Five for Friday

Happy Friday!

We are so excited to be linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching for our first Five for Friday! Being our first full week of school, we have had a lot of exciting things happen!

My students earned all of their brownie points this week! Their prize, of course, was homemade brownies! I may or may not have taste tested quite a few of them...and my husband may or may not have eaten all of the leftovers. Oops!

We both use brownie points in our classroom as a whole class incentive. They work together to earn brownies by following directions, walking quietly in the hall, earning compliments from other teachers, and just about anything else that we find impressive. :) Find the download of the brownies here from Mrs. Heeren's Happenings. 

We have been working on place value this week in math. I LOVE teaching math! We have been focusing on standard, expanded, and word forms this week, as well as base-10 blocks. My students really enjoyed completing this task card activity. The best part is that it is differentiated! 

             

Click here to find these task card on TpT.

One super exciting thing that happened this week is that my new Lilly Pulitzer dress came in! It was from the after party sale since a teacher's salary obviously doesn't cut it when it comes to full price Lilly. I am in love with this dress! 

Going back to teaching math and place value, our school just adopted the Math Expressions series. Even though we have had some training, we are struggling with it! Virginia is not a Common Core state, and the book seems to align more with Common Core than our Standards of Learning. We have heard of other schools having great success with this series, so we would LOVE some tips on how to best use this series with our classes. 

And finally...I finished month 2 of Chalean Extreme this week! I love this program so much, but I need to find the motivation to start month 3. I assume it's not just me who wants to do absolutely nothing except for sit on the couch after getting home from school, especially during the first full week with students!

Make sure you head over to Doodle Bugs Teaching to find more Five for Friday posts! 

Sunday Scoop link-up with The Teaching Trio

 We are linking up with The Teaching Trio for today's Sunday Scoop.

Here's our FIRST Sunday Scoop!! 

We have had a great start to the school year with our 3rd graders! Our kiddos came back on Wednesday! It has been so wonderful getting to know them. We often forget how exhausting those first few days of school are! From organizing school supplies to going over rules and expectations....we were EXHAUSTED by lunch time each day! 

We will be starting our "normal" routine this upcoming week. We are excited to get started on our actual scheduling and teaching! 

Since we are still new to blogging, we hope to keep everyone updated each week! We'd love to hear from you! Don't forget to find us on Blog Lovin' so you can see our updates! 

Have a blessed Sunday and a wonderful week ahead! 

Monday Link-Up: Language Tools for Building Back to School

We have had a busy week with our blog launch AND our work days at school! We apologize for being MIA this entire week, but we hope you enjoyed seeing our new blog! Thank you to everyone that participated in our giveaways and to all the donors that graciously donated their wonderful products! 

Today, we are linking up with Hashtag TeacherMom (click here to visit her blog!) for classroom tips for back to school! Today's theme is Language Arts. We would typically show you real-life, in-action pictures, but since we are new to blogging we didn't even think to take pictures. We do want to share some ideas that we use in our classroom for the beginning of the year. Stay tuned for pictures! We start school with our kiddos this Wednesday! :) 

Here are some ideas that we use that first week of school. It's hard to start out with stations, since we are just getting to know how kids' needs, so we do a very general station rotation the first few days. Our school usually starts with students on a Wednesday, so this works well for us! (It can be adapted for your grade, length of time, amount of kids....etc.) Remember we teach 3rd graders! 

Language Arts Stations: 

• Word Work: Students practice writing their classmates names using word work tools (magnet letters, special crayons....) 
• Word Work: Students practice writing their address and phone number (this may seem 'young' for third graders - but you wouldn't believe how many of them do not know this info!) We typically write these out for them before-hand on note-cards. 
• Writing Practice: Write about their first day or write about their school 
• Grammar Practice: One of the easiest things to review (or introduce!) is nouns. Typically, they know this before coming to us, but it's a great time to take them around the school to search for nouns. They can then sort them into different categories (person,place or thing) or choose three to write about. 

We are currently doing a giveaway of our Back To School Literacy Centers (click here to see the product in our store!) This product includes almost all of the ideas included above AND you can even edit the roster list for students to practice writing their classmates names. 

Enter our rafflecopter below to win your own copy of our literacy centers! Even though we teach 3rd grade, this product can be used for different grades! 

a Rafflecopter giveaway Thank you for stopping by! We hope our ideas are helpful to you in the coming weeks! We'd love to hear from you as well! 

An InLinkz Link-up

Hi everyone! Welcome to our new blog! We are so excited to start this blogging journey! Our names are Samantha and Jenna, and we are starting our fifth year teaching at the same school in Southwest Virginia. To start off our blog, we are giving away a ton of free items that have been donated by some awesome teachers! You will find the Rafflecopters to enter to win these items below. There are a few different categories, so make sure that you enter all that apply to you! The giveaway will run from today, August 10, and end on August 17.

Enter here for prizes that are for ALL grades!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Enter here for preschool and kindergarten items!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Enter here for kindergarten-2nd grade items!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Enter here for 1st-2nd grade items!

 a Rafflecopter giveaway

Enter here for 2nd-3rd grade items!

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