Tuesday, January 19, 2016

I hope you have started to love Tuesdays as much as we have! It’s another week of Featured Teacher Tuesday!
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Our Featured Teacher this week is Melanie Ebersole from Momma with a Teaching Mission!
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Melanie Ebersole is a 1st Grade departmentalized Literacy Teacher. She is also the Mom to 4 young children, 2 boys (ages 10 and 6) and 2 girls (ages 7 and 1).
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Melanie is currently in her 3rd year of teaching. She teaches at a school with approximately 700 students in Maryland. She worked in Human Resources for 5 years before finishing her teaching degree and pursuing her dream of teaching. Melanie always wanted to be a teacher, but with life happening, wasn’t able to pursue completing her degree until after having 3 children. You can read more about her journey HERE.
Melanie has a passion for departmentalization. She did a guest blog on Rachel Lynette’s Minds in Bloom, you can read HERE! She also wrote another guest blog post on a blog she collaborates on Who’s Who and New, you can read about Why Teaching in a Departmentalized Classroom Rocks HERE. You can also read more about departmentalization within the primary classroom on her own blog HERE.

Besides running her blog, Melanie is also a TpT author! You can find her store at Momma with a Teaching Mission.

Some of her newest products include…
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Miss Independent CVC No Prep Printables. These are perfect for building your students independence stamina when working with CVC words.

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This bundle pack is perfect if you are teaching the common core. So many different options for games, homework, formative assessments, or warm-ups.

Monday, January 18, 2016

Hot Chocolate Measuring

Brrrrrrr!  These cold days have me wishing I was snuggled up by a fire drinking some hot coco!  My students, I do believe, would agree.  We can't have that fire in our classroom, but we can sure have the hot coco!  A few weeks ago, our math time turned to all things "chocolatey".  Hot chocolatey that is.  Let me explain. Part of being a first grader is learning to measure by expressing length in whole units. (CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.1.MD.A.2)  These units can be tiles, inches, pictures, cubes.....marshmallows, hot chocolate packets, straws.... you see where I am going here?  So I decided it would be great fun to use some of those more unusual things to measure with.  I started planning and one idea lead to the next and before my first graders knew it, we were up to our ears in marshmallows! YUM!
To begin the unit, students were all given different sizes of marshmallows.  Have you seen how many different shapes and sizes there are of marshmallows now?  We worked on ordering these marshmallows by length and comparing the marshmallows to a standard unit.  CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.1.MD.A.1  We got really good at expressing our thoughts in "length" words.  Words like longer, shorter, taller, wider, etc. became common vocabulary in our classroom.  This helps to understand the idea of comparing length rather than size.   Size words might be bigger, smaller, larger and so on.


Students practiced the rest of the week practicing their measuring skills with marshmallows.  They first got the hang of things by measuring objects on measuring mats and then quickly moved to measuring mugs, hot chocolate packets, school supplies and more.  We really had a fun week and learned so much with this unit.  If you would like to check it out for yourself, you can find it here!
                                                    FIRST GRADE 1 WEEK COMPLETE MEASUREMENT UNIT HOT CHOCOLATE THEME

Tuesday, January 12, 2016

Feature Teacher

This week's featured teacher is Ashley, 1st grade teacher and blogger over at The Blessed OCDiva. The name pretty much speaks for itself! She has a passion for sharing God’s word, sharing goodies for teachers, and providing a fix for anyone else just a tad OCD!
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She is married to her other half and they are doggy parents to Groot (yes like Guardians of the Galaxy Groot) and Maximus(yes like Gladiator Maximus Aurelius).
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Ashley has been teaching for 7 ½ years and 6 of those have been in first grade. Along with teaching she also is the lead mentor for her campus and has been a team leader for 5 years. She loves being able to help lead other teachers and ignite their passion for learning and teaching; ultimately hoping to be able to turn that into a path for her career.


In 2014, she was Teacher of the year for her campus. What an honor and blessing this was!! All possible through God’s never ending love and direction.
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Since starting her blog, The Blessed OCDiva, she also opened up her TPT store as well and has worked at building it to offer resources for other teachers that span across the curriculum.      Some of her products include: (click to check them out)

This little packet is an integration of social studies, writing, reading, and math!!!
It focuses on 6 main landforms: hills, mountains, valley, canyon, cliff, and island.
I have included the following types of activities to help you teach:
-anchor charts
-writing definitions/characteristics of each
-matching the name to picture
-identifying the type of landform and labeling
-Count, Tally and graph
-Writing response with question stems
-landforms book with fill in the blanks (answer key included)
-Guessing game


I have also included a page of suggestions to help with understanding how it is intended to be used. However, feel free to use it according to your kids needs!
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Do you like to challenge your kids during reading workshop? Do you want them to be able to have accountable talk and written response with their text? If you do, these cards are for you!!


These can be used very easily within the workshop time frame of read to self, read with a buddy and even small groups. The teacher will want to model A LOT! But it is intended for slow release until independence!!


-2 formats for teacher’s preference of printing
-mini anchor charts for reference or can also be easily inserted into the kids card bundle
-color coded for ease of use
- table of contents for teacher and student use


Click here to see how I use them!


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Here is a bundle pack of all things geometry! 108 pages of fun! I made it as versatile as possible so it can reach anyone with many objectives!
I have included the following items in each section.


2-D shapes:
-anchor charts for each shape (square,circle, rectangle, triangle, rhombus,trapezoid, pentagon, hexagon,octagon)
-Memory match
-Book of shapes (this also integrates some fractions)
-Matching shapes
-Identifying sides/vertices
-Assessment/independent practice
-Find,Tally,Graph
-Roll and Cover
-Connect 4 spin and cover


3-D shapes:
-anchor charts for each shape (sphere, cube, triangular prism, rectangular prism, pyramid,cone,cylinder)
-Memory Match
-Find, Tally, Graph
-Name match
-Assessment/independent practice
-Sorting 3-D
-Attributes charts
-Roll, Slide, Stack chart
-Connect 4 spin and cover


Fractions:
-anchor charts (whole,half, thirds, fourths)
-Memory Match
- Bingo
-Equal/Unequal activities
-Spin and Cover
-Roll and Cover
-Assessment/independent practice
-Color fractions
-Spin and Color
-Find, Tally, Graph


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Snag some freebies while you are checking out the resources above!


This one has had over 17,000 downloads!







Be sure to keep up to date with all of the OCDiva action!
Facebook ( I update this weekly)
Twitter: The Blessed OCDiva


Have a BLESSED week!
“Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.
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