500 Follower Giveaway Day 2

Time for Day 2 of our celebration!  If you missed yesterday's post, head over there to enter to win a $25 Teachers Pay Teachers Gift Card along with a ton of Winner's Choice products from some amazing sellers!
5 Days - 5 Different Giveaways!  There will be a different winner each day!

Each day 5 items from my store will be on sale for 50% off.  The rest of the store is discounted 20% the whole 5 days.  I will also have a freebie each day - so everyone is a winner!

The freebie for today is:

Read and Respond Reading Journals and Logs

The five items marked down 50% are:

Dear Mrs. LaRue Reading Packet

Cooperative Learning Activities for Wonder

My Lucky Day Teaching Unit

Can We Get A Class Pet?

Tops & Bottoms Assessment

Thank you to all of the donors who donated to today's giveaway!  You can win sooo many great products!

Rhyming Words Task Cards from Dabbling in Differentiation 

Dolch First Grade 9 Weeks of Sight Word Work



Mother Goose's Nursery Rhyme Centers


Writing Paper With Picture Boxes

Pirates and Parrots Domino Add the Room



School Carnival Design



STEM Challenge Bubble Making


Opinion Writing



Bloom's Taxonomy Posters - Are You Charged?



Money Coin Posters and Activities



The Circulatory System Foldable


Product of your Choice (up to $10)



Pirate for a Day!



The Greedy Triangle



Inferring Bundle

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500 Follower Giveaway Day 1

I hope your 4th of July went off with a bang!  And speaking of going off with a bang - I am celebrating 500 followers with 5 days of giveaways!  I am over 500 followers on Teachers Pay Teachers and a little over 450 on Bloglovin'!  Woo hoo!

In honor of this milestone I will be having 5 days of contests.  Each day features 1 big prize along with Teachers Pay Teachers products donated by 14-15 amazing sellers.  I will also have 5 items each day on sale for 50% off and the rest of my store is on sale for 20% off for the whole 5 days!  Each day one item will be set as a flash freebie for one day only.  So, really, everyone is a winner!  I really do appreciate all of my followers so much!

My freebie for today is my Officer Buckle & Gloria Activity Pack.

My 5 items on sale for 50% off are:

3rd Grade Math Journal

4th Grade Math Journal

2nd Grade Math Journal

Capitalization Packet

Persuasive Writing Unit Third Grade

Kicking off Day 1 of the giveaways is your chance to win a $25 TpT gift card along with a $10 Shopping Spree in my TpT store! 

You also get a product of your choice from the following stores:

Enter below.  Be sure to come back all week to see the new prizes each day!

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Learning About Your Students - Reading Interest Surveys Worksheet Wednesday #5

A new year means a new group of students!  Students that you don't know yet.  How do you learn as much about them as you can in a short amount of time?  One way I get to know my new students better is to use a reading interest survey to let me know what things they like and are interested in.

 I have created a Favorites List.  I got the idea as I was reading 100 Minutes by Lisa Donohue for our book study earlier this summer.  Donohue suggested grouping students by interest levels.  This idea intrigued me, so I created a form to capture my new students' interests at the beginning of the year.

I had said in that previous post:

I looked on-line but couldn't find exactly what I wanted, so I created:

My Favorites List  (You can download it free here)

Knowledge of students' major areas of interest helps a teacher to select appropriate instructional exercises. Research has shown that students read interesting material more easily and with higher comprehension. By understanding what students' interests are "we can guide students to select books from the classroom library that will allow them to become engaged readers." (Moss & Young, 2010, p. 56)

  As we all know, if a child is interested in the material, he or she will be more willing to complete the lesson. I can't wait to find out what my new students' interests are next month!  I have had the same class for two years in a row, so it is going to be an adjustment to learn about new students.

I am also going to have them complete this Activity Rating Scale from Laura Candler (pgs. 3-4).  The first two pages are an alternate reading interest survey you could use as well. 

How do you learn about your new students at the beginning of the year?

Before you go, head on over to our giveaway page to enter our current giveaway!  Every week one lucky winner gets a $25 Teachers pay Teachers gift card! 

References:
Moss, B. & Young, T.A. (2010) Creating Lifelong Learners Through Independent Reading. Newark, DE. International Reading Association

Currently July 2014 and Two for Tuesday

Can you believe it is July already??? Where is my summer going?  Time to link up with Farley for Currently!

It is also time to link up with The Teaching Tribune for Two For Tuesday! This week for my two deals, I decided to ask my followers on Facebook for suggestions for the two items they wanted me to discount to 50% off today only.  

So there you have it... My two deals of the day are:

Divisible Me

and

Kicking It Math Multiplication and Division Fact Fluency Program

Monday Made It June 30th

Summer is here, but that doesn't mean all of us teachers aren't working!  I think many of us work harder in the summer getting things ready for the upcoming year.  I know this because Monday Made It is always full of evidence of it!

Here are a few of the things I have made this week:

Ok, I have jumped on the spray painting band wagon! I have these containers where I keep all of my supplies, but the covers were getting a little dingy from all the little hands touching them. 

They may have even been a little extra loved on and decorated.  Gotta love 4th grade humor right??? 

Anyway... I had thought about bringing them home to scrub with some Mr. Clean Magic Erasers, but then I saw everyone in bloggy world spray painting the heck out of everything they could get their hands on, so I decided, why not?

Before

After.

Luke also decided to join the spray painting party.  He had us spray paint his pegs for his bike (they were silver) so that it matches.  He may have gotten the matching OCD thing from me..

I also managed to make my new Whole Brain Teaching 5 Rules posters to match my room.  The matching OCD thing..  I still need to cut around the laminate and hang them up, but they are made!

And.. I managed to give my TpT store a little love with 2 new products! 

Homophones Bingo

and 

Prefixes & Suffixes Bingo

Both of these products were flash freebies this weekend, and I let my Facebook fans know about it.  If you aren't already following me on Facebook, make sure you do to find out about flash freebies like this one!

And speaking of following, make sure you are following me on Bloglovin' as well.  I have a big 500 follower giveaway coming up that you don't want to miss!  I am already a bit over 500 followers on TpT and I am getting close on Bloglovin' I would love to be at 500 on both by July 5th (hint, hint).  

Make sure you link up to 4th Grade Frolics and show us what you've made!  If you don't know how to link up, check out the tutorial on linking up to linky parties I wrote yesterday.