Pumpkin Character Book Reports

Whew! There is apparently no germ like a Pre-K germ! After several years of never getting sick, I was taken out by a stomach bug this week! My assistant also missed several days due to a respiratory virus. Between one or the other of us being absent, we had a crazy week! Thus the reason I have not posted our fabulous Pumpkin Character Book Reports! So, without further ado, here they are:

Each student who completed their Pumpkin Character Book Report received this Brag Tag:

I think Brag Tags are still the most inexpensive and cutest incentives around - my students love them!

We made sweet little Ghost Bananas on Halloween too - bananas dipped in vanilla yogurt with chocolate chip eyes:

I labeled my wax paper with the student names so that they were sure to have the same banana they prepared. Here's my little tip for next year - freeze the bananas on the sticks before you dip them. I didn't, and we had many a banana escape into the yogurt and need to be fished out! The kids loved them and I loved that it was an easy, inexpensive and healthy treat! It was a great activity since we couldn't have a Halloween party ;p

Well that catches me up, I'll be back tomorrow with a Veteran's Day freebie and some November news!

End of Year Fun!

Okay, I admit it, there wasn't really a proper, solemn "ceremonial" attitude during our BragTag ceremony. Instead there were squeals of delight, lots of chatter about the different projects that we did this year, and a ton of time spent making each necklace look "just right".

 Do you know BragTags? I LOVE them! Seriously, the best incentive system I have ever used. I've raved about them so much that our Student Council is buying some for next year to use as rewards for attendance, math club and for our principal and counselor to hand out to those "caught being good"!

 Each year my husband makes my BragTag board match my classroom decor - I seriously loved our Western themed board this year!

Next year we're going to be Space themed, can't wait to see what he comes up with!

The necklaces hang in our classroom all year long. As each homework project is completed, that BragTag is added to the students' necklaces. Since I teach in a Title I school sometimes its difficult to get participation in these kind of projects, but with BragTag incentive, many more students turn in projects than before!

On the last day of school we have our BragTag ceremony. This is also an incentive for everyone to come to school on the last day! I pass out any BragTags that haven' been added to our necklaces yet and then let the kids go to town with pony beads! 

 The kids wear their necklaces for the rest of the day and they are a big hit at recess - all of the older kids wants to see which BragTags my students earned and reminisce about the BragTags they earned when they were in my class! My students take the necklaces home as a great keepsake of the year - some of my former students still have their necklaces 3 years later!

I'm already designing my BragTags for next year! You can check them out at imagestuff.com ~ they run about 36¢ each which is a steal when you consider how much we usually spend on treasure box type rewards!

The other End of Year tradition I have is to send my kiddos off with a parting gift. This year I procrastinated and didn't get my Scholastic order in until the 17th! I was pretty sure my kiddos were going to go home bookless, but Scholastic pulled through! My box was delivered the afternoon of the 22nd ~ our last day! Talk about perfect timing! Each kiddo got a book, a sand pail and shovel, a set of markers, a notebook and a pencil bag with pen, pencils, eraser and sharpener! I have to admit that most of that was extras that I culled from several classrooms! My fellow teachers were digging through their closets so I could have a full set of 26 of everything lol! I purchased the sand pails at Walmart though and let me warn you - make sure they ALL have a shovel attached! I had 4 that I had to run and switch out at the last minute!

 

My kiddos were so excited to see these lining our windowsill!

Well, that was my last day with the kiddos, what end of year traditions do you have? Please rustle up a comment below and share!

Seuss Fun! (FREEBIE)

I am so happy to be able to post this picture of Sullivan! We got into see the pediatric dermatologist finally and with new lotions, antihistamines and a regimen of wet wraps, he is looking sooo much better! He's laughing for the first time in weeks! We still have to see an immunologist to find out the underlying cause and come up with a permanent plan, but it is such a relief to have him comfortable again!

 (Don't judge me for the candy corn jammies - his ointments stain everything so we are trying to keep him in old outfits for now lol)

I'm gearing up for Read Across America week! I've signed my class up to have visitors come read to us - we're just a few blocks from the university campus, so we always have education students volunteer for this type of thing. I even have a BragTag that kids can earn by reading a Dr. Seuss book aloud to the class and completing a writing activity.

Unfortunately, Dr. Suess Enterprises has a very tight copyright on Dr. Seuss titles and images, so a lot of the games and activities I had made or found on TPT had to be removed. I have found some adorable clipart that works around this issue, by utilizing a Circus Cat! I know my students will love the colorful graphics! I revamped several of my forbidden Dr. Seuss products with this Circus Cat clipart, and put them back up on TPT:

~An "I have..Who has? game with time to the hour and 1/2 hour!~

 ~An "I have...Who Has?" game with CVC words!~

~A fun card game with Fry Phrases for building reading fluency!~

~A word family matching game to help with rhyming and reading simple word families!~

~A Roll & Graph game that covers data analysis, comparing numbers and addition!~

 

~A Roll & Cover game set with number recognition, addition & subtraction boards!~

And here's a "What Makes Ten?" FREEBIE for you! Just click the picture to go download it now!

BragTags, Milk Carton Turkeys and a Freebie!

Good morning! Are you gearing up for next week or are you off the whole week? I have school on Monday and Tuesday and then I'm off for 5 wonderful days to spend time with my kiddos! I'm iffy on doing the whole Black Friday thing - so far I haven't seen anytrhing I truly need to wake up for, and of course, Sullivan wakes me up quite frequently still. I'm thinking if I have to wake up early I'd rather spend time cuddling with him:

I finally get to post about my BragTags! Since I had a substitute at the beginning of the year, I didn't bring out my BragTags at first, so I was excited to debut them this week and my students love them!

This is my board - I stretched the fabric and stapled it to the back. My husband painted the letters and stars and tacked them on and added the hooks. It is perfect for my Cowboy theme!

So far I have awarded tags for our Character Pumpkins as well as our Sight Word Stars (3 kiddos out of 27! We have so much work to do!) I had 2 sweeties turn in their Turkey Disguises early so they received their tags for that too - I'm hoping the other 25 remember theirs on Monday! I can't wait to see the creativity! I have  tags for "Falcon of the Month" as well and it is sooo hard to pick each month! And of course the yellow boot tags are just for being part of my class :)

Here's what the board looks like with the necklaces hung on it. I am ordering more this weekend - have to think of a fun one for a holiday homework packet - my new teammate wants to send one home over the break, so instead of taking a grade on it I will give a BragTag for anyone who completes and returns it. imagestuff.com is an awesome website - it is so easy to get the free proofs and order the BragTags. Our Student Council is looking at these as a whole school motivation tool for next year!

Oh! We made our Thankful Milk Carton Turkeys this week too - how cute did these turn out?!

 This year we used Mod Podge to attach strips of brown tissue paper. Some just layered the strips while others crumpled theirs into balls for a puffier look. I love how different they all are!

 

For the head I just had the kids "draw a circle with a rectangle for the neck". I love how this one is so skinny! He was also proud of his patterned feathers :)

Our turkeys are going to roost in our classroom tree until we write our list of things to be thankful for and stick them inside. Then the kids will take them home as centerpieces for their Thanksgiving tables! Oh! And we are getting so smart about turkeys! When I was talking about the turkeys roosting in the tree one of my kiddos said "Oh, these must be wild turkeys since domestic turkeys are too heavy to fly!" Love it!

Last week I shared some of my Math games and had a few requests for the Scoop & Tally recording sheet. Click here to go grab it for free!

Wrapping Up the End of the Year!

Well! It has been a whirlwind of wrapping up, packing up and finishing up around here! We are finally out for the summer, and while I will miss my kiddos, I am very glad for the time off! We had our last day on Thursday, and I had to have my whole classroom packed up and cleaned so that our local YMCA could move in by 3pm Friday! Talk about stressful! Everything had to come off the walls, furniture had to be emptied, cleaned and pushed against one wall, and cupboards had to be emptied unless I wanted things to walk off. I tell you, by 2pm on Friday afternoon, with only an hour to go, I was saying to heck with some of the stuff - if it walks off this summer or gets broken, I guess I'll just have to replace it!

I have to share some images from our final week. We had our BragTag ceremony where the students got to add beads to their necklaces and string the tags they'd earned:

Passing out the tags, picking out beads and trying to string them so they faced the same direction took quite a bit of concentration! We all gathered around the carpet for a good 30 minutes, reminiscing about what each tag represented.
For those of you new to BragTags, they are from www.imagestuff.com. You can custom order them and they are about 36 cents a piece. The company is fabulous to work with - you choose colors, design, shape etc and they make free proofs for you to view with no obligation to buy! They also have teacher packs that have all sorts of tags for attendance, homework, citizenship etc. The tags are plastic coated so they are very durable - I have students from last year who still have their necklaces! Here are some finished necklaces:

 

We got tags for being good spellers, for going on a field trip, for finishing our Chicken Life Cycle unit, for doing different Homework projects etc.


We used Marsha of A Differentiated Kindergarten's Ball Words Series to help learn our sight words this year, so this tag was for learning all 220 Dolch sight words!

I'm happy to say that 21 of 26 kiddos earned this one!

We had a Math Club that students could earn entry to - it was for any grade level, and they got a t-shirt and their name on a bulletin board. For 1st grade the standard was 100 addition problems with sums to 20 in 5 minutes. For kindergarten it was writing numbers from 1-100 and completing 10 addition problems with sums to 5 in 5 minutes. Once they earned their entry to the Math Club they got this tag:

I had to get them a special tag for it, because the shirt looked like this:

Did you notice anything about the t-shirt? Apparently the printer didn't either, which is why we got the shirts for free. I still think we should have trashed them and paid for properly printed shirts, but $ won out over common sense unfortunately, so I hoped that the BragTag would help make up for it. Surprisingly, we got not a single parental complaint about the shirts....

I have a few more end of year photos and stories to share, but I'll save them for another post. Now that I'm out of school I think I'll have more energy to blog :) so hopefully I'll be able to post several times a week over the summer. I have so much to share!

Oh, and thanks for all the sweet comments about our ultrasound appointment! We did indeed find out the gender - it was kind of hard to miss in fact, it was pretty much the only body part that baby decided to show off - for everything else he made sure to turn away from the camera! Yep, it is another boy - I'd show you the pic, but its rather pornographic since he truly was flaunting! Instead I'll show you the one semi-decent look we got at his chubby little face:

Now we just have to work on a name. I have one I've been using for him, but no one else in the family likes it. Of course since no one else can come up with anything better, I might be able to have my way with this. Seems we used up all the "good" names with our first 3 boys - Robert Andrew Frederick (he got the grandfathers' names), Thomas Patrick Ryan, and Joshua James Kees. Since we call them Robbie, Tommy and Joshie we wanted another name that could be shortened with a long e sound like that. My children are also insisting it has an O in it since they have a "secret" club called "MoRoToJo" (daughter's name is Moira) and if baby wants in apparently he will have to have a name that fits the consonant-O pattern lol.

So obviously, finding a name is going to be a tall order - almost as hard as keeping him in till his August 16th due date! I'm already having contractions - you know those "practice" contractions that I assure you I do not need after birthing 4 children! My body has had enough practice thank you very much! Not to mention the joys of gestational diabetes - one minute my blood sugar is too high and my vision is blurry and I'm soo sleepy, the next minute it nose dives and I get all sweaty and shaky. Again, very thankful school is over so I can deal with all of this without dealing with 26 kiddos at the same time!