Happy Veteran's Day

Good morning everyone!

First up - the winners from this weekend's giveaways:

Joanne was the lucky winner of the $25 Oriental Trading gift card!
Virginia was the winner of my Facebook comment giveaway - she wins a copy of my Turkey Time! pack. Make sure you follow me on Facebook so you don't miss out on flash giveaways and freebies! 


Next up, check out the cuteness:

My Winter Ten Frames Pack is up in my TPT store now! Its for all of you who can't celebrate Christmas in the classroom - it has 3 sets of ten frames from 0-20 featuring penguins, snowmen and children bundled up for cold weather. There are 1/2 page posters for display in the classroom as well as cards for work stations, along with matching recording sheets! Ten frames are great for building number sense and reinforcing addition!

I will be working on some Christmas/Winter units now, so if you have any skills you'd like to see addressed please leave me a comment or send me an email - I love getting suggestions!

I am off today in honor of Veteran's Day. My family and I are going to go out somewhere today - not sure where, but its bound to be one of the last nice weekends before winter truly hits! The rest of the day will be spent lesson planning, grocery shopping and house cleaning. Fun, fun!

I should be thankful though, because it seems that the stomach bug which struck my two oldest on Saturday night has run its course without anyone else in the family succumbing to it! It was looking a bit iffy there for a while, but the rest of us must have stronger immune systems because we managed to fight it off. My poor eldest two had a miserable Sunday, but seemed to be better as the day went on - which makes sense since I had bunches of children out sick this week, but most of them were only gone for 1 day.

I am working on assessments and progress reports this week. Actually my assessments are almost done - just have to grab the two that were out sick on Friday and then all of my Literacy 1st testing will be done! I was very gratified to see that the assessment bore out what I've been observing in class. Even more gratifying was the amount of progress that's been made!

We're at the point where we really need to work on sight words. I don't know about your class, but this year, the majority of my class is severely lacking in sight word fluency. This makes reading grade level books very difficult and frustrating. I've been needing something extra to help us focus on sight word acquisition, so I've been looking around and I finally found something I really like!

In order to make learning our sight words more fun, and to provide motivation for those who get little help at home, I am going to be using Marsha McGuire's Dolch Word Mastery sets. She has different sets for each Dolch Word List, from the Baseball Word Champs which covers Dolch word list 1 all the way through every sports ball imaginable to end with Beach Ball Word Champs which covers Dolch word list 11. 

Technically we use Literacy 1st words, but they overlap with Dolch quite a bit, and I really think my kiddos will go nuts for these Word Champs activities. I will keep you updated on how it goes - the thing I like best is that this is easily differentiated for my students, - each one will be working on their own words, and I can move them on to the next list very easily! The other thing is that as a student masters one list of words, he can then be a helper to others who are still on that list - I have quite a few that will make awesome peer tutors!

Alright, I am out of here for the day! I hope all of you who have to work today have a great day with your little ones! And for those of you who are off,  enjoy your holiday and remember to say thank you to a veteran!