Listening
It’s been pretty darn hot these last couple of days here in the ol’ Bluegrass state. Last night at 11:00 my Weather Bug app said it was 84 but felt like 94! 94 degrees at 11:00 at night! That’s just wrong! Anyway, our AC pretty much runs non-stop the only problem is… it’s not working the best right now. I was so hot yesterday sitting under my laptop most of the day. It went from so hot yesterday to… 78 degrees today – much “cooler” and we have a wind advisory so it’s been pretty windy today.

Loving
I seriously live for summer vacation. I love the freedom of being able to stay up later, wake up later, eat and pee whenever I want. It’s pretty much a dream come true. I have more time to focus on myself and exercise, eat better, and enjoy my hobbies. Since we got back from Florida almost two weeks ago the time has seemed to fly by! I have lots of things coming up this summer the first being student teacher training on the 21st (I hope to have a student teacher in the spring). Once all of these school PD’s start hitting me I know my vacation is dwindling away! It makes me sad!

Thinking
Since my summer vacation is here and passing before my eyes I’m thinking a lot about the things I need/want to do this summer. On my list is:

• Read more books
• Clean/Organize our craft/computer room
• Get caught up on Project Life
• Loosely plan out my year by making a personal curriculum map
• Make new teaching materials for myself and TPT)
• Exercise more
• Finish re-design of my personal website
• Finish re-design of my teaching blog

I could go on and on but won’t.

Wanting
I so want to go back to Disney World. I know I just got back from there but I seriously love that place. I would move there and work there if I could. I would do any job there. I seriously feel so happy when I am there and love the magic and atmosphere. *sighs dreamily*

Needing
You saw that list of things I am thinking about, right? Well, now I actually need to do them all (plus the other things I didn’t list!)! I enjoy being able to stay up later during the summer but unfortunately when I do, then I tend to wake up later and not be as productive as I could be. Plus, the husband has to work during the summer (libraries don’t close in the summer you know) and staying up later is not good for him either.

3 Vacation Essentials
So I already returned from vacation number one but I have another one coming up in July – an Alaskan cruise! My first cruise ever actually. I’m going to be so sad to not be able to use my iPhone as much on the ship (so not paying crazy prices for Wi-Fi). I will be using my iPhone for taking pictures and whatnot and my iPad for reading. I’m going to have to read up more about the weather on an Alaskan cruise but whatever the weather comfy-cute clothes are a must. And sunscreen! I am pale and white and do not tan well. If I don’t use sunscreen I will end up looking like a tomato! Can’t have that!

There you have it! Now, go link up yourself if you haven’t already!

Seriously… I am just trying to survive these last 7 school days. They will be a busy 7 days and then the day after school is out I am leaving for Disney World! I can’t wait! I’m so excited for this summer! Not only am I going to my favorite place (Disney World) but I am also going on my first cruise ever! My husband and I are going on an Alaskan cruise with his parents, brother, brother’s girlfriend and her parents. I hope to have a lot of fun! I also have SO MANY ideas for things I want to make for my classroom this summer and for TPT. It is going to be a BUSY summer but a fun one (I hope!).

a Rafflecopter giveaway

It’s not too early to start thinking about ordering Brag Tags for next year! I’m currently making a big list of all the tags I’d like to give my kiddos next year. It is my goal to celebrate student success even more in my classroom next year and Brag Tags are going to help make that possible!

Thanks to everyone who entered the contest!

This week was Teacher Appreciati0n week and I got all sorts of goodies from the awesome PTA and my students!

Thursday was our camping themed day. Because everyone’s MAP score went up on both reading and math, I let my students choose a reward. They chose a camping themed day. I set up a tent and the kiddos read in their sleeping bags. We ate hot dogs, chips, and s’mores and watched a camping themed movie!

I have seven more days of school left. Things have been getting a little crazy. I’ve had to confiscate some highly valuable items.

I’ve been Instagramming pretty much every day! I’ve been participating in the Photo a Day Teacher Challenge from The Pinspired Teacher and the Teacher Snapshots prompts from The Clutter Free Classroom. All of the pictures in this post are from Instagram. My account name is: FirstGradeBrain Here are some more pictures from this week.

We made our Mother’s Day projects. I even made one too. Can you guess which one is mine?

We were supposed to go on our field trip today but because of the rain we moved it to Monday instead. Next week will be our field trip, our last Fun Friday (even though it will be on Tuesday!), field day, and our behavior medal award ceremony. Busy times are here!

To celebrate Teacher Appreciation week, Teachers Pay Teachers is offering a promo code! May 7th – May 8th everything in my store will be 20% off. With the TPT promo code TAD13 you can save an additional 10% off your total purchase making it up to 28% off all together! This is a great time to make purchases for the beginning of next year so you can get to work on getting things ready over the summer. I can’t wait to go through my own wishlist and score some awesome goodies at a great price!

(My Teachers Notebook shop will also be 20% off at this time!)

Also, if you haven’t already entered my giveaway to win 100 free Brag Tags, don’t forget to! The lucky winner may just be you!

The game includes enough Scoot cards to play with up to 30 students. I have included recording sheets for 20, 25, and 30 students. If you have less than 20 students, simply cross out the extra boxes. Arrows are also included to help guide your students to the seat they should scoot to next. Your class may not need to use the arrows after playing several times, but they do come in handy if your class is just playing Scoot for the first time. (Playing Scoot without practicing first could potentially be disastrous! I know from personal experience!) I included both color and black and white cards to use when playing.

Ooh! Short i is now available also!

In addition, I have posted my May SmartBoard calendar and a June/July one as well for those that may be teaching during those months.

Twelve more days of school left for me! The time has flown by this year!

Brag Tags are plastic laminated tags used to motivate and reward students.  Kids love to collect them and display on a custom lanyard, chain necklace, or on their backpack. These fun, durable tags come in a huge assortment of colorful designs and in a wide range of themes.  You will find designs that include perfect attendance, honor roll, accelerated reader, citizenship and much, much more.  If for some reason we do not have a Brag Tag to fill your needs, we can easily customize a Brag Tag for your classroom, school or organization.

Denise allowed me to select 4 designs and she sent me 25 of each plus chains to hang the tags on. These are the four tags I chose:

On the last day of school the first grade classes have an award ceremony. We give every student an award. Last year I not only have my traditional awards but I also gave out candy bar awards too! The award ceremony is always a lot of fun and I thought the addition and subtraction Brag Tags would be perfect to give out at the ceremony for those students who mastered their addition and subtraction facts! I can’t wait to give these out! Everyone will receive the 1st grade tag with my name on it. I’ve been using the Look Who Was Caught Doing Good tag during these last few weeks of school to encourage my students to keep following our rules. The kids love Brag Tags!  Here’s how my tags actually turned out:

I am so excited about next year because I plan to go ALL OUT with Brag Tags! At my school, students are rewarded from time to time, but as a primary teacher I feel most of the rewarding goes to the upper grades (honor roll awards, medals for assessment scores, etc.). The primary grades are slowly but surely getting more awards but I want to reward my kiddos as often as I can! There are so many tag possibilities – perfect attendance, special events/holidays, academic awards, and MORE! I have read some teachers give out brag tag awards on Fridays or maybe once a month. I plan to do this in my classroom also. Floating around on Pinterest are cute bulletin boards teachers have made for students to hang their necklaces on. I plan on doing this as well.

There are seriously so many fun Brag Tags available on Boost Promotion’s website! I love the one with the arrow in the target. I plan on using that for MAP testing scores! Here are some more of my favorites:

Boost Promotions also keeps teachers in mind by offering Teacher Kits. You can save 50% off the regular prices when you order special Teacher Kits, and the best part is YOU get to select the from the stock designs and shapes, making the kit completely customizable to suite YOUR needs.

I was very impressed with the quality of the tags and the printed images. Boost Promotions offers customization and they are affordable! Students love to collect things so this is an awesome way to celebrate student successes!

Boost Promotions offers not only Brag Tags but also several accessories, such as spirit tags and lanyards to help promote school spirit and support positive achievements at a fraction of the cost you may expect.

Boost Promotions are so awesome that they are letting me give away 100 Brag Tags to one lucky reader! You will receive 100 Brag Tags (25 each of four designs) of your choice! Enter below using the Rafflecopter widget. Good luck to all! Giveaway ends on Friday, May 10th and the winner will be announced that weekend!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

I think technically I am a little late linking up to this, but I still want to play along! This Linky Party is hosted by Latoya over at Flying into First Grade. Here’s the topic this week:

My favorite ice cream flavor…. hmm…I like all sorts of ice cream flavors. At Cold Stone I love getting chocolate and banana ice cream mixed up with bits of Heath Bar in it. Mmmm…. unfortunately, the closest Cold Stone is about 30 minutes from my house. So when I am having an ice cream craving I like to buy Denali Moose Tracks ice cream – specifically the Chocolate kind. Chocolate ice cream with peanut butter cups and fudge.  I like to pour some of that Reece Peanut Butter Cup Shell over the top. And if I am feeling really crazy (which usually I  am!) I also sometimes dump Heath baking bits on top! Mmmm…. so yummy! I didn’t even know until this very minute that my favorite kind of ice cream has its own website!

Sports? Really?? I don’t “do” sports. Seriously, I think professional sports are the biggest joke. Why should someone get paid thousands or millions more to simply shoot a ball through a hoop than people out there who save lives? Especially when we have so many people who do not have enough money to simply survive? Okay… I will get off my soap box now. If I HAVE to pick a favorite sports team then I pick the Nashville Predators Hockey team. Having a Canadian husband means that by default I am exposed to hockey more than the average person I guess.

Right now I have fallen back in love with reading. As a kid, I used to get piles and piles of books from the library. I would literally sit around all weekend long and read for hours and hours. I was big into series books – The Baby-Sitters Club, Sweet Valley Twins, etc. In the past few years I stopped reading for pleasure for the most part. I read to the kids at school but that’s not the same. When my husband and I found The Hunger Games books, I fell in love with them but he mostly read them all to me. Yes, we get into bed at night and he reads to me. Last month, my husband had to go away to a conference to present and I was left alone for a few days. I downloaded some eBooks into my Nook app on my iPhone and I have been reading like a maniac ever since! I’ve read The Host, Defiance, the Beautiful Creatures series, The Mortal Instruments series, Divergent series, Matched series, Delirium series, and now I’m into the Fallen series. Yes, I still love a good series.

I signed up and was assigned to Kelley Dolling from Teacher Idea Factory (who I am sure you must know from her awesome Good Morning Work packets!). I decided to review her WOW vs. Blah sentences packet which is her top seller!

I have a very diverse group of writers this year (as I do every year). I have students who can write perfect three page stories with no spelling mistakes and students who struggle to put even the beginning sounds of a word on a page. I have noticed this year’s group really fell into the “awesome” trap. You know what I mean right? How every sentence they want to write says “It was so awesome. It was really so so so so so so awesome.” I swear, everything they write has to have the word awesome in there as well as at least five or six so’s. I often change popular picture books into boring stories where every other word is awesome or so so so just to make the point of how B-O-R-I-N-G that is! This is why I knew Kelley’s WOW vs. Blah sentence packet would be perfect for my class!

Kelley’s packet begins with a visual of how to teach your students a visual of what a WOW sentence is and what a Blah sentence is. How cute is she?! My kids LOVED the gestures! I got really crazy and animated with it while explaining it to the students. We had a great time!

Kelley’s packet includes multiple activities to practice writing and recognizing WOW and Blah sentences. We did the sentence sort first. After explaining the difference between a WOW and Blah sentence and introducing the gestures students had to read sentences and determine if it they were WOW or Blah. They had a lot of fun with this activity since the WOW sentences were really fun and silly.

Each day we did one of the shared writing templates together. These pages give three blah sentences and the students have to turn the blah sentence into a WOW one. We did many together as an example and then I let the students do them on their own.

One a student did independently

One we did together

I noticed that pretty quickly ALL of my students were writing more detailed sentences. My students that struggle with writing did not include as many adjectives in their writing as other students BUT they were adding a lot more details and forming longer sentences than they were before which was huge for them! Some of my students really took off with the WOW sentence concept! It was great fun to read their sentences!

Included in the packet is a center activity where students hunt down the WOW words in sentences, write their own sentence and illustrate it. We did this activity in cooperative groups. I gave each group a different sheet. We did this a couple of different times so each time I just gave each group a different sheet than they had previously.

At the end of the week, I gave each student a different a Blah sentence and they had to rewrite it as a WOW sentence. I took each student’s picture making a Wow face and added it to their sentence. I will hang these up in the hallway. The kiddos LOVED having their picture taken and their sentences were awesome! They turned out so cute!

Everything in the packet was a ton of fun and I can’t wait to use these activities earlier in the year next year so we can refer to Wow and Blah sentences all the time. Maybe this will save me some of the “it is so so so so awesome” lectures.

If you need some fun ideas to get your class to write more detailed sentences, be sure to snatch this up! And be sure to visit The Teacher Idea Factory and tell Kelley that First Grade Brain sent you over!

Visit Kelley’s blog here
Visit Kelley’s TPT store here

Have a great Easter!