Oxygen to Your Brain!

Man, having no school on Monday completely throws me off schedule. This week is going to be a CRAZY week. We had an morning assembly on water conservation today. Tomorrow, we're going on a field trip to watch a symphony concert. And somehow during this week I will need to give the kids an  end of unit OCR test and first trimester Math benchmark exam. Busy busy busy! We also have the entire week off next week so we really have to cram everything in this week.

ANYWAYS. Enough of my griping sharing, I saw a couple of linky parties recently that I wanted to join so here's the first one!

I'm linking up with Miss Kindergarten's Teaching Tip Linky party! Do you have students who can't seem to sit correctly on the carpet no matter how many times you remind them to criss-cross applesauce??? (Who doesn't??) Well here's a little tip you can try in the classroom!

All I have to say is "oxygen to your brains!" and immediately all 24 students of mine will be on their bottoms, legs crossed, sitting up straight and tall. I credit this idea to my master teacher. She would tell her students to sit up straight at their desks when they are taking a test so that they can get oxygen to their brains. I simply generalized it to any time the students are sitting. If I see students slouching at their desks, I just acknowledge how a specific student is ready for class because he/she is getting oxygen to his/her brain and immediately everyone is sitting up straight. I also tell students that if they sit on their knees they are cutting off their blood circulation which also keeps oxygen from getting to their brains. This makes sure they sit on their bottoms rather than on their knees. Oh the things you can tell a child. :)

Hope this tip helps! :)

Also, check out this awesome giveaway below if you want to get some gift cards to some great places! :)

Train Craft and Writing and TpT News!

So I'm really going all out now! First a blog makeover. Now, a Teachers Pay Teachers store! I sure hope I know what I'm doing!

This month's OCR unit is on transportation. One of our selections is a poem about trains. Last year, as a follow-up activity to this reading, I gave each of my students a picture of an empty caboose. They had to choose what item they wanted to put in their caboose, draw the item, and then write a sentence about it. I went all out with the hallway bulletin board display. Took me around two hours to get it done.

However, this year, I wanted to change it up a bit. I felt like there was too little writing and too much of me providing the students with already made art. So I changed it up and created this:

We read another train book to learn about different types of train cars. Then we created our train craft. I told the kids to come up with three things their trains would carry and to draw them in the train cars. The following day I taught a mini-lesson on using commas in a series and did a quick review on writing plurals. And our craft and writing was complete!

My example to the class

One kid decided to include a flatcar in his train.

The final product!

 The kids had a blast with this. This is also very exciting because creating this product motivated me to try a hand at selling my stuff. I have now created a TpT store and this train craft and writing activity is my first priced product on there. Please check it out here! Comments and feedback are appreciated! :)

New Template!

Once again, my blog has undergone another makeover!!

This new template came from the free template collection of Leelou Blogs!

I really hope to one day spend some money and get a custom template made so that I can say that my blog is one of a kind. But until then, free templates we go! :)

Maybe now I'll be more likely to get my act together and create myself a blog button? Haha, we shall see. :)

Snow in California?!?!

Apparently it hailed two nights ago because when I got to school yesterday morning, this is what I saw...

Keep in mind, this is California so we don't really see snow EVER. In fact, when I was showing all the kids the different weather cards I have, we even talked about how it doesn't snow in California. So you can image what the kids were thinking when they arrived at school. All the kids were ecstatic! I heard the some were each on the ground making "snow angels". Haha. Not quite, kids. But still pretty crazy.

Did You Vote?

Hope everyone voted today! I promised my facebook friends that they would get some cute election-related writing as a reward for voting so of course I'm going to share it with the blogging world too!

On Monday, we read Teacher for President. The kids loved the book! Then we moved on to the writing assignment I came up with over the weekend. It made for a wonderful bulletin board for today. Parents thought it was pretty cute too. One walked by and told me good luck on my campaign! :)

And some close-ups...

My favorite. :)

If you still want to do an election lesson (it's never too late!) and need something, check out my previous post for more information on the writing above. 

Election Freebie!

When my class went to the library this week, I asked our school librarian if she had Duck for President. My plan was to read Duck for President to the class for our election lesson on Tuesday. However, the librarian was already planning to read the book to the class next week so I asked her if she had other election books I could read to the class. She gave me My Teacher for President by Kay Winters.

After browsing the book, I thought it was perfect! So now I will be reading this to the class on Tuesday. I also created a writing activity to go along with this book. Click on the image below to check it out!

I made two letter templates, one for teacher and the other for principal.

We are also having a Diwali Assembly hosted by some of our parents on Tuesday. Tuesday will be a very busy day! Don't forget to vote! :)

Joining Classroom Freebies' Manic Monday now too!

Rainbow Tens!

I saw this idea on Pinterest and I just have to say that I love it!

My kids loved it too! (Can't remember where I got this from.)