Veterans Day Emergent Reader, Videos and More!

 

Veterans Day is a big deal in my home and my community. Not only is my husband currently serving in the Army, I am also an Army Veteran. My father and my uncle were also veterans. We live on a military base, and a lot of my students have family members in the military.  

 

This is my husband and I, right after we met during advanced training! He's been in the Army for almost 20 years, and we've been married for 19 years!

So as you can imagine, we celebrate Veterans Day in a big way! Here are some of the books and videos I use in my classroom, and a freebie for you as well! Affiliate links to Amazon are provided for your convenience.Enjoy, and don't forget to thank a Veteran!

Veterans Day videos:

Kibboomer's Veterans Day song - your students could easily learn this to sing at an assembly.

Informative kid-friendly video about Veterans Day

Video highlighting reunions of soldiers and their families. Well put together and a tear jerker! 

 

Read aloud of "Veterans: Heroes in Our Neighborhood" book!

3rd Graders singing "I Still Believe" in honor of Veterans Day!

Great read alouds:

FREEBIE:

 Veteran's Day Songs & Reader - just click to grab this freebie!

Veteran's Day Freebie!

I'm getting ready for a short week! We have Veteran's Day off, so we're only in school 4 days this week! We have our Veteran's Day celebration tomorrow and my class will be singing "Red, White and Blue" by Debbie Clement. It is a great song for any of the patriotic holidays and the kids love doing the sign language while singing!

I have two math activities that are super easy that the kids always enjoy:

 Click here to grab it at TPT.

 My kiddos always do really well with data analysis since we play a lot of Roll & Graph games! Click here to grab it on TPT.

I also created a quick freebie for you - my kiddos are working on ordering numbers, and I'm trying to get them as much cutting practice as possible (we can  all hold our scissors correctly now, yay!) so I made a cut and paste sheet:

Click here to download it for free!

Veterans Day Pics, Turkey Math & a Freebie!!

Happy Veterans Day! I'm so happy to have this day off to spend with my family! In years past we had professional development on Veterans Day, but this year we got it off! My husband had a 4 day weekend (one thing to love about the Army, 4 day weekends for federal holidays!) so he was tasked with taking Sullivan to the doctor for his check-up and shots. Good news - Sullivan's hip click is gone so no more worries about dysplasia! Bad news - his skin is soooo dry but the only thing we can put on it is hydrocerin since he's so young, and the hydrocerin does almost nothing for it, so rather than having baby soft skin, Sullivan's little forehead feels like sandpaper :(  He apparently took his shots like a champ but was a bit sad that evening:

On Friday my school had a Veterans Day breakfast. In addition to myself, 3 other teachers at my school are vets! Our music teacher  put together a great program and I thought the cafeteria looked super:

My class did our part to help decorate the hallways for Veterans Day with this cute craft from Hadar:

Its kind of hard to read, but this one says "Thank you for serving our country. You are the best soldier in the world."

 "Thank you for fighting for freedom Thank you for our country. I love you soldier." Awww!

Our Veteran's Day Roll & Cover games were a hit inside the classroom too!

I'm spending today cleaning house and getting progress reports finished (progress reports already?! Didn't I just send home report cards?!). Yesterday I finished up my Turkey Math pack that covers all the skills we have been working on, plus the ones coming up in the next several weeks. Can I just say that I love teaching math and this pack makes me so happy! Its going to be so much fun that I'm rather jealous of my student teacher - it has been so hard to stay out of my room! This week I ducked back in several times to help out with our craft and do a few lessons, but next week I'm turning over the reins 100%! Anyways, here are some images from this pack:

 Turkey Ten Frames for number sense and missing addends.

Spin & Graph, plus finding 10 more/10 less/1 more/1less with base ten blocks, number lines and 120 chart.

 Fact Family Barns!

Read & Write the Room with time to the hour and 1/2 hour, more base ten blocks practice, and another graphing sheet.

Addition & Subtraction Roll & Cover Games, Read & Write the Room Missing Addend edition, Missing Addend clothespin activity, plus more practice sheets!

There are 7 different math center activities and 12 print & go practice sheets! If you'd like a chance to win a copy, Rustle Up a Response below and I'll choose two winners tonight at 10pm!

I also made a quick Turkey themed "I have... Who has..?" game for practicing CVC words. Head over to my TPT store to grab it for free!

Oh! And in honor of Veterans Day, I'll share this sweet pic of when hubby and I first met :)

Monster Spray, Veterans Day & a Freebie Hop!

Did you survive Halloween? My kiddos were actually pretty good both Thursday and Friday...or maybe I am just getting used to the craziness?! Sullivan spent most of the night exploring his hands - he is just learning how to get them in his mouth!

We had so much fun last week with Debbie Clement's Monster Spray song! Oh my goodness, I told my kiddos to close their eyes and imagine their monster as we listened to the song and I took the most precious video. I really wish I could share it because my kiddos were moving and dancing in their seats, spraying the monsters and at the end a chorus of voices called out "I got my monster!" "I know what mine looks like!" It was awesome! We made a class book and here are a few of their pages:

This week we are going to be learning Debbie's "Red, White and Blue" song for Veterans Day. I absolutely love the book that goes with the song! Such gorgeous illustrations and the song is super catchy. My kiddos always love learning the sign language too!


Before we hop into learning about Thanksgiving and all things turkey, we're having a week of Veterans Day fun! That includes a Veterans Day Roll & Graph as well as Roll & Cover games:

I'm also cutting and laminating my military ten frames from my Fall Holidays Ten Frames pack:

My student teacher is taking over more this week (poor thing, I'm having a hard time letting go and I know she's at that "Get out of here and let me try it on my own!" stage!) Wish us both luck - me in the letting go and her in taking over 100%!


If you're in the mood for some freebies (who isn't?!) then head over to my Facebook Page to see our Fall Freebie FB Hop! Tons of goodies for this time of year! Just click the picture below to go see it!

Veterans Day Plans (Freebie!)

Good evening! I am super excited tonight! I found out that I get Monday off for Veterans Day! Yay! In the past my district always had us doing professional development while the kids were out of school and since I am a veteran, I always felt slightly bitter about working on my holiday lol. But, no bitterness now, I get to stay in bed on Monday! It is especially nice since my husband also has the day off since he's in the Army. It's rare that we are both off at the same time, so we will have to do something special I guess :)

In honor of Veterans Day we will be learning Dr. Jean's Veterans Day song this week. My kids always love it and it is so easy for them to learn! I am thinking we will sing it for the school on Friday morning :) We will also be making poppies of some kind. Last year we tried these, they were super cute, but they took forever! Let me repeat that, forever! We were drowning in cut out poppies for 2 days! We may just go the torn paper route, but I'm still finalizing those plans (shh!).

I made a fun Silent E game last year for my kiddos and I just added it to my TPT store as a freebie. If you're working on cvce words this might be something fun for you to grab :) EDIT TPT is having fits and the link is sporadically not working. If it doesn't work, just try again later or you can grab it on Scribd here too.

Then, since I can never leave well enough alone, I decided to change it for my lower kiddos who are still working on cvc words. They're coming along, but still need a lot of support. I'll try to get that uploaded tomorrow - TPT is giving me fits right now!

Let me share some pictures of the poster we made for Veterans Day - our local Golden Corral asked for posters from kids to decorate the restaurant since they offer a free meal to vets on Veterans Day. This was kind of a last minute thing thrown at us, and we don't have any large construction paper left in the building, so I made do with sheets from a watercolor pad. I think they turned out kind of cute:

First, check out how sweet they looked as they were making their posters:

And here's a sampling of the finished posters:

What's that? You want to know what's on the bottom left corner? So did I! Apparently it's a wiener dog. Yep, with a wiener dog baby inside it! What does that have to do with Veterans Day? That is a question for the ages my friends! Edited - we were talking about Veterans Day again today and someone said "puppies" and it finally clicked. When I was talking about "poppies" they misunderstood me! Thus the multitude of dogs on our posters lol!

Finally, here's a bag full of those flat wooden spoons you get with individual ice cream cups. Our cafeteria was getting rid of them and offered them to me. I KNOW there's something cute to be done with them, right? Each little rubber banded pack has about 10 spoons, so there are lots of them! If you have any ideas, please Rustle Up a Response below!

 

Veteran's Day (plus a Silent E freebie!)

Being a veteran myself, I love doing it up right for Veteran's Day. This year I am going to try to get a bus so I can take my firsties out to sing for one of our local veterans' groups. I absolutely love Dr. Jean's Veteran's Day song. Last year my class had the honor of singing that song to Dr. Jean when she came for an in-service for the teachers. She got there early the day before and came by the school to give an impromptu concert! Afterwards we got our class picture taken with her and my kinders begged to sing her the song and she was gracious enough to agree to stay to listen to it. the song is on this awesome 2 cd set - along with Albuquerque Turkey, Stand Up For Martin Luther King and many more songs for every season and holiday you can think of! I seriously use it all year long.


Speaking of veterans, 2 years ago I had a little girl in my class who's mama had been deployed several times. Her daughter had some difficulties adjusting to mommy being gone, so her mom wrote a book to help her cope with the deployments. It's for sale on Amazon and it's fabulous!

Mrs. McBride was nice enough to give me a copy for my class since her daughter was my student! Often times children have a difficult time expressing the guilt, frustration, anger, and sadness that they feel as the result of their mom's deployment.There are more and more moms being deployed, and I really think that this book is helpful - not only for those children who are directly affected by deployment, but also to show children the sacrifice that soldiers and their families make to keep our country safe.
Finally, I made a Silent E game for Veteran's Day. I haven't been feeling good lately, but a trip to the doctor yesterday led to a diagnosis of bronchitis and a prescription for some meds that have me feeling much better, so I am on a creating binge now lol. I hope you enjoy it, and as always, I'd love it if you left a comment! Click the picture to download the game for free!