Giveaway! Check It Out! 50+ Followers

A little late but hopefully worth the wait.

I think I have finally recovered from Spring Break. I wasn't prepared to be chasing after my toddler while trying to help my mom, who recently had hip surgery and radiation for cancer. I'm so thankful for my hubby and the coffee he made to help us keep going.

Anyways back to the giveaway. Hadar of Miss Kindergarten will be creating one of her Personalized Teacher signs, from her Etsy Store, for one of our lucky winners and another prize will be awarded to another lucky winner, a $25 gift certificate to Scrappin Doodles.

Prizes

To enter all you have to do is:

1. Follow my blog Little Treasures or if you already do leave a post saying so.
2. Post about the giveaway on your blog and leave a post saying you did.
3. For an additional entry you can add my button to you blog.

The giveaway ends on Saturday, May 7th at midnight Pacific Time.

I want to thank you all for making this blogging experience a joy.

Good luck!

More than 50 followers!

I haven't posted in a bit since I am finally on my Spring Break. I do have a giveaway in the works and will post some details really soon. I'm so super excited that I have so many wonderful followers. I'm working on posting some more reading strategies.

HELP-
If anyone has some great ideas on reading units I would appreciate your input. I am almost done with our classroom reading texts and could use some ideas.

Reading Strategy ~ *Working Memory*

Teachers know that a child can only really work with a few pieces of information at a time, and that their attention span is also limited. So, with that in mind, one strategy to use is to limit the key words you introduce to only a few and concentrate on those.

We all do this I'm sure :).

I just have never tried to do it in the way that it was presented to my fellow teachers and I.

For an average seven year old they have a working memory of about 3 "new words" at a time. So for instance, while working with adding suffixes, use only about three words. Have the kids add the -ed and then, for guided practice, have them pick one of the base words and write it on a sticky note, then on another sticky note write the word with the suffix. Here comes the fun part! The students will go around the room pairing up and having their partner read the sticky note on their hands. This allows them to get up, read, listen and hear these key words.

I have yet to use it but I will sure give it a try and see how it works.

I wish I had pictures but here is a visual I made.

Awesome Giveaway!

Mrs. Randall of Mrs. Randall's Learning Library is giving away a customized student blog kit! How great is that?

Don't miss out! Visit Mrs. Randall's Learning Library

These are a few (or 7) of my favorite things....

1. I love to window shop on Etsy. I actually shop occasionally, but I’d be further in debt if I gave into buying all my favorite items I have on there.

2. I love coffee, white chocolate mochas are awesome. I'm not addicted like my hubby but some days they just hit the spot.

3. I love my warm cozy bed, it is one of the comfy spots at home.

4. I love sushi. Fresh sushi from the sushi bar puts a smile on my face.

5. I used to collect angels but not so much anymore, still think they are peaceful and serene. I still have one that is a small version of this one on my dresser.

6. I loved to watch detective shows, I miss Monk and Law and Order Criminal Intent- Vincent D'Onofrio I miss you. The other shows that are just too gruesome. Now I’m stuck on reality t.v. Andy Cohen is my best bud at BRAVO.

7.Disney Pixar movies are a big favorite of my son, for some reason he just isn't into regular old cartoons. I have watched almost all of the Pixar movies at least 20 times.



I don't believe any of that was school related. :)

Thanks Katie for holding this linky party.
Don't be left out, join in.

Reading Strategy ~ "Chunking and Visualization"

We are familiar with teaching students to chunk word parts to read words. We are also familiar with chunking words in the sentences so a student can read the sentence. If you add visualization and a picture representation the student will better understand the thoughts behind the written words. So have your student chunk a thought from a part of the sentence and illustrate that thought. They should continue until they understand what the sentence means.
Here is an example and then a blank copy for you to use as you wish.




I used the kid graphics from Kristen at First Grade Teaching.

Reading Strategy ~ *Spot and Dot*

I've just learned a few new reading strategies and thought I'd share.

This one is called Spot and Dot.

We can use Spot and Dot to decode longer words. To Spot and Dot, we find the vowels and put a dot over each vowel or each group of vowels. Since every syllable has a a vowel, we look for the syllables around the vowels.

*If the syllable ends with a vowel, usually the vowel says its long sound.
*If the syllable ends with a consonant, we know the vowel makes its short vowel sound.
*If the vowel ends with a consonant, we know the vowel makes its short vowel sound.
*We also know, "When two vowels go walking, the first vowel does the talking."






This one is great for reading and can be used for spelling too!

Main Idea

My students have been working on Main Idea. They have enjoyed Brain Pop Jr. and some fun Smartboard activities. Here are a few activities I created.



Is there anything else you use to teach main idea?

Countdown to Summer Giveaway

Hadar of Outfitted and Inspired is having a giveaway for a countdown board. Don't miss out.

If you win you can even specify the colors you want.

Happy Birthday Cupcakes!

I've been playing around with my recently purchased clip art and Publisher. I was able to make my version of a Birthday Poster to use for next year. I thought I'd share it. I wanted to make it a banner but I don't know if that would convert to a PDF.

Spelling

I have had the wonderful opportunity to Co-Teach this year. My class is the inclusion class even though we don't have anyone identified as Special Ed in my class. My co-teacher has given me so many great ideas and she will be retiring this year, so I'm a bit sad about that, but happy that she will be able to focus on being creative outside the classroom.

Well she gave me one way for the students to easily learn to spell could and should. Then, this week I took her strategy and used it for spelling cough and rough. Here are the posters I came up with. The kids just need to remember the saying, "Oh, you little donut." or "oh you giant hamburger."

My students took to learning this without these posters but I thought I'd have these on hand for next year.