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! 

All I want for... BLACK FRIDAY!

HAPPY THANKSGIVING BREAK! Are you off for the entire week? I hate to brag but... I AM! WOOT! If you're not, I'm so sorry. May the kids be QUIET, the week FLY BY and you have plenty of REST and GRUB on your days off!

Today I'm liking up with The Primary Pack  for a fun Black Friday linky! 
I'm not really a Black Friday shopper. I'm a lay in bed and eat leftover Thanksgiving food type of girl. I will do online shopping though. And MAYBE if I've had a lot of coffee, I might stop by Target. Buuuuut... That's not likely. It's more likely I'll eat pumpkin pie for breakfast, a turkey sandwich with a moist maker for lunch (any Friends fans out there?? lol) and then have "Leftovers" with the family on Friday night. "Leftovers" gets a capital letter because it is an official event with my family. We heat up all the leftovers and re-do Thanksgiving - no decorations this time though, and we use paper plates..... And no fancy clothes, just elastic pants... My family is a bunch of FOODIES, y'all! Haha. I can't wait!

Enough food talk. Back to shopping. My own personal Black Friday list consists of two things. New pots and pans and EVERYTHING HUNGER GAMES. I just KNOW there will be some online shopping deals on pots and pans.... There HAS to be.... Why the need?? You see, I was watching a Bill Nye video the other day with my class. He told me that if the non-stick coating on your pots and pans have cuts in it, when you cook with them all the chemicals that make it a non-stick get released into your food... and like everything else, THAT CAN CAUSE CANCER. I swear, I haven't cooked with my pots and pans since I saw that (well, really, I just haven't cooked because I hate cooking... Take out menus, please?). Anyway, I NEED NEW COOKING THANGS.
Also, I NEED all of the Hunger Games movies. I'm not a big movie person. Like, I'll watch one every once in a while, but there are only a few I can sit down and watch all the time. Over and over. Again and again. Hunger Games is one of them. I LOVE KATNISS. I don't understand why she can't be real so we can be besties....

For my classroom Black Friday wish list, I have a few FANTASTIC items on it. They should really be on your wish list too (don't worry, I'll link them so you can put them on there).
-  If I had a Million Dollars Project by 4MulaFun. Jennifer is SO STINKIN' AWESOME. Love her products. Recently, I've let my students do more PBL type of learning' and it has been AMAZING. This is the next project I want to do with my class!
- Reader's Notebook Response Pages by the Thinker Builder. THANK YOU PINTEREST for helping me find Michael. Everything he makes is AWESOME. He completely changed the way I take notes for Guided Reading Groups. I NEED these response pages!!
- Christmas Labs by the Science Penguin. Why do kids love science? BECAUSE IT'S SO COOL. My kids are going to LOVE me when I bust out with all this awesome Christmas science!

Now, here are some fun things Christmas items from my TPT store - I'd love for YOU to put on YOUR Black Friday TPT wish list!

- Design a Christmas Tree is HOT OFF THE PRESS! I just created this activity after my students LOVED my Thanksgiving Meal Planning project. In this set, you will get 4 pages of "store ads". Students will shop the store ads and purchase items for their dream Christmas Tree. There's a lot of math included in this set but it's disguised as FUN. The kids won't even know how much learning they're doing! HEHE! I've included some problem solving questions as well. It's only $1.50 right now... GO GET IT!
- Snowman Math Glyph is a favorite of my kiddos EVERY YEAR. This is actually the first math glyph I made. All sorts of skills are included in this - what makes this so awesome is each answer has the kiddos coloring their snowman a certain way. My students loved it so much, it's inspired a ton more Math Glyphs!! Go check them all out!
- Looking for a way to give students or coworkers a cute and low cost holiday gift? Go get my Holiday Gift Tags! These cute little signs fit on a snack sized baggie. Then pop in a few sweet treats and BOOM, Christmas shopping is done, son!
- My Christmas Activity Pack and Winter Activity Pack are perfect for your holiday party day to keep the kiddos occupied... ;) SO much fun inside both of them!

Oooohwee! All this shopping talk is making me EXCITED!
Want to join this link? YOU SHOULD! Get over to the Primary Pack's blog and LINK UP and ENTER to win like, a TON of fabulous items.

Whatever you do this holiday, I hope it is full of FUN, FRIENDS and FAMILY.
Wishing you tons of Thanksgiving blessings!
xoxo

Catch Up and a SALE

So I've survived the first two weeks of school! Yay! My sweet students are already into the groove of things which is AWESOME. I'm so happy to already have routines set up and running well. We were  doing work by Day 2!

Here's a look at my finished classroom (before students!). I'm not working with as much space as I had the previous two years, but I think everything fit quite well.

Thank God for contact paper! I had an orange set of cabinets, a set of brown laminate, and a set of yellow.... UM, NO. So I bought a ton of black contact paper, covered them, and finished it off with my favorite rainbow leopard border. WOOT.

These awesome measurement cards are from LoneStar Learning. LOVE THEM!!!

 Here's my soon-to-be-fabulous math word wall! Math vocab cards by Blair Turner - get them HERE! 

The only area I had trouble finding room for was my library... It kinda sticks out but oh well-- It bothers me but not the kiddos! 

Here are the first day of school gifts for my class and team! 

I've posted some new goodies in my TPT store and guess what... EVERYTHING IS ON SALE! The sale starts tomorrow, Sept. 9, and will run until Sept. 12. 15% off everything!!