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Sunday, November 19, 2017

Daily Spiraled Math Skill Review

I've posted before about one of my best selling TPT products - Reading Morning Message. It's a 6 week spiraled review of reading skills including main idea, character traits, character changes, making inferences, theme, word meaning, text structures, and figurative language. Each set spirals different skills - check out all 4 editions & holiday editions here!

I recently started making a 6 week set for math! It's a great way to review and front load ESSENTIAL math skills. My math teammate and I are LOVING it. I recently went out on maternity leave, but my sub is continuing to use it. I love knowing my kids are hitting important math concepts EVERY DAY wether I'm there or not!


I have created two editions so far:
MATH Daily Message Edition One
MATH Daily Message Edition Two 
I plan on creating a total of 6 to last all school year!

Here's how the SIX WEEKS of spiraled skills work:
- Every Monday, students work on multiplication
- Every Tuesday, students work on division
- Every Wednesday, students complete a single or multi step word problem
- Every Thursday, students work on decimals in the form of tenths and hundredths
- Every Friday, students work on fractions


I LOVE reviewing skills my students already know & taking them further. This set is also great for front-loading topics we haven't hit yet. We're about to start our fraction unit, and my students already have a strong foundation on fraction skills we'll be learning perfecting.

Would you like to try a free week? Shoot me an email at katietexas82@gmail.com & let me know you'd like to try a FREE WEEK of math daily message! 

Sunday, November 12, 2017

Thanksgiving

I love Thanksgiving. Fall is my favorite season for so many reasons - the colors are so warm and comforting, the food is PHENOM (candy on Halloween and home cookin' on Thanksgiving? YES PLEASE), and hellooooo everything pumpkin spice!! This year I've added even ANOTHER reason to love this season, my newest little pumpkin Mackenzie Jo! She was born 10-4 and I am sooooo in love.

Teachers love Thanksgiving too, because it's a time to TAKE A BREAK & REFRESH. I feel like the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving Break are some of the most exhausting. Our district takes the entire week off, but in the past it hasn't been that way. I LOVE HAVING THE ENTIRE WEEK. So do the teachers in my district because we vote for it every year! Lol.

I love to incorporate holiday themed lessons into my teaching, but I don't want it to be fluff work. I want fun and meaningful lessons and activities that keeps students engaged but allows them to have fun! That's why I created "What's On the Menu".


With this activity, students plan a Thanksgiving meal by looking at a store ad. Students pick out the foods to be served & calculate costs of multiple servings. They can also create an invite to Thanksgiving Dinner & draw what will be served on a plate. It's SO much fun and my students LOVE IT! They don't even realize they're adding, subtracting and multiplying decimals and using real world problem solving skills! They're just focused on FOOD!




We always seem to be working on fractions during Thanksgiving time, so I've created a couple fraction activities too - Pumpkin Pie Fractions & Thanksgiving Fractions
  

If you're looking for a reading activity, I've made a Thanksgiving themed edition of Morning Message. It's a week long review of essential reading skills - Monday focuses on Main Idea, Tuesday is Character Traits, Wednesday is Theme, Thursday is Inferences and Friday is word meaning. 

I hope you'll try out one of these activities! I LOVE FEEDBACK and I would love to see pictures of your students using these sets in action. Have a fabulous Thanksgiving, friends! 

Wednesday, November 8, 2017

Add some COLOR to your math instruction!

Y'all. Do you own a set of LEWO Stacking Blocks yet?? Well YOU SHOULD!

I love having old games & game boards around the classroom - you can always pair them with some task cards and create an instantly awesome station/ center.

So when I saw the LEWO Rainbow Stacking Blocks, I knew I HAD TO HAVE THEM. I had been meaning to paint a few old Jenga games I had collected and pair them with some task cards BUT could never find the time... Then I saw LEWO had done the messy work for me!


I wanted a math review game to go along with these blocks, so I created a multi-skill task card set that coordinates with the block colors. The cards cover addition and subtraction (red), multiplication and division (pink), word problems (yellow), decimals and fractions (green), measurement (blue) and geometry (purple). Check it out here ---> Rainbow Block Game Math Review

The set includes a color option (prints two sided task cards) OR a color saver option. I went with the color saver option and printed on card stock that matches all the blocks! I cannot WAIT to let my kiddos get a hold of this. I have a feeling I'll be needing more than one LEWO game!!



Below are links to the game AND the card stock colors I used. I'm not affiliated with LEWO or Astrobright, I'm just a fan of both! Haha!







Sunday, November 5, 2017

Animated TPT Banner

Do you have an animated banner in your TPT store? I've tried to make several but they're always a big ol' fail: Either my product link is messed up or my pictures come out WAY smaller than I expected... But that's all changed now that I found this tutorial by Carolyn Wilhelm from the Wise Owl Factory!

Here are the images that I'm using...



I uploaded these gifmaker.me to make this: 


Thanks to the tutorial, I've made these into a GIF that looks AMAZING on my TPT store! Check it out here in my TPT store!