons and gymnastics that the kids are signed up for. There is also talk about going on a family vacation with my parents and my sister and brother-in-law and their kids. Otherwise, I honestly use the summer break to get my house organzied for the 9 month tornado that blows through my house during the school year. Sorry, nothing too exciting.

5. How do you get ready for a new school year?
Lisen- This is my 11th year teaching and while I still get excited about redoing my room and changing things up I COMPLETELY rely on my trusty Back To School To Do List! After having my girls my brain seems to be on slow motion so I will be really referring to my list for next year to make sure I don't forget any of the important things that need done before kiddos show up!
Katie- What? We have to get ready? Some years, we luck out and we can keep our things up from the previous year, so decorating isn't as time consuming. When I actually have to start from scratch, I spend probably two days in my classroom staring at the walls and then go home. Seriously though, most of my time is spent getting material labeled and getting the low down on the cherubs from their first grade teachers.

6. Favorite project you do with your students:
Lisen- Hands down, Gingerbread Houses! We always do a Holidays Around the World unit around Christmas and this is our culminating event. We all wear pjs, parents come to help, we practice our grade level song for the all school sing along, and we make gingerbread houses! I have kiddos who are in high school now who will see me and still talk about the Gingerbread houses being their favorite memory!
Katie- The Gingerbread Houses are VERY fun. I don't want to use the same answer as Lisen, so I suppose I will go with the activity we do to wrap up our nutrition unit. The kids have to bring in a healthy snack to present to the class and tell us what food group it is from. We also have excercise stations set up for the kids to rotate to. We video tape them with the flip camera and put it to silly music and then watch it with them (of course, Lisen and I are always in our Jane Fonda gear modeling the correct exercise form).

7. Funniest thing a student has said to you or asked:
Lisen- One little girl told me her mommy was going to get her boobies smashed (mammogram) and then also told me her mommy was going to the DR. to see if they should have some more babies in their family!
Katie- During an assembly, one of my students tied his shoelaces to the strings of his shorts....and he couldn't get them untied. He was just sitting there, on the floor, rocking back and forth. All I could do was sit there and laugh....like crying laughing (am I a bad teacher?). Just as I pulled myself together and was about to get up to help him, he got himself untied. Seriously though, I almost peed my pants.

8. Favorite drink:
Lisen- Starbucks white choc. mocha and around Christmas Peppermint mocha. I try to avoid spending the extra cash and make my coffee at home (not the same!!!) so when I splurge it is like a Calgon take me away commercial!!
Katie- COKE!! Hands down the best drink ever invented. Period.

9. Best teaching memory:
Lisen- Oh how to choose!!!! I think my favorite kiddo one is actually younger siblings telling me that they are going to "pick" me for their teacher when they get to 2nd grade. ( I love that they already feel so comfortable with me!) My favorite parent memory is a note that I got from a parent telling me that I would never know just how much I meant to their child and how their child had grown so much in the year with me! Totally a tear jerker!! I still have the note, and YES the parent was a former teacher!!!! I will SO write notes to my girl's teachers someday because I GET what a difference they make!!
Katie- Last year I got a card from a parent telling me how much she appreciated what I do for her child. She also expressed how much it meant to her that her daughter loved coming to school everyday and that she didn't have to worry about her. As a mom that meant so much to me.

10. What is your goal for next school year?:
Lisen- My goal is to totally change up our 2nd grade theme and start fresh! All 3 of us are so excited and bubbling with ideas for a new theme. I also want to keep the excitement going the whole year and to try to avoid the end of year slump! Personal goal- to somehow become on top of everything instead of feeling like I am running around in circles trying to do everything perfectly! ( I need to learn to adjust to the fact that with children I no longer have the time I used to, to do all the school things I want to!)
Katie- Ditto on the theme. I always have such huge goals and then get so overwhelmed with trying to reach them that I end up sabotaging everything. So, I will just say my goal is to be realistic.

Here are the 10 people we are tagging:
Kelley at http://buggyforsecondgrade.blogspot.com/
Leanne at http://spendadayinsecondgrade.blogspot.com/

Sandy at http://soaringthroughsecond.blogspot.com/

Amber at http://applegirlamber.blogspot.com/

Lindsey at http://theteacherwife.blogspot.com/

Amy at http://www.stepintosecondgrade.blogspot.com/

Lisa and Beth at http://madeintheshadeinsecondgrade.blogspot.com/

Kristin at
http://ateenytinyteacher.blogspot.com/

Alisha at http://thebubblyblondeteacher.blogspot.com/

Denise at http://sunnydaysinsecondgrade.blogspot.com/

Here are the questions:
1. What made you want to become a teacher?
2. What is one thing you would change about your school?
3. What is your favorite teaching product?
4. What can you not live without in your classroom?
5. What is your favorite thing to do outside the classroom?
6. What is your best memory of teaching?
7. How long have you been teaching and what grade/grades?
8. What would you do if you weren't a teacher?
9. What will you be doing this summer?
10. What is your favorite thing about blogs?

As blogging newbies we can't wait to see your answers and get to know you better!

We also have a Mother's Day freebie for you. Click here for the freebie.

If you use the freebie we would LOVE comments!!!! Thanks!





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Happy Monday and a freebie!

Hello!
I hope everyone had a great Easter! We traveled to Iowa to visit my husband's family (6 hours each way) and I am exhausted! We left Friday after school and returned Sunday night around 6. My girls have just started to realize that being in their carseats is not fun. Uuuggghh! I spent most of the trip sitting between them alternating between handing out new toys from the toy bucket, finding the toys when they decided they were done with them and chucked them, singing ridiculous made up songs that had them giggling like crazy and my husband rolling his eyes, and trying to catch a nap when they FINALLY fell asleep!!! I think we were all glad to get home and be out of the car!
I'm off to do some more creating and organizing! My student teacher is only teaching for 2 more weeks and I need to make good use of my extra time while I still have it!!
Enjoy our Chomping on Greater Than and Less Than activity!
Click here to grab it!

If you decide to use it please leave us a note! We LOVE comments. (They really do make our day! Katie called me at 9:45 last night to let me know that someone had commented!!!!)




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Currently Linky and a fact family freebie

Happy Wednesday!
We are linking up with Farley at Oh Boy Fourth for her April linky party.

We also have been working on a farm yard fact family activity. It is finally finished!
Click here to get it!

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Bunny onesies and a freebie

Hello all! I recently found a place where I can get tutus for REALLY cheap! So because of that my girls now each own 7. Oooooppps! That might be a few more then they really needed, but they are so stinkin cute in them. I then decided that they needed some really cute new onesies to go withe tutus. However, the ones I liked on etsy were WAY more then I could justify spending. So I found the most wonderful thing in the world (thanks mom for the tip) called Wonder Under at Hobby Lobby. Using this fabulous stuff I was able to make my girls these onesies!

I also finished up some 10 frames freebies. There is an outdoor 10 frame and a back to school 10 frame.
Click here to get the outdoor 10 frame.

Click here to get the back to school 10 frame.

Enjoy! Don't forget to leave us a comment if you download! Pllleeeeaaasseee!!









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