BTS in a Flash: Curriculum Must-Haves

Happy Sunday!  It's almost time for many of you out there to go back to your classroom. This always brings mixed emotions for me;  the exciting freshnes and anticipation of a brand new school year, and the sadness that summer is done. The first is always foremost for me, though.   I love going back every SEPTEMBER, so I'm enjoying all these great ideas. Last week's linky featured must-haves for the classroom. I found a bunch of things to put on my own shopping list!

I don't go back to school until SEPTEMBER, but I'm thinking about it early (did I ever stop?) and sharing you these curriculum favourites of mine with you. Visit the linky by clicking HERE.

The first product is one I've created and just recently added to my TpT store. 

I had so much fun making this Scaredy Squirrel Goes Camping pack that I am really looking forward 

to making them for the other books in the series. 

There are 10 literacy activities included. 

The first is my favourite. I used it after reading the book to my class last year and they were very 

enthused. It's an emergency kit craftivity for things you might need on a camping trip. 

Also in the pack are an interview with Scaredy, writing instructions for putting up a tent and making 

S'mores, making lists, a sheet for recording connections after listening to the story, a book recommendation sheet, and writing an opinion piece on camping vs watching TV.  It's available at my TpT store HERE.

If you'd like a preview of this pack I made up a freebie with 3 of the activities in it. Get it You can pick it up HERE.

My second must-have is something I use all the time in my classroom. It is Digit Dual by Miss 

Nelson. 

It is an excellent combination of flashcards and Snap!  As they come in after recess each day my students pair up to practise their Math facts. These cards are by far the most sought after activity during this time.  I printed up 6 sets on different coloured papers and they are always selected first. The partners sit facing each other with the cards face down between them. They take turns flipping the cards and the first to say the correct answer gets the card. 

There are 19 pages with 12 cards on each. 

Last, but not least is a product that's on my Wish List. I can hardly wait until the Teachers Pay Teachers BTS sale starts. My list is pretty crowded but this is at the top. It is from the immensely talented Reagan Tunstall. 

I do Guided Math in my classroom and am always scrambling to put together both a whole class lesson plus small group lessons. In the fall I'll have a conbined class and have been groaning about how much more planning that will entail. But Regan has made this brilliant set of lessons for Math. It includes whole group lessons, small group lessons, detailed instructions, and differentiation for a variety of learners. I read her blog about this product I knew I HAD to have it. 

These are some of the pages from the preview. 

Click to see her post. She has much better pictures and information on it than I can give you. Go to her blog HEREto learn more. 

Get this product HERE

It's almost midnight here on the west coast and that means the TpT sale is officially ON!  I'm heading there to do a little shopping before I go to sleep. I hope you are able to get some of those great items off your wish list and into your classroom too!

BTS Survey and Graphing activity

Even though the end of summer is approaching, I am loving August. The days are more mellow than July, the fresh fruit is in season, the garden is lush with produce, and we travel to Courtenay (one of my favourite spots on earth) on Vancouver Island to visit my mum and dad. 

This is a view of the Comox glacier much like I used to be able to see from our yard every clear day when I grew up. Now trees obscure the view in the summer. AND there is WAY less ice because the glacier has receded so much due to global warming. I heard that it's been predicted that it will completely disappear in around 35 years. 

I am linking up today (a tad tardily) with The Third Grade Zoo where Jessicca is sponsoring a BTS freebie/tips party. Click on her blog title to hop over and get some great ideas.

Last summer I made this BTS Meanwhile, I finished up this project. It's my BTS Survey Questions 
and graphing activity. I think your class will enjoy it as much as mine does. 

My class used it last fall and they begged me for more so I made up a bunch of others that they could use during Math center time throughout the school year. 

This package has four different questions. Here's a sample:

The other questions are How do you get to school, Which season do you like best? And What are the best kind of apples?

After they finish surveying their classmates they make a graph of the results. I wanted to make this so that beginning readers could do it so I included pictures as well as words for them to use on the survey question cards as well as the graphing activity.

Pick it up here for free (at least for a while). 

Grab and Guess freebie

I can't believe that it's Friday again. So soon!

I'm going to do a double link up this week with Fern from Teaching Blog Addict's FREEBIE FRIDAY.  

And Doodle Bugs' Five for Friday. 

 

 

It's been a busy week!  Last Friday we took the ferry from Nanaimo to Vancouver.  We thought we'd have to wait for the 10:45 sailing because it was looking pretty busy, but managed to get on the 8:30 ferry.  Amazing!  We drove into the terminal at 8:15 and pretty much straight on to the boat.
The scenery is beautiful.  This is a photo just as we were entering Horseshoe Bay on the Vancouver side.

My hubby had a meeting at 1:00 downtown, but we were there so early that we had time to stop in Stanley Park and go for a walk.  Stanley Park is a bit of heaven on earth.  In literally less than one minute you can go from a view like this:

to this:

Here I am near Siwash Rock (where a grey whale was spotted yesterday).

And later in Gastown, the oldest part of Vancouver, looking at the steam powered clock. 

 After we left Vancouver we drove to nearby Richmond to visit friends.  On Saturday they took us to Richmond's Marine Days celebration.  They have restored a lot of the waterfront there to what it was like 100 years ago.  There were little houses built on pilings over the water.

One of the most interesting belonged to a Japanese family.  The mother of the family, Asayo Murakami, had a very interesting history.  She came to Canada as a "picture bride" in 1924.  She had been married to a young man from a rich family, but failed to produce a male heir (she had two daughters and her third child, a boy, died shortly after he was born).  The family decided to get rid of her and sent her picture off to Canada where a Japanese worker in Vancouver agreed to pay her passage and marry her.  When she arrived in Vancouver she took one look at her prospective husband and refused to marry him, saying, "He wasn't my type, too short."  So she worked for two years picking strawberries and working in the cannery and other jobs to pay off her debt to him.  At the cannery she met the man she married and raised 10 children with.  The cannery is now a museum. Great gift shop!

Sadly at the start of  WW2 the family were interned in Alberta and never returned to B.C.  It is a regrettable chapter in our history, but the family came through it and prospered.
Mrs. Murakami lived to see many children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren.  She didn't tell her family about her daughters in Japan until she turned 100 years old in the late 1990's, but they were able to trace them.  Unfortunately one had died only a few years earlier, but the other came out to Canada to reunite with her mother and extended family.

©John Iuchi—Ms. Asayo Murakami on her 103rd birthday in Calgary, Alberta

The family has donated many family items to the heritage site in Richmond and have worked at restoring the beautiful garden in the yard.
I can't begin to imagine the heartbreak of losing an infant, then being sent away to a foreign land, never seeing my other two children and husband again (he was not in favour of sending her away because he loved her, but was overruled by his parents).
She lived to be 104!

Richmond has other attractions as well.  One of the best is an abundance of blueberry farms.  We picked up a 20 pound case (oh, oh - I'm supposed to be metric...).

Most of them went into the freezer, but I found a great recipe on the internet and made this fantastic cobbler for dinner on Tuesday evening. I love that the gluten-free included was delicious!

The link for it is HERE or in the picture.

LOL - my husband's aunt and uncle from Seattle are here for the summer and their 2 grandchildren came up to visit them for a week.  They are 10 and 12 years old and were having a great time playing with 3 of my grandkids.  When they all came over for supper all 5 of them were constantly comparing how they said and used different words (hence supper/dinner).  Pronouncing "about" was a particular topic of conversation!

When we got home the garden was BURSTING with tomatoes, cukes, zucchini, strawberries, eggplant, peppers and peaches! Hubby picked these goodies this evening.

Jack was DELIGHTED to see us when we got home on Sunday afternoon.

(If he doesn't look especially animated to you, please bear in mind that he's 87 and a half% basset hound) (and it was 100 degrees fahrenheit).
We had a great young couple stay to take care of the garden and look after Jack.  They gathered the pickling cukes and stored them in the fridge.  Yesterday was canning day.  21 quarts of dill pickles!

 

We don't go back to work until September 8th!!! after Labour Day.  It only happens this late every 7 years and I'm making the best of it.  In May when I was reading blogs about teachers being out for the summer already I was feeling pretty envious, but now.....not so much.  I'm spending some of my time "refreshing" some of the items in my TpT store.  Here are a couple:

See them in my TpT store by clicking on the pictures.
I've also been getting a bunch of items finished that have been sitting partly done for quite a while now.  No big projects (although I'm working on units for Guided Math which I'm pretty excited about), but I got these three done.  The first is Apple themed task cards with activities:  addition to 8 and odd and even.  I was making them for my firsties last year (I had yukky hand made ones that they were using in Math centers) and now I'll be teaching two's and three's!
Click on the picture to get it from my TpT store.

A second Math center activity that I finished is the FREEBIE this week.  Also made for my firsties and not finished!  I've used this activity in my Math centers for years (again they used the not-so-beautiful hand done version, but they didn't seem to notice at all!)
I put out my tubs of manipulatives and they grab a handful, estimate how many, then count them.  Super simple!  Super popular.  The FREEBIE includes 2 recording sheets:  one where I listed the manipulatives I have in my classroom for them to use, and a blank that you can fill in if yours are different.  If you are anal picky about hand done printing you could take a screen shot of it after you download it and paste in text boxes.  LOL!

Math workshops - small groups

I'm back home from my holiday and ready to join Kathy at Third Grade Doodles for Math Workshop Monday. 

Five important advantages of meeting with small guided Math groups:
1.  The kids prefer small group of instruction. They're always asking, "When will it be MY group's turn?", even when they know it's their group's day to meet. If their group doesn't meet when they're expecting they don't hesitate to protest.
2.  You capture their attention much more effectively than in a whole class setting.
3.  You can monitor their thinking and pick up on confusions quicker.
4.  Kids having problems understanding the concept are less hesitant to ask for clarification.
5.  It's easy to switch the groups around or add another student to the group.

 My Small Groups
I meet with my small groups during the last hour of the Math block, starting with the group that needs the most help.   This works well for two reasons:
First:  they are the kids that are most likely to need extra instruction and if things go sideways later in the Math block (someone comes to the door, there's a fire drill, someone drops a basket of crayons, other students get into a disagreement or are off task, pieces are missing from the Math centers.....) I will have already met with them and their group won't be missed
Second: it is always much quieter when the rest of the class is working at individual seat work, so we can all concentrate better.  Because I have such small groups I sometimes combine 2 of them for small groups, or if there were kids from other groups that needed differentiated instruction I can just add them to a group for one or more meetings.

This is my centers rotation board with the groups listed above it.

I usually start out with a quick warm up exercise that takes 2-3 minutes, or do a quick review of the previous concept.  This might be as simple as looking back at their Math work from the day before and asking if they have any questions about it.
Next I introduce the main activity that we'll be covering in the small group lesson, which is related to the whole group lesson that I just taught. Usually this part of the Guided Math lesson includes some manipulatives or graphic organizer or game that will give them a chance to practice  the concept   In a
small group setting I can closely observe what they are doing and how they're doing it. I encourage
them to explain what they're thinking. Often I draw them out by asking questions, but I've noticed that when kids are in a small group setting they are much more willing eager to ask their own questions spontaneously than they would when the whole class is together.

After about 10 minutes I get them started on their seat work for the day. If the group has kids who are having difficulty with the concept I walk them through at least one of the questions.  Then I have them complete one on their own which they show to me so I can see if they clearly understand before going to work independently.

If I'm working with a group of kids who quickly understand Math concepts they will usually have completed and marked their independent work before I meet with them. We usually start off with a quick discussion about the work they did and what (if anything) caused them to get incorrect answers.  The main part of the lesson is an extension of the main lesson where I show them "mathematician tricks" to find answers quicker along with an activity that will challenge their thinking.

I have been reading lots about Math Workshop and Guided Math in the last few weeks and found this Pinterest board from Dr. Nicki Newton that is full of great information.

She has a Guided Math blog you might find interesting too.

Freebie Friday - Classroom money

I missed linking up to Freebie Friday last week because I'm on holidays on Vancouver Island and last Friday was a 'driving day'. We travelled north from our beautiful capital city of Victoria to Courtenay where I grew up.

Photo by Robert Forbes courtesy of Victoria Tourist Bureau

I've been blogging this week on my iPad, which can be a little immensely frustrating, but I'm learning a few new tricks every time I write a post. So this linking up with Teaching Blog Addict should be super easy, right? Ha!

The freebie I have this week is for the classroom money I made for my students. It comes in colour or b&w. I used the b&w to save $$. I printed out one sheet of each denomination and photocopied them onto different colours of paper. My firsties especially loved being able to collect 'money' and spend it on reward tags. Click HERE or on the picture to grab it. 

                             

Math center activities and freebies

I love following Favorite Things linky with Teaching Trio on the first Wednesday of the month. I get so many ideas that I can use in my classroom.

                                       

I've been thinking about Math a lot this summer so I'm going to share my three of my favourite (spelled in Canadian, eh?) Math center activities. Don't forget to click on the pictures of the activities to get the 2 freebies. 

                                   

#1. The first is from Sara Ventrella at MissV's Busy Bees. And it is a very generous freebie that is always a hit with my students. It is fun to see them measuring around the classroom and out into the hall!

#2. The second is one I made myself. It is a favourite in my classroom and the bestselling product that I have in . This set of weighing task cards has 3 types of weighing activities that the students do using a balance scale.  They include finding objects that weigh the same, finding if 

an object weighs more than a given weight, and finding which of two given sets of objects weighs more. Students are asked to predict and record their answer before weighing.  Click 

HERE or on the first picture to check it out. 

                                         

                           

#3. Finally this data collection and graphing activity is another popular activity during Math center time. Students survey their classmates then make a graph of their results. They enjoy it so much that I have made a bunch of different seasonal ones that are in my store. The beauty of having an activity that is similar in the centers over the course of the year is that the stdents are already familiar with it so you don't have to teach them how to do a new activity when you switch out your stations. 

I have this Back to School set available in my TpT store as a limited time freebie right now so click a picture to grab it now.