Favorite Thanksgiving Books

Happy Tuesday! 

We are loving that it is November and have started having fun with all things Turkey!  Some of our favorite books to use this month are The Great Turkey Race by Steve Metzger and ‘Twas the Night Before Thanksgiving by Dav Pilkey.  

  

We have really fun art activities that we do with both of these books. 

With The Great Turkey Race we help the turkeys get away from Farmer Kate and Farmer Pete by running faster.  Of course, one of the best things to help a turkey run faster is...tennis shoes!  Right?  :) 

The kiddos started out by taking their tennis shoes off (a total hit) and putting them on their desks so that they could use them as reference. 

We talked about the size of the turkey's shoes and discussed how to use the space on our paper.

Then they drew the shoes with pencil.  

Next they outlined them with skinny black markers.  These are a staple in our classrooms!!!!! 

Finally they colored them in with crayon or colored pencil.  

The next step is to paint a turkey.  We looked at different books to get an idea of how our turkeys should look. 

Finally, after the turkeys were dry, we glued on the tennis shoes and our turkeys were ready to escape being Thanksgiving dinner! 

With 'Twas the Night Before Thanksgiving we decided that the best way to convince people to let the turkeys go was to offer them a yummy alternative to a turkey dinner!  We started off by brainstorming as many substitutes for turkey as we could possibly think of.  

Then we drew our turkeys actually holding the item that they are trying to convince people to eat.  We used crayons to color them in because my sweet friends this year tend to rush and get messy with most art projects. Crayon pictures tend to turn out the best for us! 
Finally we added a slogan at the top and wrote a few sentences encouraging others to try the alternate food instead of turkey. These are always fun to hang out in the hallway in November.  When our first grade friends are taking restroom and drink breaks we can always find them checking out the 2nd grade posters!
P.S. This is my sample with marker.  After all our hard work I forgot to take an actual picture of the cuteness that was my student's work!!!

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My Truth Monday

We are linking up with Sunny Days in Second Grade for her My Truth Mondays.

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November Currently

We are linking up with Farley for her November Currently.

Listening: I am enjoying listening to(and watching) The Amazing Race. Every Sunday we DVR it and then after the kids are in bed my hubby and I watch it together. It is one of 3 shows that we always save to watch together. Every time we watch it we discuss which of the detours we would do and how we would react to some of the situations. We were NOT happy about the team that stole the taxi tonight! :)

Loving: My little boy is 5 months old and I am apparently the funniest person in the world. I make faces at him or tickle his tummy and he laughs like there is no tomorrow. I seriously can't get enough of it!!

Thinking: I CAN NOT seem to fit everything into my day....and that is on a weekend! It is even worse during the week. I feel like an extra 24 hours would let me get a bit more done on my to do list..and maybe some sleep!

Wanting: Sleep, sleep, and more sleep!

Needing: I have a lot of really high kiddos this year and then 2 little friends who need some TLC. I am nearing the end of a round of interventions with them and want to see if they pass them.

A yummy pin: Too Cute Turkey Treat

These might not be the tastiest treat I could find, but I know that my girls would absolutely love making them with me. To me that is way more important!:)

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Milestone....

Happy Saturday night! We are so stinkin excited and had to share that we are featured on the TPT Facebook page right now! Here is the link if you want to check it out! TPT Milestones
Sooooo.....Thank you to everyone who reads our blog (sporadic as it has been as we both add kiddos to our families!:)  and who have bought items from us!  We appreciate you more than you will ever know!

Katie & Lisen

Five for Friday

It is 5 for Friday time!  We are linking up with Doodlebug Teaching for her weekly linky.

Interactive Math Notebooks.  Oh my goodness!  I love these things.  I had heard about them for awhile, looked into them, meant to make some for myself, ran out of time, and finally bought some!!!  I absolutely LOVE Blair Turner’s units!  My kiddos have had a blast with them.  Click on her name to head over and check out her units on TPT. :)

We had meetings on Monday and found out (for the first time!!!) that we are going to be giving our kiddos a writing test.  They have to write an informational piece that we will be scoring as a district test.  Yikes!!! We have done writing before in conjunction with our tests, but it has never actually counted as anything.  Then to find out less than a month before the testing window starts...talk about stress filled teachers!  Sooooo we are doing lots of informational writing practice!  Katie is working on penguins and I am starting with spiders.  These pics are of an information gathering chart Katie’s kiddos made and also her class using an online Zoo Books resource. 

My clip chart, my happy clip chart!  I have said it before, and I will say it again, this group of kiddos is wonderful!  This is my clip chart 1/2 way through the day.  These little friends legitimately are this far along the clip chart 1/2 way through the day, most days!  This seriously just makes me smile.

Treasure Box.  Katie and I do our rewards a little bit different, but our kiddos both earn stars and can use them to buy things at the end of the week. This is one of my kiddos favorite times!  I always have sweet little helpers to want to be in charge of calling sticks for friends to come back and buy prizes.  They also get such a kick out of getting to make change for people!

Finally, a little personal fav of the week.  We left little brother home with Grammi and took the girls to the pumpkin patch.  They had so much fun picking out a pumpkin to carve with Daddy and were so proud of getting to help scoop out all the pumpkin “guts”!  It was absolutely precious getting to see just how excited they were when Daddy added the candle to their jack o lantern and turned off the lights.  I love, love, love getting to watch all the “firsts” with my kiddos!

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I'm Done With My Work....Now What???

I’m done with my work, now what???

I think we have all heard this a thousand (if not more) times!  I don’t know about you, but I get exhausted from constantly    repeating the list of options that are available after work is completed.  I could tell the same child, the same list, 20 times in a row and they would most likely STILL ask me what to do!

I have had a few years of tougher classes who had some problems with self control and work completion so I haven’t really had the opportunity to offer extra choices for the last few years.  However, this year’s crop of kiddos are AWESOME!  They are so self motivated to finish work and LOVE to move onto something else.  I seriously am in hog heaven with this group!  If they want to keep learning then I want to give them options!

While I was gone on maternity leave my wonderful sub also got tired of hearing kiddos ask what to do after work completion.  So she made a list of options and wrote it on the board. 

Great, right?  Yes, it was, but when I came back I decided to do something a little more fun with our I’m Done With My Work list.  I made one of these posters about 4 years ago with another great group of kiddos and decided to bring the idea back out with this group.

 My kiddos loved getting to model the options and are having so much fun seeing their picture or their friend’s pictures on the poster.  So far they are also using the poster as a reference instead of me!  Woo hoo!!! Here’s to hoping the novelty doesn’t wear off!  If it does at least I can point to a really cute poster instead of repeating myself over and over! :)

 (The cute frame at the top of the poster is from Teaching in a Small Town and the font is MTF Jumpin Jack if you are wanting to make yourself a poster and like the headers in this one!)  :)

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Surprise TPT Sale!!!!!

TPT has hit 100K likes on Facebook and is having a surprise sale! Way to go TpT!

They are celebrating with a 10% off sale today and tomorrow only! Just use the code FB100K to get your 10% off!! We are also having our store on sale for 20% off during this surprise sale. Head on over if you have anything on your wish list!

We are linking up with a lot of other great sellers at Freebielicious. So click on the pic and head over to see what other great TPT sellers are joing the sale!!