Five for Friday

Happy Friday! I wanted to link up really quick with Doodle Bugs Teaching for Five for Friday and give you a little peek into my week! You can link up by heading over to her blog or clicking on the button below.

So here's a quick look at five highlights from this week...

A while back, Ashley from Teaching in Bronco Country did a great Periscope about the Pets in the Classroom grant program. I went straight over to the website and filled out the application. You actually apply for a specific animal. About a week later, I received our approved grant in the mail. It was that fast! I went this week before a family night event and picked our little hamster up. I did have to pay for 50% of the hamster, which was about $8, but the setup was totally free. They even included coupons for other things you might need. The kids are in love! You should definitely go check it out by clicking on the button below.

You can also visit Ashley's blog and check out her original post about the program by clicking on her button below.

I've mentioned NAEIR a few times before, but I just had to show you all the sticky notes I got in my most recent order. All of these sticky notes cost me $3. And they're normal sized sticky notes! The blue ones are monsters, the green ones are hats, and the pink ones, of course, are flowers. This is only a small part of my order, which also included labels, dry erase boards, tape, and 160 SCENTED Fouhy erasers. Those erasers only cost me $2. TWO BUCKS!!! I'm hoping to do a quick scope from my classroom tomorrow to show more of the stuff I got.

One downside is you have to place a minimum order of $25. The supplies are technically free, and you pay the shipping fees. I order maybe every 3-4 months, so it's pretty easy for me to come up with at least $25 to meet the minimum.

If you haven't yet, head over to their website and sign up for a free teacher account. You can click HERE to head over now.

Jess from The Whimsical Teacher made a comment on Periscope one night that we should blog about purposeful things...like how to solve teacher problems. And I had a problem...headphone storage!!! My desktop computer headphones simply hang on the monitor. The listening station headphones stay in the station boxes. I just didn't know what to do to store my Chromebook headphones. I literally have no space left in my room. So, I saw this empty spot on the side of a counter, and this idea was born. I used light-weight Command hooks, gallon sized bags, and mini-binder clips. The binder clip is strategically placed at the edge of the bag so it doesn't interfere with opening the bag, and the kids don't have to take it off. They simply lift a bag off the hook and go sit down. When they're done, they place the headphones back in the bag (no winding cords up), zip it, and hang it on the first open hook. So easy, and I had everything in the classroom to do it. Don't you love it when that happens???

I seem to be mentioning Periscope in the post a lot, but it is where I am gifted the best ideas from some of the best teachers! During Math Motivation Monday on the I Teach TV Network, Angie from Lucky Little Learners shared five strategies for subtraction with regrouping and even shared a great freebie. I wasted no time and used it the next day in my classroom to help some of my kiddos who were having a hard time transitioning from concrete to semi-concrete representation. It work better than I hoped! You should definitely click her button below, and head over to her blog to check out the post she did to accompany her scope.

My team had to do some adjusting during our intervention time to accommodate a heavy load of fluency kiddos. We have a fantastic online reading program called myON. We knew this would be a great activity for our grade-level and beyond students because they are still reading and completing a comprehension piece every day. While the students usually select which books they read, we have the capability to assigned specific books to each student and monitor their performance on quizzes. We also created a special page they fill out to hold them to an even higher level of accountability.

Since the transition from being in a teacher-led classroom to a self-led classroom was rather quick, we had to ensure the kids could complete purposeful, independent work with minimal disruption to the fluency groups we have. So... the myON Work Group poster was made. We laid out how to get through their assignment from start to finish and even included (most) problems we anticipated. It has worked great so far! I could definitely see making similar posters for my stations during my literacy block!

Well, those were just a few highlights from my week! We are finally supposed to get some serious snow this weekend, and I am ready for it! This is Colorado, after all!

Have a great week!