New Product

Since I graduated from East Carolina, I am a pirate at heart and LOVE pirate stuff.  I started to go with the purple and gold but I resorted to the traditional red, black, and white for this pirate themed classroom.  I have 79 pages of pirate themed labels, from name plates, to behavior chart, to Daily 5 and CAFE signs.  I hope you enjoy.  Thanks for looking.

Click HERE

New adventure...or not

We are on our Thanksgiving holiday break now and other than spending time with my kids, hitting the stores for the Black Friday deals, and baking for my next cake order, I am enjoying the time off.  Did I mention I put my Christmas decorations up on Veterans day lol?  It was a first for me but I am really enjoying them and the kids are too.  So I am thinking about venturing in to creating my own clip art.  I am thinking about having me 6 year old help as I love the elementary style clips that are simplistic and so fun.  Stay tuned!
  Also, if you are looking for Black Friday deals, check out teacher pay teacher, they are having some of their own.  As I was shopping in the wee hours of the morning I was wondering, what in the world does Best Buy have that people camp out for?  Still haven't figured it out.  I do it for the sport of it all and it's the one time I can go shopping for such a long stretch of time without worrying about having to get home to the kids.  I always go witha friend so we can shop and laugh at all the craziness.
Wishing you and yours a door busting holiday :)

LADYBUGS!

Nothing is cuter that ladybugs!!! That is why I made seven background ladybug images to use as you please other than selling them as is.  Great for classroom printables, letters, and more.  You can see them at my TEACHERSPAYTEACHERS STORE

English Language Learners

I had the opportunity Friday to attend a workshop with our two English Language Learner teachers.  Our population of ELL students is over 30% so I really could use any extra help in my instruction.  Really all the tips could be helpful to all of our population.  The main point was that ELL students can answer higher order questions and do high level task, they just lack the language to get there, therefore you have to start at the basics to help give them the LANGUAGE tools to accomplish the higher level task.  They really encouraged visuals and graphic organizers to help students who speak no English understand.
On another note, three more days till TURKEY day, what is on your plate :)

BOOKMARK Freebie

Our school has a literacy night tomorrow night and I am preparing for it today, YIKES!  Normally I would be serving food to our parents, but this year, I get to stay in my room, the media center that is.  So I created a powerpoint to have playing in the background, "Helping Your Child Read".  I also plan on having these bookmarks available for hand out.  The bookmark has a couple of Bloom's Reading Response questions for parents to ask their child as they read together or for students to ask themselves.  On the back is the infamous "I PICK" choosing a book strategy.
Link me to YOUR BLOG LIST and I will send the bookmark file to you for FREE!!!!!!!!!

                                                     

More products and a FREEBIE

I wanted to share with everyone the curly cute borders I made for teacherspayteachers.  I hope you enjoy and can use them for your classroom needs.

Wish everyone a wonderful weekend.  I am going to begin working on our thematic snowmen unit all the specialist at my school are doing.  We try to incorporate reading in to all of our subject areas, pe, music, art, science, and of course it is not hard for me in the library :)

Here are some FREE POLKA DOT graphics for you to use however you would like except selling as is.

Please reference me when using :)

MY FIRST SALE YAY!

So I got to work this morning with an email in my Inbox that says I have sold an item on TeachersPayTeachers!  YAY!  I am so excited about this new venture and look forward to coming up with more creative things to match the Common Core and Daily 5.  Here is a link to what I sold, a snowman themed Daily 5 center signs and word work!

Daily 5

Our school began the "Daily 5" last year and ever since we started, I have been trying to incorporate it in the media center.  This year, after talking to several other media specialist in my county, I decided to try sort of a Daily rotation.  I thought this would give me a chance to work one on one or in small groups with students, teaching some library skills.  We have been working in centers for a couple of weeks now with my 1st and 2nd grade students.  I have not tried it yet, with the kindergarteners yet.  Now that we have rotated to the different centers, I want to organize it more and really focus the students in the centers.  They have I CAN statements at each center but I wanted a way to track their center.  Thanks to some help online, I found this smartboard file and I changed it to fit my needs.  You can find your own at Smart Exchange.

I have been allowing students to use the IPADS freely but now I am ready to focus them on reading.  Therefore, we are going to use "Tom the Cat" app and have students read the books to him for fluency.

I just need to purchase some earbuds, hopefully from the dollar store.  I would love to hear what you are doing in your classroom or media center.

Turkey Time!

I can not believe it is already November.  Seems like we just started school and now we are close to winter break.  One of my favorite series of books are the "I know an Old Lady" and what would be more appropriate to read to my kindergarteners that, "I know an Old Lady who swallowed a Pie" by Alison Jackson.  The kids love these books as well.  We start out by discussing November and what it reminds us of.  I usually get responses like: turkey, sweet potatoes, pies, Thanksgiving, pilgrims and more.  Then I share with the students that November reminds me of Thanksgiving and I share with the students how my family celebrates Thanksgiving by all getting together and eating.  This usually leads in to them discussing all the things they like to eat for Thanksgiving.  Then we share how we eat so much our belly's are full which of course leads into the story.

There are a lot of great resources free.  Makinglearningfun.com has math, literacy, carpet time and more printables for this book.  Also, lilcountrykindergarten.blogspot.com has a bunch of cute printables as well.  I plan on using the retelling printables for my mini lesson with the kindergarten. I would love to hear what your favorite read alouds are for November.

Cutesy!

So I am always searching for cute fonts and borders and I found the cutest border free by http://the3amteacher.blogspot.com.
Thanks so much, I love it!

It's Friday!

Had a busy night last night.  As you can tell from my bio and blog title, I bake and decorate cakes at night.  I had my first "Tiffany" Box cake order and my first "Gender Reveal" cake order.  I also made chocolate chip cookie cupcakes for my son's class and chocolate chocolate chip cupcakes for my other son's daycare.  Busy, busy, busy.  I decorate cakes for fun, because I definitely do not charge enough to make anything from  it, but I have a good time doing it.

So back in school mode, are there any teacher librarians who incorporate any of the Reading Daily 5 in their classes?  I am beginning centers this year based on the daily 5 and am really enjoying it.  It has freed up some time to give some personal attention to students.

Here are my center signs if you would like to use them. Click HERE.