Working with Sentences

Last year, one of the best things happened. We got a reading specialist for the second half of the year. The position became available and one of our amazing 1st grade teachers got it. We were able to send 5 of our children to her. The students that were "bubble".... they could go either way on state testing. I knew who I wanted to send right away. I knew who would benefit from this... and I was right. Because the room was right across the hall from us, and I looked up to this teacher, I would often talk to her about things going on in our class. What worked, what we struggled with, getting advice. And after she had my students, she would tell me how they did or what they needed to work on. And every time there was something they needed to work on, I jumped at the chance to figure something out.

One thing we talked about a lot was simple work with sentences. Writing was the weakest area for my students (and always has been)... I am not sure what happens but they get to me in third grade and we are back to the basics of capitalization, punctuation, and just making a logical sentence. We spend a LONG time working on that. Then moving to paragraphs that flow and all follow ONE topic. I swear that is why I have gray hairs. So I thought and thought about what I could do. And it came to me. Work with one sentence a week. Do a couple editing things to the sentence (so students can start to see common mistakes they make, enabling them to peer edit later on), use synonyms and antonyms, expand sentences, identify parts of speech, etc.

We also noticed that students could tell us what a noun was, or what a compound word was... but give them a sentence and ask them to identify these things, and they would just make careless mistakes. I wanted some clear practice. Something that would make them apply themselves. And so we have Sentence a Week. 36 sentences to work with through your school year. This can be used so many ways... morning work, after lunch work (I try to have something for my kids to do when we come in from the cafeteria chaos... this would be perfect), jumpstart your writing time, or even a writing center. I originally was going to just have task 1, task 2, etc but I decided to keep the days of the week, because that is how we function in my class. If you decide to use it in a center or otherwise, you could always just tell students to do Monday and Tuesday activities or something. I just like things to be laid out by day so students know exactly what to do when. It could also be used as a weekly homework thing and instead of a peer editing their work they can edit with a parent.

Here is an example of week 1. It is just a screen shot, but feel free to pull it up on your smartboard to try it (or print it if it works clearly).

If this is something you think you can use, it is 50% off for the rest of today in honor of my June daily deals. You can find it here.

And if you missed out on my daily deals, make sure to "like" my facebook page for announcements of other deals and sales. I don't have as much time to blog as I would like, but it is very easy for me to throw a quick post up on fb!

HUGE Giveaway!!!!

 Ready for a HUGE giveaway?!?! I have joined in to help Tabitha celebrate reaching 1,000 TpT followers!!

10 winners will each win one of the prize packages listed below. Each package contains a $10 shopping spree to 10 different stores- that a $100 shopping spree and a total of $1000 in products in all!

You can enter right from my page. Best of luck! 

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Planner Happiness

Raise your hand if you love the "school supply" aisle!!! Come on, I know you are all raising your hands. Me too! I have loved this aisle since as far back as I can remember. So when I left my teaching job after this year and moved back home (more on that later), where I can not currently teach, I said I need to find a job that will allow me to feed into my pen and supply obsession. Well, bad news is I haven't found a job yet. Good news is, I found something to fill the void in the school supply area of my life. 

My Erin Condren Life Planner. 

Last year I ordered a teacher planner, which I LOVED. It was my favorite thing in my school bag. In fact, I can't even bring myself to get rid of it! After getting that in, I decided to order a life planner. See, I am really forgetful. I mean, walk out of the room and forget what I went for forgetful. So it was my hope that this life planner would help me remember everything we had going on. Except... I never got it. I never could figure out how to make it work for me. See, I don't look at my days as morning, day, and night like the weekly pages have. I just don't function that way. Especially when my school days consisted of... work all day, do stuff at night. So it went unused for the most part, except for the monthly calendars.

But then... something hit me. I could split these 3 large boxes into 6 small boxes and make it work for me. I have a box for me, my husband, my daughter, fitness, TpT, and blogging (I have a personal blog too). And so it started like this... drawing just a few lines in and boom, perfect... or so I thought.

Then I found this amazing group of people who went ALL OUT with their planners. Washi tape, stickers, the whole nine. And then I was in love. I wanted to figure out how to do something in my life planner that would be cute but still functional. And off to shopping I went... and boy did I shop...

These are some of my favorite pens. Clicking will take you to them on amazon.

I think I am set for a while. (And there is another bucket that has post it notes, a sticker maker, stickers, etc.)

And then I got to decorating. I started with this week. Which is looking like this....

And after this little bit I decided this just wasn't it.  I wanted more. So I went to one of my many blank weeks and messed around with what I wanted to include. And came up with the perfect template for me.

I now have a spot for everything I need to include related to my life. Even if it is a little OCD of me that I had to create a template. :)

Cute, functional, and lets me indulge in office supplies.

Have you tried Erin Condren before? Thinking about it but haven't purchased yet? If you use this link and sign up for their newsletter and promotions, you will receive an email within about 48 hours for $10 off your first purchase. (From reading, it seems that because of the new 2015 life planners coming out and the mass amount of orders, the codes aren't being sent quickly, but be patient, and persistent with their customer service. They will make sure you get the code. Just save the referral link in case they ask for it.)

Weekly Math Mania

Ok friends... I am trying to get things back in order here. I really am. But I am really far behind, at life, in general! We moved back to our hometown and a lot of stuff has been going on. I am currently out of the classroom and am unable to teach until I get my Master's degree. It was heartbreaking news for me when I found this out (LONG story) but I am hoping that things will work out for me, one way or another. I am in the process of getting started on a Master's program (pending it is an approved program) and am trying to decide what to do outside of teaching. But in the meantime, I have been cranking away at this to do list for things I wanted to create but never had time to really do it.

This one is my BIGGEST and (personally think) best product yet. For the past few years (pre TpT time for me... as in, before I knew it even existed), a friend and I have been saying we really need something that our students could work on daily or weekly where they reviewed all their math skills. Because they would master something, and then could apply it beyond the basics... but when it came back to the basics, they had no clue what to do. For example, place value. They would perfect identifying the place, the value, and even number forms. But then it would just vanish. And so I started by putting review questions on every test I made. And eventually the review section would get larger and larger. Finally, I had the idea to make something students can do weekly. And after months and months of work, my Weekly Math Mania was complete!

Now, there are a ton of ways this can be used. As I was working through it, the way I would use it was that students would get a sheet each week. They would complete 4 boxes a day as part of their morning work routine. By Friday, the entire sheet would be done and it would have only taken just a few minutes a day. It could also be done in a math center, early finisher work, homework, etc. My kids LOVED our morning work routine because there was a lot going on and they got a lot done in a little time. And it was probably the best 30 minutes to start a day ever. Every child in my class felt successful because of the variety of things they did. Anyways... back to Math Mania.

Each week there are 20 questions. And the boxes are all related. So box 1 is always going to be related to place value, for example. And box 10 will always be a word problem. Not only will this bring routine for your students but it will help you to reteach and preteach different skills. Think about it. Let's use rounding, for example. It may not come up for a couple months in your curriculum. But it shows up every single week in one way or another on Math Mania. So, the first few times, your students struggle. But as you go over the problem, you are doing a mini lesson on how to round. Now, a few months later, rounding comes up in your curriculum. And most of your students already know how to do it! You can focus on higher level questions, pulling small groups, or just spending less time on it than you would have without this set. And now, when rounding is finished, typically some students would forget how to do it without constant use of it. You can be sure that they will continue practicing with it because it will show up every week on Math Mania. No need to stress about forgetting the basics.

If you want to look further into this, try it out for free for two weeks, or just want to get a closer look at the questions, I have a freebie sample available in my store for you to download.