Humphrey and Rex

Whew! I have been so busy printing, cutting, and re-cutting out of laminating that it’s left me no time for anything else!

I am really super excited about some things going on this week!  First of all have you ever read this book…?

 

I had a teacher friend from another school who I play Bunco with recommend this book to me as a read-aloud. Oh my gosh! The kiddos loved it!  It’s from the point of view of Humphrey the Hamster, the class pet of Room 26.  I’ve read Junie B. Jones and some other funny, cute books, but let me say, even if you are wary because it’s a  fourth grade level book, my students soaked it in!  They would beg me not to stop even after 20 minutes!  There’s a whole series of Humphrey books and one of my little high readers is devouring them!  We finished it Friday and now I don’t know how I’m going to choose another book that will live up to it.  Today they were telling me if their predictions had come true, were commenting on funny parts, and did a fabulous job retelling the story. I loved it!

What I even loved more was that this book was a perfect segue into something I started last year!  I’d had this book and idea before last year, but when I moved to first grade and got a student teacher, I knew I had to try it out.  I know a lot of people do take home bags – which I am totally going to start doing doing.  I know Erica Bohrer at

has a bunch of mascot (Pete the Cat, Scaredy Squirrel, Skippyjon Jones) related take home bags kinda like the one I’m going to share. I love it when we bring stuffed animals and other items in to make learning more meaningful for our students. Just like Heather at

did with Cranky Crab and Flora Flamingo ! I totally found a new blog to stalk  !

Anywho….sorta got off track…a long time ago I found this book…

It’s a short picture book about a class pet: Rex the chameleon.  Everyday someone  in the class gets to take him home and write in a journal about what they did with Rex. The illustrations are fun because some of them are drawn as if the children actually drew them in their journal.  I love how the book ends with, “What would you do with Rex if he came home with you?” (that’s not completely exact but the gist).  I like that it’s open-ended and a perfect segue into the kiddos getting to take their own Rex home (he’s our “class pet”) and journal about Rex’s adventures with them.

I bought this beanie baby off Amazon.  Then created my own journal…it’s kinda not as cutesy as I would like it, but it was even worse last year.  I did it at the last minute last year, so it wasn’t all done up, but I wanted to keep the same journal so my students from this year could see and read what my students did last year.

I added some car stickers this year and a pic of the book.  It’s not beautiful but it’ll do : ).  Then tonight I attempted this…

This is not all that cutesy either, but I was drawing a blank.  Actually, you could say this is my second attempt because the first time I had this black bag made out of a funky material I’d bought real cheap somewhere that I’ve learned does not like to be ironed. Let’s just say I bought a new iron tonight and a new bag at Hobby Lobby that I made sure was made out of cotton canvas.  Other than still learning what material can be used for iron-ons, I’ve gotten pretty comfortable with iron-ons.  It looks better than the Toys-R-us recyclable bag I’ve been using!

The first kiddo went home with Rex today!  I’m excited to see how much effort they put into it this year!  Last year I had some kiddos take pics with Rex all the places they went and glue them in the journal.  It was pretty cute!  I’ll have to take some pics of some journal entries later.

Hope you enjoy the books as much as I do!

The Other Things I Dressed Up For This Year…

I’m going to thoroughly embarrass myself with this post, but I’m gonna do it anyway : )… I already posted a pic of myself for Pirate day - here are some other things I dressed up for…

I found this too cute “Chunky Monkey" rap online during my blog stalking this summer, but now I don’t know where I got it.  It was all about teaching kiddos to chunk up words.  So, I decided to dress up like a rapper and “rap” (sort of – more like spoken word : )  I tried to get my team to join up with me, but they said, “Tag your it.” So, I was kind enough to do it for the whole first grade…the pic is pretty awful because I took it myself in the mirror (that’s what happens when your single)…

I couldn’t stop laughing at myself  thus the funky face ; ) (plus I was playing old school rap in the background and I was just cracking myself up !)I found the monkey mask at the dollar spot at Target and bought the hat and running suit at Wal- Mart…the chains came from our art teacher.  I took part of a morning and went into each classroom with my boom box (playing MC Hammer’s Can’t Touch This) and groovin…then I chunked up some words with them and left their teacher with an activity to chunk up the words.  I’m going to have to find where I got this Chunky Monkey activity from because everybody should use this!  I swear I still have kiddos coming up to me telling me that I was Chunky Monkey and all I have to do is say, “What did Chunky Monkey teach you?” and they say, “Chunk, chunk, chunk up words.” Love it!  Don’t love this picture I’m letting everyone see, but it’s the only one I’ve got.

The other time I dressed up was for Super Hero day during Red Ribbon Week.  My team and I dressed up as Super Teachers!  One of my teammies found the free iron-on on Teachers Pay Teachers.

You can download a copy by clicking on the link:

 Super Teacher Iron-On.

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This is another not so good pic of me that my roommate took at like 11:00 at night when I finished making my outfit.  I had no make-up on, so thus I chose to leave my face off I decked out my outfit with a black cape from Party America (more vampire-ish than superhero but I made do), a belt, black running shorts, black leggings, and my leopard Sperry shoes – which of course is a staple for all jungle-themed super teachers).

What I am most excited about is that as I was blog stalking tonight on this blog…

I found out she has a Sup-ER-Heroes Unit (Adding –er and –est ) and an Action Verb Unit that is super-hero themed on Teachers Pay Teachers!  Voila!  Another time I can use my awesome Super Teacher outfit!  These units are perfect for the Super Teacher motto: Growing brains every day! (ok, not really a catchy motto, but I do tell my kids everything we do is to grow their brains )

She also had someone dress up as a clown for the dipthongs: ou/ow (which I’m contemplating now) but we are also very near to The University of Oklahoma or OU and in the past I have taught my kiddos that when OU football players get tackled they say /ou/, soooo…someone could dress up as an OU football player.  Hmmmm…principal maybe?!

I’m going to improve on sneaky e next year and get someone to really dress up in a disguise or wear a mask to come in and sneakily attach themselves to cvc words and change them to cvce words.

I want more things to dress up for!  This has become a little  too fun and addictive and such a great hook to get my kiddos engaged!  I can’t wait to find out more ideas people have to dress up for!

Love My Kiddos!

This post isn’t going to say much except to say that I love my kiddos! After a library lesson on fact and opinion.  One of my kiddos told me it was her opinion that she thinks sometimes I work too hard, so it was a fact that she was going to bring me something special tomorrow. Love that concern and perception!  My kiddos really have surprised me this year with some of their comments…earlier in the year one of my students told me – “it must have taken you a long time to make all these counters Miss Schmidt…thank you” in reference to a bunch of lima beans I had turned into ghosts by drawing eyes and a mouth on them (we used them in math).  You don’t always get that recognition from kiddos for the work you put in  - they really impress me!

Pirate Party and Eat Ice Cream With Your Teacher Night!

Today was such a fun day!  We had a “Pirate Party” day to celebrate and learn about the /ar/ sound because everyone knows pirates say, “aaargh!” I totally used all of the activities from the wonderful Babbling Abby’s TPT Pirate Mark unit (click on the words and they will take you to her TPT site), which is FAB-U-LOUS!!  We made the Pirate Mark craft (which is great to use if you need time to do individual assessments – the kiddos are busy crafting and your busy assessing!), had an "ar” word hunt and received a treasure of candy bars and pirate tattoos when we found all the words.  We also read her too cute Pirate Mark story and listened for words with /ar/ in them.  I wish I could post pics of all the stuff we did out of the unit because it was oh so cute, but your just going to have to go to her blog to see pics of what she did.  Just find her quick link for r-controlled vowels! 

I even dressed up like a pirate like she did!  Plus, I let the kiddos dress up too- about 7 of them did, but I let everybody make pirate hats anyway.  This /ar/ sound better stick! The pic below is with one of my awesome teamies who dressed up too!  I’m really getting in to this iron-on thing! The first time I did it was earlier this year for Superhero Day, my fellow teammies and I did Super Teacher shirts…pics of that will have to be posted too!

Mrs. B is making a hook with her hand…me…quite frankly I’m not sure what that pose is…let’s just say the camera and I are a little awkward together and not the closest of friends .

I’m not posting pics of the activities from Abby’s unit, but I will  post pics of some of the pirate decorations I got from the dollar spot at Target (love that place!) and from the Dollar Tree.

I hung this over each of my table groups!

Party has /ar/ in it too!

I used these Ziploc baggies to house the game pieces for the /ar/ game in Abby’s unit.

 Mrs. B loaned me her Lakeshore treasure chest to house my baggies of candy bars and tattoos.

It’s kinda fun to go all out, the hard part is coming up with or finding ideas for everything else.  Do something with popcorn for the /or/ sound ?

Tonight was also Eat Ice Cream with Your Teacher Night at Braums.  Braums does a book buddy program where they will give kids free ice cream for reading.  Last month was Eat Pizza with Your Teacher because Pizza Hut does the Book It program and gives free personal pan pizzas for reading.  I base the reward off of my kids monthly reading logs.  In the past, I had always just handed out the certificates and that was it, but I noticed the certificates stayed in a lot of kiddos folders and never got used.  So, I decided what better way to get people to use them, but schedule a night to do so!  Plus, you get to eat with your teacher and classmates at night!  The squeals as kids see each other makes you think they never see each other during the day!

I did the first one in December and it worked out really well – six kiddos came and had pizza.  Tonight eight kiddos came and had burgers and ice cream or just ice cream.  It’s perfect, because I don’t have to spend any money (which I do a lot of normally), I need to eat, and I don’t cook very much! Voila!   It’s also kinda fun to interact with my kiddos and their families outside of the school setting.  I’m going to have to go hunting for other restaurants that will do rewards or we may have to just rotate pizza and ice cream each month.

What a day!

My So-Called Life Part Two

I know I’m sounding like the biggest teacher nerd and oh so lame, but I just spent my Friday evening cutting out laminating. That’s not the saddest part…the saddest part is that that isn’t unusual!  I’m a little bit miffed at myself though because I learned a very important lesson tonight…here’s a little fyi for you…but first I have to preface it…

So, this summer I became a blog stalker, idea junkie, and printing addict.  I swear I probably went through 4 or more (ok I don’t want to admit it but probably more ) ink cartridges for my printer and tons of white cardstock!  Office Max was my escape out of the house. 

I especially loved printing math and literacy games that I wanted to go ahead and create before the school year started.  My thoughts were if I’m going to laminate and have the stuff for awhile, it might as well be pretty, thus the high ink bill.  Back in the day it used to be file folder games that people printed off and then colored in by hand…oh I am so glad that is no more!  So,  a lot of these games I printed off, I only printed off enough for a small group of 5-6 students to complete or work on together at one time.  The games still needed though anywhere from 2 to 6 sets of the same cards/materials.  I love hands on materials and games but I am not a fan of having multiple sets of something and children mixing up all the pieces – that is such a headache! I also started out printing a bunch of go fish cards on colored cardstock, but realized once I was done that you could completely see through the cardstock if you held it up!  Two frustrations = One solution (I’m sure other people do this, but I didn’t think of it until this summer) I decided to back all of my cards/materials I was making for games with scrapbook paper!  Then,  I could also theme my scrapbook paper with the theme of the game! 

These cards don’t have a theme because they are just part of a place value unit.  Isn’t this a perfect way for kids not to get their cards mixed up if they’re in the same center?!  Even if the cards do get mixed up – it’s easy to sort them out! Yes, it’s a little bit of work to do this, but I think in the long run it will pay off.

 

Ok, so here’s the lesson I learned…if your getting tired of cutting all those cards out of the scrapbook paper  - do not decide to just glue a whole sheet of the cards onto one big piece of scrapbook paper and then laminate.  You need to cut each individual card and then laminate.  Why, do you ask? Well, what happens is as your cutting apart your cards that you laminated in a group, the laminating starts peeling away from their edges…which means the cards will have to be laminated once again and then you will have to do even more cutting out of laminating!  Urgh! My hands are tired! Why oh why did I get that bright idea to begin with!  Normally, this would have worked, but because I put two pieces of paper together, there needed to be a better seal.

Live and learn is a motto that I repeat to myself. 

By the way I am super excited about some activities we just did and some others we are going to do next week!  More to come on that.

My So-Called Life

My last weekend before school starts back up and how did I spend it?  Reorganizing my flash drive!  Last spring/summer I discovered the world of teacher blogs and spent days upon days scouring them and downloading wonderful freebies and ideas.  I did put the files into folders, but the folders were vaguely labeled Math and Reading etc., so what I did was subcategorize the folders with a little more detail.  For instance Math now has a gazillion folders labeled: place value, addition, sequencing, etc.  Which is great, but, oh my gosh, that was an undertaking!  I swear it took me all weekend!  Ok, there were a few detours where I finished printing off some of the games I had previously downloaded and cut them apart.  Does that sound like someone obsessed with their job or what ?!  I spent New Years Eve and a good portion of New Years Day in my pjs with a pizza, my computer, flash drive, and a printer.  I haven’t even unpacked my suitcases from Friday!  I’ve just been on the computer.  My house may not be clean and ready for me to go back to school tomorrow, but my flash drive is!

Isn’t my flash drive cute?  I have a leopard print one too (I can’t find a zebra print one)…I thought since my classroom was a jungle theme, it would help me to know which flash drives were for school if they were an animal print.  I have one for SMART notebook documents and this one is for everything else.  I don’t even save to my hard drive at school anymore because the district is always needing us to clear stuff out.

Ooooh  a sad bit of knowledge about my cluelessness – I have been living in the dark ages with not only my ex-computer (which was probably 10+ years old) but also with printers!  I had my little old printer and thought life is grand I have a color printer that works….well life can be grander people!!!  Since I got a new computer for Christmas I thought why not get a wireless printer, how cool will that be!?  Well, it gets cooler because I didn’t  even know that printers now have scanning and copying functions!!  Plus, I can print straight from my smart phone!  Oh, my gosh I have been having so much fun hitting print from my computer all over the house and copying and scanning random stuff!!  I just got the printer Friday and I think my ink is already low!  Is that bad?I just love to print all of my games in color because it is just sooo much nicer!

My eyes have been opened!  What else is my techie deprived life missing? I am craving more knowledge!! 

I did get out of the house today and went up to school to clean and reorganize a little.  The room needed a good Clorox wipe, wipe down.  There’s still a little pile on my desk that I’ll work on tomorrow and then after that I ‘m going to take some pictures to post on here!