Product Spotlight

I'm going to spotlight some fellow TPT seller's products on the first of each month as a blog promotion. Check out these 5 wonderful products! Just click on the product picture to go to the link.

Chocolate for Teachers

We all know that teaching around Christmas, Valentines, or just about any other holiday can be almost impossible. Many of our students don't know how some of holidays began or the meaning behind them. There are also some crazy-fun holiday practices that have died out over the years, but are still good for a laugh or two. 

174 pages of printables, activities,and informational text about holidays that we celebrate. Plenty of variety to keep your students interested and engaged. Each holiday has a decorative cover that can be printed and used as a book cover for your kids! Activities include: flip books, task cards, crossword puzzles, and printables. Everything you need to teach the holidays for the whole year! All answer keys included. 

Standards listed are for grades 2-4, but passages and activities would also be suitable for grades 5 or 6 and homeschool. 

Please look at table of contents for complete listing of holidays included, standards covered, and for a sneak peak of pages!!

Homeschooling and Homesteading

This bundle includes two popular lesson plans with numerous activities, templates, and teaching ideas. 

Included in the bundle:
- Instructions on how to construct a worm bin for composting with your students
- Two different science journal templates
- Extensive vocabulary lists related to decomposition and composting
- Directions for numerous educational activities and games
- List of resources for getting started with worm composting in your classroom

Lab and Library

This engaging bundle is packed with games, activities, & printables to practice place value (reading numbers to 120, tens and ones, comparing numbers, ten more/ten less). Great for centers, small group review, or whole class!

Included:
  •150 pages of content!
  •5 games (with multiple versions for differentiation and low/no prep)
    •Reading and Writing Numbers to 120
    •Understanding Tens and Ones
    •Comparing Numbers
    •Ten More, Ten Less
  •17 printables (including 2 open-ended pages that can be used over and over!)

The games are designed for math centers or stations, but could also be used as whole class activities. Some components can even be used as quick routines or sponge activities if you have an extra few minutes here or there.

Lots of teaching suggestions and modifications to maximize engagement!

It is aligned to the Common Core State Standards for first grade.

Teacher of 20

This 32-piece set is packed with back to school favorites! Included are 16 vibrant, colored images and 16 black and white versions. 

This set includes images of:
- glue
-eraser
-crayons
- glue stick
-markers
- dry erase markers
- tape 
- scissors
-an apple
-pencil
-teacher
-student
-backpack
-book
-tissues
-school bus

The images will have high resolution, so you can enlarge them and they will still be crisp. 

Natalie at It's Elementary!

Making Words is a great activity to build phonics and word recognition skills. Each word list begins with 2-letter words all the way up to a mystery word. This activity is perfect for covering grades 1-3 foundational and language standards.


If you would like a product spotlight for later months, please leave me your information in the comments section below.

Show and Tell Tuesday

I'm once again linking up with Stephanie from Forever in 5th Grade for the Show and Tell Tuesday linky. Is it wrong to feel so happy that SCHOOL'S OUT!!!??? Check out my "show and tells", then click back on the button above to go to the original post.

We had some great activities for the end of 5th grade this year. First, I want to show-off our awesome field trip to see the Lehman Caves in Great Basin National Park. We focused on national parks this year for the 100th birthday of the National Park Service. Along with research projects, online activities, and a National Park Day (check out this link to see the awesome job they did), we took the 4 hour bus ride up to the cave system for students who earned it (they had to meet certain criteria to go).

 Our 5th grade is so big we had to break them up into 2 field trips. This is the first half. 

Our wonderful Ranger Guide

My 2nd show-off is our "Science Day". Once each quarter we decide  on a subject and rotate our entire 5th grade through different activities and lessons. It's a great chance to get to know all the kids, not just the ones in our own classroom. For the 4th quarter we decided on science for the subject space for our theme since we always build and launch rockets at the end of the year. My lesson was creating, measuring, and comparing "moon" craters made from different sized objects. The kids had a blast and my classroom was covered in "moon dust" aka flour.

Our school began the process of becoming a Leader in Me school this year. We focused on teaching kids the 7 Habits as well as taking on more hands-on leadership roles within our school. Though we still have a long way to go, the kids really rose to the challenge. They did everything to keep our school running like helping out in the lunchroom, putting on assemblies, raising and lowering flags, and monitoring attendance. It was great to see them so excited to do the things we all consider as work, and they were motivated to make our school the best it could be.

Finally, school is out! We had some great last-week activities: rocket launching, a picnic lunch, kickball tournament (the teachers beat the 5th-graders for the 2nd year in a row), talent show, teacher talent show, field day, and awards ceremonies. Amidst all this we had some fun classroom activities as well.

Cleaning our desks with shaving cream...of course we had to take time to draw in it!

Building dodecahedrons made from all our 5th grade memories.

Go back to the button at the top of the page to check out all the other great "show and tells" and have a wonderful summer!!!!

Product Spotlight

On the first of each month, I'm going to spotlight a single product from my store plus a few from my fellow teacher-authors. For June, I'm featuring how I always end my reading classes for the year...a novel study.

 This is everything you need to study any fiction novel in any genre. You have journal prompts, comprehension practice pages, vocabulary activities, reflection, and a book review. My students l-o-v-e the independent work time. It gives me the opportunity to see what last-minute mini-lessons they might need before we break for summer. And best of all...I get time to talk with them one-on-one about their reflections of their year of reading!

If you would like a product featured next month, please comment below, message me on facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/itselementary123/, or click on the link to go to my TPT page.

Teacher Appreciation Sale!

National Park Day

2016 marks the 100th year of the National Park Service.

Our 5th grade team: Mrs. Carsrud, Mrs. Pason, me in the hat, Mrs. Kraintz, and Mrs. Mahlke

 To celebrate, our 5th grade classes worked on a collaborative research project.

a couple of early greeters: Mrs. Carsrud's and my daughters sitting at the "ranger station"

Each class was assigned 5 national parks as well as a notable person who contributed to the National Park Service in some way. We put together a website to guide them along (check out our link!). The groups were then assigned different roles within their park to study: zoologist, botanist, statistician, historian, and tour guide. They had to research and write a report based on their particular role for the park they were assigned. Then the teams put together a tri-fold display to present to the entire school, their parents, and even the superintendent!

a group of 5th-graders giving a presentation on Denali National Park to Mr. Zander, our superintendent

Our kids got 2 and a half hours of public speaking experience! It was a wonderful opportunity for them, and we (the 5th grade teachers) were so impressed with how hard they worked and how they presented themselves, especially to the adults who came to see. These kids never cease to amaze me!

checking out the map marked with all the parks we represented

Next up: a field trip to the Great Basin National Park to visit the Lehman Caves!

Extra Credit or Not?

I just finished reading Go Figure's blog post about this topic, and let me tell you, it is one of the most heated debates among teachers! I have always believed that extra credit is detrimental to students. It can falsely inflate their grades and make parents believe they know the topic when, in fact, they scraped by with extra credit. However, there are some reasonable justifications for the other side of the issue.

I have seen my own children bring home "work" that was way too easy for them, or game-type assignments that had nothing to do with the class they were taking. When I as about it, they claim it's extra credit. What is the point of extra work if it isn't allowing the child to demonstrate their knowledge of a subject?!

Having said that, I had a bit of a conundrum this year with my science classes. I had an assignment that I really wanted to give them credit for; it was a great demonstration of their knowledge of the scientific process. However, there were some constraints that we couldn't find a way around.

So here is the assignment: I gave them a sort of scavenger hunt to fill out as we explored projects at our school's science fair. The questions weren't the usual like: "Which project is your favorite?", but more like "Choose one hypothesis that isn't justified and rewrite it with a research-based reasoning." Because the assignment was time (and place) sensitive seeing as how we were only allowed 45 minutes at the fair, I couldn't make it a required assignment. But I also didn't want it to be "busy" work. The purpose was to see them apply the scientific method to an array of experiments. So I accepted reasonable and explainable responses as bonus points on their own science fair project. The entire assignment was only 8 points, so I felt it wouldn't inflate the grades of those who saved their own experiment for 10:00 the night before, but would show me they understood the scientific method, which is what science fair projects are all about anyway.

So, let me know what you think? Extra credit or not...or somewhere in between?

To read the original post go to Go Figure: Curing One Mathphobic at a Time.

February Show and Tell

I love this linky! I'm once again joining Forever in 5th Grade and lots of other great blogs for an online show and tell. Click back on the button above to see all the other blogs in the linky. I only have 3 this month, so here goes...

Science Fair projects are finished! My 5th graders have spent the last month learning about and conducting their own science fair experiments. They are presented at the school fair this week, then the county fair in March. This picture is my daughter and 2 classmates testing the evaporation rates of three different liquids by weighing sponges over time that were soaked in the liquids.

My son auditioned and made the regional honor band. He's the percussionist in the center-back...looks like he's glowing with the stage lights shining so bright. They sounded amazing!

I don't usually do whole-class novels. I'm more of a book club/literature circle kind of teacher, but since a movie version of The Great Gilly Hopkins is coming out later this month, we wanted all our 5th graders to read the book. After a mini-lesson on plot conflicts (character vs. character, character vs. self, character vs. society, and character vs. nature) we applied it to chapter 3 of the book with this anchor chart...hanging from the top of my unused TV. My kids then filled out a similar chart with a partner for the next chapter. They are really loving this book!