The Book Fair, fractions, TPT and the weather man?!

Woohoo! Teachers Pay Teachers is celebrating 3 million sellers tomorrow and Friday- WOW!! As a new seller, I'm super excited to join the fun, post my new things for sale, and stock up on some great things too!  Here is an update on some super fun things I've created just in time for the sale! :)

 The first thing I created is something I'm super excited about!  I've had an ongoing list of skills my kids need to practice before their Reading SOL that our comprehension activities don't always cover.  I love to incorporate seasonal things into my lessons to make our day more fun and upbeat!  So, I created this GIANT St. Patrick's Day themed LA bundle.  Included activities are... St. Patrick's Day letter mash up, a vocabulary dictionary activity, a vocabulary word search, a cross word puzzle, shamrock synonyms and antonyms, a madlibs story, shamrock prefixes and suffixes, identifying vowels and vowel sounds, and ABC order.  It's quite a bundle that I plan on using during Reading rotations for the week of.  Hopefully my kiddos will enjoy the fun theme :)

With all of our snow days, we're a little behind in our curriculum! (Insert scared, stressed out face
here.)  My kids have been troopers though with getting caught up and are demolishing fractions- who knew that was totally possible?!  We're moving right along but I'll be sure we take a break to have a fun scoot filled day for these understanding fractions task cards- that are totally decked out in green, gold, and all things St. Patrick's Day!  These cards cover all the skills the kids need to have mastered before the ever dreaded... adding and subtracting fractions.  This bundle includes cards for: regions and sets, fractions and division, estimating fractional amounts, equivalent fractions, simplest form, mixed to improper, improper to mix, comparisons, and ordering fractions- whew! I'm looking forward to using these through out the month as well for other activities!  Oh, and how adorable is this clip art from Krista Wallden?!

Today the kids were totally rocking it out with simplifying fractions but like them, I am sick and tired of using our boring work book and notebook paper to solve fractions... so I whipped up these fun robot cards to use for tomorrow.  Instead of playing scoot like the kids and I are used to, I'll have the cards "hidden" throughout out the room for the kids to work on. This way they can go at their own pace and won't get stressed out from the timer during scoot.  I also have more cards than kids so hopefully they'll work independently ;)


In other news, a LOT of exciting things have been going on in 4th grade! The first exciting event took place last week.  We finished our weather unit a few weeks ago (check out the weather stuff in my store!) and invited one of our area's popular meteorologists, George Hirschmann to our school to give a "weather talk" to our kids.  I was pleasantly surprised that the kids remembered so much from our unit and asked Mr. Hirschmann some great questions!  A lot were tornado and lightening related, but he answered them all with some comical comments and delivered some great info.  The kids even got a shout out that evening on the local news which was awesome!


Since we're working on fractions right now, I've been incorporating Cuisenaire Rods to introduce topics and skills.  The kids were excited to get their hands on something tangible and enjoyed discovered how fractions work.  We used them to introduce equivalent fractions and I plan on using them throughout the rest of our skills.  Sometime in the future, I plan on writing a post about how I use the rods in my lessons.  For now, try to decipher the equivalent fractions the kids discovered :)

Last but not least, it's Book Fair week at my school! I remember the excitement, curiosity, and toy filled goodies the book fair always brought... I miss those adorable, half naked baby, Anne Geddes book marks and posters!  So anyway, my kids know that I'm a Disney freak and love the new movie, Frozen.  One of my girls found my "wish list" in the library and snagged this book as a gift! :) She caught on to the connection between Frozen and this book's snowman and realized that the he was like Olof, hehe!  So we read the book at the end of the day and then I let the kids watch the video that was pretty similar to parts of the book!

Also, as a newlyed, I just HAD to purchase this book.... just to totally support the book fair though! ;)  I'm making cookies tonight (from the book) to use for an inference lesson and author's purpose writing activity for tomorrow. The kids know I love, LOVE cookies!








Oh, and now that the Olympics are over, check out our finished graph!  We didn't have the time to fill out the medals like I hoped, but it was still fun! (Not always straight and neat, but fun!)

Enjoy the sales on TPT my friends! Looks like our county will have our first FULL week of school since December- woohoo! :D