Live, Laugh, Love Second: Five for Friday

Another fantastic week has come to a close...which means I am one week closer to my first Fall Break! We have 2 more weeks to go, and I am so looking forward to having a break. It's not that I'm tired of teaching or stressed out. That's not it at all! But...I am looking forward to time to recharge, so I can keep teaching full throttle. I love teaching, but let's be real...it's mentally exhausting! This will be a much needed break for me. I'm hoping to post some pending products to TpT and organize my clipart, but we'll see how much I actually get done.

In the meantime, I'm linking up again with Doodle Bugs Teaching for Five for Friday. Head over to her blog by clicking on the button below and check out more blogs!

We've been working on place value, so I've been trying to come up with some creative ways to practice while still sticking as close as I can to Engage NY. I made this spinner activity to use as an independent activity while I small group on another skill. The kids loved flicking the paper clip, and I love that they were practicing their place value skills. You can click HERE to download a free copy of the page to use in your room! The fonts are all KG (Geronimo Blocks, One More Night) and the adorable stars are from Krista Wallden's Dragonfly Creative Kit. It was a a FREE DOWNLOAD! You can download the kit HERE. I made the spinners myself using my mad shape skills. Ha! I'll be making more pages to accompany this one, and when I finish I will put them on my TpT store.

One of our activities was counting up on an empty number line, and some of the students really struggled with it. While the others were working with the Place Value Spin, my small group and I used these old, magnetic, dry erase sentence strips to practice counting up. I bought these sentence strips 6 years ago, and I used them ONCE. I'm glad I was able to dust them off and use them again.

More place value! This was another way we practiced empty number lines and writing in unit form. I'm really happy I decided to let the kids write directly on their desks. It took a LONG time for me to embrace this because I like desks to be clean, and this is a bit messy. But, it beats digging out the whiteboards and gives them a bigger work surface. I bought the plastic sleeves holding the charts at the Dollar Tree.

I laugh when I see this picture. It's from the beginning of the school year, and I was teaching the kids a chant. I look excited (and maybe a little bit crazy), and I really hope I have this same excitement all year! I love my new school, and I'm really glad I listened to Him and closed one door so He could open another one for me.