Teacher Happy Planner Giveaway

Teacher Giveaway!

Are  you still looking for your perfect Teacher Planner?  Well, you are in luck, because I am giving away this 2018-2019 BIG Happy Planner Box Kit, Teacher Edition - Teach From the Heart - Big Teacher Planner!

This post contains affiliate links. I earn a small commission each time someone makes a purchase using one of my links, which helps to support the blog.  All opinions are my own and I only promote brands and products that I have used myself and truly love.

This exact version is no longer available on Amazon, but I did find this similar one.  

I have posted before about my Arc Planner, which I LOVE, but it was getting too big with both my personal and my school items in it.  I decided to go with the Happy Planner for school because it uses the same hole punch to be able to add pages that I might need myself.

At our school we are required to turn in out lesson plans on Plan Book, but I like having a paper version to keep notes of things that worked or didn't work, or student progress on them.  With the Happy Planner, I can print them out, punch them, and add them right in. 

I will be sharing a video with a walk-through of my planner soon, along with some ideas and resources that I have found, but for now, I wanted to get this giveaway going, so you can get your hands on your own as soon as possible!

You will be getting the same exact set as I have (shown in the pictures) along with this accessory pack.

GIVEAWAY DETAILS:  

Prizes: Teacher Happy Planner

             Teacher Happy Planner Accessory Pack

Rules: Use the Rafflecopter to enter.  Giveaway ends 8/25/18 and is open worldwide.  Due to shipping costs, giveaway is only open to residents of the United States.

Are you a Teacher Blogger or Teachers pay Teachers seller who wants to participate in giveaways like these to grow your store and social media?  Click here to find out how you can join our totally awesome group of bloggers!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Learning About Windmills - STEM fun!

One of my fellow teachers and I have been taking a STEM class to help us integrate STEM into our curriculum.  As part of our class, we have been very lucky to receive a variety of resources, but our favorite so far has been a KidWind kit!

With the kit, our students have been able to design their own windmills with the following purposes:

1. A design that will lift the most weight.
2. A design that will create enough power (electricity) to turn on a small light bulb.

We started our lesson by allowing the students to play with the kits, designing windmills as they built them.

As they watched each team try out their designs, they made lots of observations and developed several theories.

Once they tested a few out, it was time to plan some re-design based on the observations they had made the day before.

I loved how some of the students used tools we had used in previous lessons (rulers and using centimeters) as they wrote out their plans.

Some used prior knowledge.

Here is a video of some of our students lifting washers with their windmill:


Our winning engineers who lifted the most weight.  They were so proud!

Here are some students creating electricity with their windmills.

You can order these kits here (you could also use it as a Donors Choose project!).  Or you could try to make a similar kit to the one shown below.  Our instructors from the STEM class ran our school's science night and brought these versions with them. They used wood dowels, closet rod, PVC pipe, swimming “noodles” cut 3 inches wide, a washer, and hot glue to make them.  

They poked barbecue skewers into the pool noodle and taped paper plates to them to make their windmill panels.

Have you integrated STEM into your classroom?  I'd love to hear what you've done!  If you have a blog post about it, be sure to leave a link in the comments below.

A Peek at My Week-November 10, 2013

I am linking up with Mrs. Laffin's Laughings for A Peek at My Week.
 
Because of Veterans Day, this next week will be short of course, but it will be even shorter for me since I am taking the GRE on Wednesday! And although I should be working on sub plans as we speak, I am blogging instead! LOL!

 Daily 5 (Reading and Writing Mini-Lessons)

 We are finishing up our poetry unit and will continue to work on reading Love that Dog and using mentor texts to write our own poems.  I will be posting more about this later on this week and next week, but I am loving how their work is turning out!  My reluctant writers are turning into poets!  

 Math 

 This week begins our division unit.  Most of my kiddos are still struggling with the concept of division and their basic division facts, so this week will be an extensive review before we dive into the processes of long division.   I just started small math group instruction two weeks ago and I am LOVING it.  I really loved when one of my struggling kiddos said, "The best part of math rotations is working with the teacher!" (My other rotations are seat work and games). I feel like I can really give each student what they need and ALL of my students are making progress instead of just a few.  

 One of the games I will be adding to the rotations this week is this division bump freebie game from Games 4 Learning. 

Social Studies

We will continue learning about the Pony Express.  We had a re-enactment done a few weeks ago sharing letters from our school to another local elementary school which the kids loved!  We have been reading a few pages of this book everyday.

We will then start learning about Native Americans in our state.

Science

This week starts our unit on systems of the human body.  

Seems like an awful lot to cover in a short week, but somehow we will make it all work!

Teaching Subjects and Predicates With Mr. Morton - FREEBIE

‘Mr Morton is the subject of the sentence, and what the predicate says he does.’

That song is ingrained in my brain after I used the Grammar Rock anthem to teach some of my kiddos about subjects and predicates.  Several of them were having difficulty with  writing complete sentences, and most of them were thrown into a tizzy when we were working on some of Jivey's amazing grammar lessons when they were asked to identify the subject and predicate in her mentor sentences.

So... a mini-lesson was in order.

First we watched the video:

Then we practiced identifying the subject and the predicate in the sentences from the video. They really got it after I modeled a few of the sentences.

I also found this picture from Doxie House that I will definitely incorporate next year or if I have a few strugglers.

I made a free worksheet for you to use with your students if you would like.  You can download it here. 

While you are there, be sure to follow me on Teachers Pay Teachers for the chance to win a $25 TpT gift certificate :D

Failing to Plan is Planning To Fail - Creating Your Long Term Plans for the School Year

 

 

You have probably heard this adage a time or two, but have you ever followed it?  This will be the second year in a row that I am switching grades (last year I switched from 7th grade math to 3rd grade and this year I am moving up to 4th), and I don't want to feel like I don't know where I'm going.  So, I used the curriculum map we have from our school district, and added the things that aren't there (science, social studies, grammar, and writing) to create a set of Long-Term plans for the year.  Even if I don't stick to it 100%, I feel better having a plan to cover everything I need to during the year.

 

 

It didn't print out 100% perfectly, but since I' m the one who is using it, I'm ok with that.  If any of you know how to fix it, I'm all ears :)

 

I have put the plans in the back of my lesson planning notebook for future reference as I start working on individual units.  The front of my lesson plan book is for my weekly plans and monthly calendars where I will list out everything including special events, assemblies, etc.

 

I will be sharing my complete book in a little bit - I bought the Staples Circa I had my eye on and am working on customizing it to fit for me. 

 

I have uploaded the Excel version of this document so that you can edit it and use it if you would like - setting it up took forever, so I thought I would save you some time. It is a freebie, and all you have to do to get it is to like my Facebook page here.  It is in the Facebook Fan Freebie tab.

 

Do you make long term plans?



Learning About Frogs - Carousel

We are beginning a research/non-fiction unit on frogs (since we will be getting a class pet soon!). Before I told the kiddos what the unit was about (and what pet we were going to get), I had them complete a carousel activity.  I set up 6 stations around the room with pictures and chart paper. The chart paper was pre-labeled with "What I Notice" and "What I Wonder".

The students worked in groups of 3 and had 3 minutes at each station to talk about what they noticed.  Each group had a different colored marker and wrote down some of their observations and questions.

It was really fun to see what things they noticed (and what things grossed them out!). It was a great way to introduce the unit and get their brains engaged.  They did eventually guess that we would be learning about frogs.

I am working on the complete unit as they work on it, but I will eventually post the final unit to TpT when it is done.  In the meantime, you might want to check out my Can We Get a Pet Unit which kicked off the whole project you see here!

Have you used a carousel in class before? What other engagement ideas do you use?