On Becoming a Principal ....One day

       For the last 18 months I have been back in school working towards my 2nd master's degree in Educational Leadership. I have been taking online courses at American College of Education www.ace.edu . When I first began in February of 2017 I truly had no idea what I was getting myself into. The last time I had written a scholarly paper was in 2002! I learned quickly, but not without a lot of hard work, studying, research and late nights. Needless to say in the last 18 months I have learned so much about research and evidence-based strategies, the many roles and responsibilities of a principal and have challenged myself in more ways than I can count. 
       While I am excited to one day be an assistant principal or principal next year, I will be teaching 5th grade reading and social studies. I still must take the Florida Educational Leadership Exam (FELE) before I can continue on my path. My 12 year old son, (the blue butterfly up their on the title) asked me to wait to try and get an Assistant Principal job until he graduated 8th grade. (He goes to the school where I teach).  So, for the next two years I will be teaching a different grade where I will familiarize myself with the Florida Standards Assessment, and work with students on their reading skills. I am looking forward to this change and am excited for what my future holds.

West Gate K-8 Promo

This past year, our school district was making little commercials to promote each school. I was asked to speak on the video, and have a short cameo towards the end.
This was my first time ever doing something like this. As I am sure you will be able to tell, I did not know which way to look. My eyes are looking to my assistant principal who was to my left, and then back to the camera! lol!  Needless to say the highlight to this was that I had a 4th grader come up to me at parent pick up and tell me I was famous because I was on You Tube! haha! If only it was that easy.
West Gate Promo

Teacher Appreciation Sale

May 3rd and 4th !!

Joy Cowley Classroom Giveaway

 

I am so excited to share with you 2 characters from The Joy Cowley Collection

  Mr. Tang and Smarty Pants.

 Mr. Tang has a taxi cab in which he goes on a variety of adventures. The taxi cab has a variety of special features and can do some pretty incredible things. In each different story the cab introduces the children to different phonics skills as well as different vocabulary. It can add skis when it snows, jumping legs at the zoo, or become a submarine in the ocean.

 Smarty Pants is a silly clown that can teach children about a variety of emotions in Smarty Pants at the Circus. In Smarty No Pants, the silly clown loses his pants in the wind, but never gives up. Lastly in Smarty Pants at the Talent Show, Smarty pants shows the listener to just be your self.

 My favorite part of all of these books is it comes with a page full of information about what you can do with each book. Here are a couple of examples in the back of the book.

 Each description includes:

Features of the text

Before Reading (making meaning and analyzing the text)

During Reading and 

After Reading (Using the Text, making meaning, and cracking the code)

Would you like to win this for your classroom? Then enter below!

 

Click below to enter

Joy Cowley Classroom Giveaway

Learn more about her new characters by clicking the links below.
Joy Cowley Books by Character 

JCC New Character Set

JCC New Character Set Guided Reading 

Featured Teacher Tuesday: Heidi Neels

NOOO!  It’s come to an end!  This is the last blog post for a while of the Featured Teacher Tuesdays!

Heidi Neels from Flipping for First is a spunky and organized first grade teacher!  

Years of tumbling, cheerleading and a passion for teaching made her blog name come to life!  She has been teaching for 9 years, 6 of those being in first grade!  She has truly found her teaching niche!

Heidi has been married for 15 years (yep, he’s tied up in the basement) and has two beautiful girls ages 15 (don’t do the math) and 10!  Faith brings joy in her life each and every day!  God has blessed her family and teaching career!  She is a middle child (typical middle child syndrome) and requires lots of attention from those around her!

Organization fuels Heidi through first grade!  (It may be a disease!)  Check out her blog for some amazing tips on how to organize Words Their Way, Listening Stations, Behavior Management, Erin Condren Planner, Common Core Assessments, Classroom tips and so much more!

Laughing is important to Heidi!  Mo Willems, first grade quotes, and National Lampoon movies can put a smile on her face.  Just like Wimberly, Heidi can worry a lot!  Therefore Heidi clings to

Psalm 46:10  “Be still, and know I am God!

Heidi’s best seller is her Editable Daily Behavior Chart!  This is an amazing product that every teacher who has a student with challenging behavior needs!!  Heidi loves to hear success stories about teachers using this in their classrooms!!

Fry’s First 100 Sight Words came about when she had 30% of her students struggling with sight words!  Yikes!  To overcome this obstacle, Heidi created a product that focuses on teaching the words in context using pictures, repetition, and motor skills!  She ended that year with 100% of her students knowing all first grade sight words!  Love it!

Heidi’s First Grade Common Core Math Assessments are a full year’s worth of assessments!  She even has a blog post with a yearly calendar to help you plan!

Check out one of Heidi’s freebies!

Don’t forget to join me in following Heidi!

Featured Teacher Tuesday: Karen Wasdin

Meet Karen Wasdin from Silly Sam Productions!

Silly Sam Productions

Karen has been teaching 1st Grade for almost 30 years. She is a Baseball Mom from New Jersey and loves to watch her son play for the High School team and travel teams. Her husband is a Videographer/Photographer and she enjoys assisting him in producing sports and educational videos in his business, MoonGate Video Productions.

Finding ways to help her young learners understand the trickiest concepts has driven her to create multi-sensory approaches and engaging lessons that MAKE LEARNING FUN! These techniques can be found in her products at TpT.

GRAB A FREEBIE FOR MENTAL MATH FACT FAMILIES!

Color-Coded Fact Families Mental Math uses the color-coding technique to help learners make connections to math strategies.

Point of View 

is an integrated Reader’s and Writer’s Workshop unit that has students look at the story of the Three Little Pigs through the eyes of different characters. Then they do the same with their own personal narrative about their first day of school. This helps them truly discover and empathize with others and recognize feelings other than their own.

Short and Long Vowel Super Bundle Package 

is an extensive unit covering the heart of the first grade phonics curriculum. Word Houses use patterning chunks and vowel sounds to help students become stronger readers and writers. Creating their own Vowel Books helps students celebrate all that they have learned.

You can find and follow Silly Sam Productions here:

Blog:     Laugh and Learn with Silly Sam           Twitter:  @sillysamprod

TpT:     Silly Sam Productions                             Pinterest:  Silly Sam Productions

Facebook:   Silly Sam Productions                      Instagram:  sillysamproductions

Not just another handwriting book

Zaner-Bloser Handwriting recently contacted me about trying out their handwriting book for my first graders.
I've been teaching 18 years, 9 years in 1st grade and I've never had a "real" handwriting book / Curriculum for all of my students. Over the years I've had teacher's manuals or a freebies TPT. So, having the opportunity to use a real handwriting book for each of my students was not one I was going to pass up. I'm used to just teaching the letters and practicing 1 letter at a time. This book is set-up very differently and I see a big difference in my students desire to work on this book and their handwriting at this point in the year.

When I first handed the new handwriting books out, the first thing my class wanted to know was, could they keep them. They had not had a handwriting book before either. At the beginning, the students are shown how to position their book, and are given practice using pictures as well as handwriting lines.

Aside from the great quality and durability of the book, the teacher's manual has great tips and tricks in it as well. This book does not just include letters. It also includes, numbers, stroke direction, number sentences as you can see above. Another great feature in the books is the QR codes. You can scan the code on a page, and it will bring you or your students to further practice.

This students is a lefty. The book gave instructions for how lefties should position their books when writing. We are using this mid-year and my students are getting more and more independent. If I let them they would just want to fly through this book. They really enjoy doing the different activities provided. It's more than just letter writing.

So far, we have practiced writing all of the numbers and number sentences. Writing sentences for handwriting practice and completing sentence prompts. Also, we've practiced using question marks and exclamation points correctly in sentences. The students also practiced question words (who, what, when and where) along with the question marks.

My kids are so excited about doing their handwriting each day, writing sentences and practicing numbers. If you are in the market for a handwriting book, I highly recommend this one from Zaner-Bloser.

Featured Teacher Tuesday: Stephanie Darling

It’s FEATURED TEACHER TUESDAY!

This week our Featured Teacher is Stephanie Darling from Special Adventures!

Stephanie Darling is currently a 1st Grade Teacher in Central Arkansas.  This is Stephanie’s first year in 1st grade, she previously taught special education for 5 years.

Stephanie is married to her husband Kenny, who is also a teacher.  They work in the same elementary school where they met just a couple years ago.  They were engaged and “ran off to Vegas” to get married.  Their little family has grown by 1 as they have a yellow lab, Ozzie keeping them on their toes.  

Stephanie loves teaching!   She is having a blast this year in first grade and is very passionate about helping all students learn in fun and engaging ways.  Stephanie has really enjoyed learning so many new things from teachers in her online teaching communities such as facebook, blog, tpt and more. You can find Stephanie on

Facebook  

Instagram @specialadventures

Periscope @StephaneDarling

Blab @StephaneDarling

Twitter @StephaneDarling

Pinterest https://www.pinterest.com/darlings123/

Besides running her blog, Stephanie is also a TpT Author!  You can find her store at Special Adventures with Stephanie Darling. Some of her newest products include…

*Seasonal Mystery Passages for fun close reading practice.* Click the link to check out Stephanie’s latest Winter Themed Passage.

These packs are perfect for working on reading comprehension and close reading as well as vocabulary development.  

Stephanie also has created an entire year of 2nd Grade Math Curriculum and has a growing bundle that when completed in June will be an entire year of 1st Grade Math Curriculum.  These sets are aligned to CCSS and have all you need, games, hands on engaging lesson plans, reinforcement pages, differenciation, assessments, explicit instructions for use, to save any teacher time, money and energy in planning and teaching math.

                                                    

Featured Teacher Tuesday: Lauren from Curriculum and Coffee

Welcome back for another week of Feature Teacher Tuesdays!

This week’s Feature Teacher is Lauren, over at Curriculum and Coffee!

Lauren is a wife, aunt, daughter, sister, and a dog mom to her Brittany Spaniel, Ace

Isn’t he cute?!

Lauren is in her third year of teaching first grade in Southwest Ohio. She loves to create, blog {when she can! The school year is SO busy}, and spend time outdoors with The Hubs and Ace. With a knack for tech, Lauren has taken those skills and applied them to the blogosphere, serving as her school’s Technology Learning Consultant, and to her TpT store.

One of Lauren’s Best Sellers in her TpT store is her Fact Family Activities!

These activities are interactive, and encourage student engagement with cutting, pasting & putting together fact family puzzles

Another one of Lauren’s favorite things to teach is grammar and writing conventions. She saw a need for a product that was engaging, and fun, but still served the need for her students to practice those capitals, punctuation marks, proper nouns, commas in a series, dates, and all of the other CCSS convention standards! The best thing? You can grab all THREE of her DOLs in one big bundle!

Lauren’s students LOVE taking a red pen to these pages and becoming the grader. Students gets to find all of the mistakes, and then rewrite the sentence. After, Lauren has her students complete a dictation sentence where she tells them how many points the sentence would be out of (capital, period, name title {Mr.}, commas, etc), and students get to grade each other’s dictation sentence.

Check out these other awesome products that you can find in Lauren’s TpT store that are 20% off this week, February 9-12!

Don’t forget to follow Lauren!