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

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!

Featured Teacher Tuesday: Ashley Beierle

This week's featured teacher is Ashley, 1st grade teacher and blogger over at The Blessed OCDiva. The name pretty much speaks for itself! She has a passion for sharing God’s word, sharing goodies for teachers, and providing a fix for anyone else just a tad OCD!

She is married to her other half and they are doggy parents to Groot (yes like Guardians of the Galaxy Groot) and Maximus(yes like Gladiator Maximus Aurelius).

Ashley has been teaching for 7 ½ years and 6 of those have been in first grade. Along with teaching she also is the lead mentor for her campus and has been a team leader for 5 years. She loves being able to help lead other teachers and ignite their passion for learning and teaching; ultimately hoping to be able to turn that into a path for her career.

In 2014, she was Teacher of the year for her campus. What an honor and blessing this was!! All possible through God’s never ending love and direction.

Since starting her blog, The Blessed OCDiva, she also opened up her TPT store as well and has worked at building it to offer resources for other teachers that span across the curriculum.      Some of her products include: (click to check them out)

-Rockin Landforms

This little packet is an integration of social studies, writing, reading, and math!!!

It focuses on 6 main landforms: hills, mountains, valley, canyon, cliff, and island.

I have included the following types of activities to help you teach:

-anchor charts

-writing definitions/characteristics of each

-matching the name to picture

-identifying the type of landform and labeling

-Count, Tally and graph

-Writing response with question stems

-landforms book with fill in the blanks (answer key included)

-Guessing game

I have also included a page of suggestions to help with understanding how it is intended to be used. However, feel free to use it according to your kids needs!

-Responsive Readers

Do you like to challenge your kids during reading workshop? Do you want them to be able to have accountable talk and written response with their text? If you do, these cards are for you!!

These can be used very easily within the workshop time frame of read to self, read with a buddy and even small groups. The teacher will want to model A LOT! But it is intended for slow release until independence!!

-2 formats for teacher’s preference of printing

-mini anchor charts for reference or can also be easily inserted into the kids card bundle

-color coded for ease of use

- table of contents for teacher and student use

Click here to see how I use them!

http://theblessedocdiva.blogspot.com/2015/06/make-your-masterpiece.html#

-Superb Shapes and Fabulous Fractions

Here is a bundle pack of all things geometry! 108 pages of fun! I made it as versatile as possible so it can reach anyone with many objectives!

I have included the following items in each section.

2-D shapes:

-anchor charts for each shape (square,circle, rectangle, triangle, rhombus,trapezoid, pentagon, hexagon,octagon)

-Memory match

-Book of shapes (this also integrates some fractions)

-Matching shapes

-Identifying sides/vertices

-Assessment/independent practice

-Find,Tally,Graph

-Roll and Cover

-Connect 4 spin and cover

3-D shapes:

-anchor charts for each shape (sphere, cube, triangular prism, rectangular prism, pyramid,cone,cylinder)

-Memory Match

-Find, Tally, Graph

-Name match

-Assessment/independent practice

-Sorting 3-D

-Attributes charts

-Roll, Slide, Stack chart

-Connect 4 spin and cover

Fractions:

-anchor charts (whole,half, thirds, fourths)

-Memory Match

- Bingo

-Equal/Unequal activities

-Spin and Cover

-Roll and Cover

-Assessment/independent practice

-Color fractions

-Spin and Color

-Find, Tally, Graph

Snag some freebies while you are checking out the resources above!

This one has had over 17,000 downloads!

Food Chain

Guided Reading Template

Be sure to keep up to date with all of the OCDiva action!

Facebook ( I update this weekly)

Blog: The Blessed OCDiva

Teacher Pay Teachers Store

Twitter: The Blessed OCDiva

Have a BLESSED week!

“Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.

Hebrews 4:16