Simple Spinner

I hope everyone had a great 3 day weekend with lots of fun, family, friends and football! I'm stopping by really quickly to share a very simple spinner. I'm going to use this to add some challenge to some of my math games. For those of you who use Envision, I like to take those topic games and turn them into file folder games for math stations. I will use these spinners with some of my math games from last week to add a little challenge and continue building our number sense. The idea is that my students will still spin the game spinner or roll a die, and then spin this and have to add or subtract 1 or 2 from that number. It would also be a great addition to a game like Chutes and Ladders. Of course there are a million uses for a spinner and in the near future I plan on making different spinners to help me differentiate activities - they might say things like 10 more, 10 less, etc. Anyway, click on the images below to download my blank spinner or my programmed more/less spinner. It took me less than 5 minutes to make this, but hey if I can save you 5 minutes by sharing it with you, I love that!Have a FANTASTIC week!



How does your garden grow?

This week we're working with r-controlled a, so I created a little game to use in centers this week. We've just wrapped up our plants unit and of course have been enjoying the beautiful spring weather here so it's all about growing a garden. Click on the graphic below to download it from google docs. I had a great time playing around with my new purchases from Just So Scrappy. That was the first time I'd been to the site and I know now that it won't be the last! Her stuff is super adorable and VERY affordable! Happy gardening!

Great Finds at the Dollar Tree!

How much do you love the Dollar Tree? I always come out of there with bags of random loot, but hey, they're only $1, right? Check out what I grabbed yesterday - I CANNOT wait to use these! (Please ignore the ugly carpet in the background...I'm renting!)

I hope you can read what's on them. These are going to be so great in my enrichment tubs, centers, small group... the list goes on! I'm actually thinking about making some of my own for their take home fluency folders as well.  The 4th pic is a pack of 4 blank spinners. Not sure what I'm going to use those for yet but the possibilities are endless! I also stocked up on more clothespins (you can never have too many!), more plastic tubs (again... never too many!), and Easter/Spring pencils. Have you found anything great at Dollar Tree lately?

Filling Buckets and a Long E ee/ea Game

I've been looking forward to starting up "bucket filling" in my classroom since December. I've seen lots of blog posts about it so I know I'm not the only one using this. My school didn't have the book so I had to wait and get it from another school, AND THEN we had snow and ice, AND THEN I had to wait until a day when FINALLY no one was absent. That day finally came on Monday. I had a small bulletin board that I was using for our focus wall/anchor wall (reading/la skills for the week are posted here), so I moved that over to a corner of my whiteboard and took over this space for our buckets. I plan on putting up pictures of our class to fill the empty space, but for their privacy I took this picture first. I used small library pockets and made a label with each student's name and clipart of a bucket. I couldn't find clipart that I liked for the sign so I drew that myself... I'd be lying if I said it took any less than 45 minutes for me to make that. I'm not much of an artist! I stapled an actual bucket to the board and it holds the notepaper and some pencils. I snagged that bucket (actually more like 5 of them) in the Target dollar spot last summer and I knew I'd find a use for it! We'll get notes out on Fridays only, and they can write notes for bucket filling when they finish morning routines, when they finish work early, after lunch when we're taking our bathroom/water breaks, or at the end of the day when they're all packed up. It's only been 2 days and those buckets are getting pretty full!

Our bulletin board

Our bucket filling notes

Here's something I've been working on for next week. It's an ee/ea long e game called "Read the Street". Students read the ee/ea words on the car cards and try to move their cars through each stop light. Watch out for yellow lights (lose a turn) and red lights (start over)! Every thing you need for the game is in the download and there are a few blank cars in case you want to add your own words. You might also want to draw arrows on your game boards to guide players through the lights. I'd love for some of you to use it and let me know what you think! Click on any of the preview pics below to download.