Two Posts in One: Fake Five for Friday and 2015 Calendar

I've been trying to write a Five for Friday post ever since Friday but all my pictures are on my phone and for some reason they keep failing to upload on blogger. Major sadness. That only means that I will have to go back to using my camera to take pictures because I'm simply too lazy to email all the pics on the phone to the computer. However, my phone is doing a good job uploading to instagram and twitter so let's pull some pictures from there to share the big highlight from last week! We only had three days of school (2.5 really since Friday is a half day for us) so there wasn't much happening anyways.

Children's author, Kathryn Otoshi came to visit our school and also autographed books! If you haven't read her books, One, Zero, and Two, you definitely should! Not only do they teach social skills, they also dabble in some math skills too! (even, odd, greater than, less than, number values, skip counting, etc.)

Love her autographs! So cute!

Check out the books on Amazon!

Full disclosure: Affliate links below

        

We also talked about Veterans' Day. We watched some videos below that my wonderful colleague found:

Reading of the book, The Wall by Eve Bunting:

A good explanation of the poppy's significance with veterans:

Then we did some writing and made a poppy craft.

 The air is starting to get chilly (North California resident here) which also means the holidays are secretly creeping up on us. That brings me on to my next topic...

HOLIDAY GIFTS!

What do you give your students and what do you have your students make to give their families? I usually order books for my students through Scholastic as my gift to them. Student gifts to the families have varied every year from wax paper lanterns to sock snowmen. However, no matter what the gift is, we always pair it with a 2015 calendar. People have been asking me when the 2015 calendar is coming out and it's finally here! Best of all, just like all my other calendars, this one is free too!

Click on the image above to get it from my TpT store!

If you need some ideas on how to make this calendar into a gift, below are some pictures of what I've done with them in the past. Click on the picture to get to the corresponding blog post to read more!

2014 Calendar

2013 Calendar

Another crazy week to come! It's parent-teacher conference week! We get a full week of minimum days which end at 11:20. That means minus the 1.5 hours of ELA time I'm committing myself to (1 hour small group, 30min whole group), I only have around 50 minutes of instruction time for other subjects every day! Not sure how much we are going to get accomplished this week but we will see what we can do!