Top of the Evening to you!

Whew...just when I wrap up all my Dr. Seuss stuff I realized that now I have to start getting ready for St. Patrick's Day! I always make a big deal of it in my classroom, partly because I'm part Irish (1/4 on my father's side lol!) but also because it's one of those few non-secular holidays that I can embrace wholeheartedly because there's nothing to offend anyone or prevent anyone from participating (at least so far - watch now that I've said that there will be a big politically correct storm against celebrating leprechauns in the classroom!)

Anyways, in the past, our leprechaun friend has created a lot of chaos in the classroom whenever we tried to catch him - some of the things that he has done, that my kids remember even after a whole year (remember I have some from last year and even 2 years ago in my class this year!) are: peeing in our toilet and forgetting to flush (a few drops of greed food coloring in the bowl lol!), turned our chairs upside down while we were at recess, gathered all the green items in the class and left them in a pile, and used a green marker to draw on all of our dry erase boards! Last year he left a note that he lost a shoe in our classroom so this year my firsties are convinced that he'll be back to find it. Now I have to figure out where to get a tiny green shoe! I did find tiny green leprechaun hats at JoAnn Fabric the other day, but no shoes.

This year instead of creating one classroom trap, I'm going to have a family homework assignment where each student creates a leprechaun trap at home and then brings it to school to be set up. I'm working on my letter home and such for that, so look for a freebie with all the details on how to pull off a stellar leprechaun visit soon!

Speaking of freebies, I have a St. Patrick's Day freebie for you tonight! It's from my new St. Patrick's Day Lucky Leprechaun Math Unit (can you tell I had trouble deciding what to call it?!) It's up for sale in my TPT store now, and it's 60 pages of fun! Included are 5 activities that are suitable for small group or independent math centers featuring skip counting, fact families, place value and number sense as well as 5 math journal prompts with 2 digit addition without regrouping.

I threw this little color by sum in at the end, and decided to share it here with you as well, because if there's one thing guaranteed to please my class it's a coloring activity! Hopefully your kiddos will enjoy this as well!
Color by Sum St. Patrick's Day Freebie

All right, now on to the really fun stuff! Awards! I was totally doing a little happy dance earlier when I saw that I had received some very coveted awards! Alright, maybe they were only coveted by me, but when I saw that these awards were making the rounds of all my favorite blogs I was totally crossing my fingers that someone would remember me and choose my little ol' blog too! Kinda like when we were back in gym class and they were picking teams for dodgeball, but way more grown-up and sophisticated of course! anyways, I  was honored by the following lovely ladies:

From Chrissy B of





and Kimberley of
                                           
I received this award:

Isn't it pretty?!

AND, from Elizabeth of





I received this little beauty that I have long been eyeing!

Thank you ladies, you all rock! The funny thing is that I would have given each of you these awards as well, I follow each of your blogs and love them!

Ok, so the TBA award doesn't come with rules, but the One Lovely Blog award does and here they are:

1. Link to the person that gave it to you. (check!)

2. Follow the person that gave it to you. (already was!)

3. Pass to 15 others. (so hard to choose!)

Okay, in no particular order, and hopefully I'm not choosing blogs who have already accepted these awards here are my recipients for BOTH of these awards. Please go check them out - I truly love each and every one!

The First Grade Parade

Alright, time for lesson plans, have a great night everyone!