Five for Friday

I am going to sound like a broken record, but I am once again apologizing for not posting more this school year.  I have this obsession of creating every extension lesson I do and that has taken a lot of my extra time. 

Well, it is Friday and another cold one at that.  I am going to start with my 5 for Friday from Kasey over at  Doodle Bugs Teaching

 

1.  I cannot believe this weather here in Wisconsin!!  We have been freezing all month.  Only 3 days of school called off this month, but only because we need the wind chill temp to be below -30 before school is called off.  I can honestly tell you that we have had about 10 days where the temp at the start of the day was between -25 and -29.  The other day it got up to 18 above zero and it seriously felt like a beautiful day.  I can only hope that the groundhog does not see his shadow this weekend :). 

2.  I mentioned my obsession with creating products to fit the needs of my current students.  Most of my efforts are towards math since many of my students struggle to get excited about math at the beginning of the school year.  My goal is to make learning and understanding our first grade learning concepts both fun and interactive. 

Pretzels used as sticks of ten and Fruit Loops used as ones to practice adding groups of ten and ones. 

My students loved this game working on a variety of different way to practice fluency in numbers to ten.  I saw this game in from Sandy Atkins and made my own dominos and recording sheets.  I am currently working on a new TpT product that has a variety of interactive games to practice this important concept.  I always send these activities home for parents to play with their child as well. 

3.  My daughter Madisyn has started competing in swim meets this season as a 7 year old.  I have to tell you that I think watching those 8 and under swimmers swim is one of the cutest things ever!  She has a great stroke for a first year swimmer, but will not listen to a word of coaching I have to say, despite the 15 years of coaching I have.......

Game Face!

So nervous for her first race!

Top swimmer

4.  I am piloting a new math program this school year before rolling out this program to the whole district next year.  Has anyone used the newest version of Math Expressions?  This math program is so impressive and best of all covers all the standards of the Common Core.  Our last math program lacked the fact fluency piece and Expressions hits it right where students need it. 

5.  I have posted two new products this past month.  The first product contains 11 ELA activities:

Link to my TpT Winter ELA Centers

The second product contains 11 Math Centers/Activities all aligned to the common core. 

Link to my TpT Math Center Product

I am going to continue to post a free product I have created.  This product is a sample of my new Emergent reader product.  This product will help your students practice most of the pre-primer Dolch sight words in a fun and interactive way.  Click on the link below the picture for a sample of this product.   



Free Preview HERE

Happy Friday and find time to enjoy the weekend :).