Catholic Schools Week Day 1

This week is by far my favorite week of the school year- Catholic Schools Week! For those of you who don't know, Catholic Schools Week is an entire week of fun activities dedicated to celebrating attending a Catholic School. Each day we have at least one fun activity planned that is outside the norm.

 

This year's theme for CSW is "Raise the Standards". Throughout this week, students are being asked to find a way to "raise" their academic standards while always keeping our faith as our highest focus (hence the cross being the tallest in the graph). Today's activities were mostly just prep work for the other days that are coming up or the beginning of week long activities that we will be participating in. Here are a few of the activities we did:

1. Penny Wars- Each class has a jar located on a table outside the principal's office. At the beginning of each day, students are asked to bring in their pennies to put in their class jar. Silver coins can be put in other class' jars and will count as negative points. So for example, if a fifth grade class had a lot of pennies, we could put in a quarter to give them -25 points. Our class was in the lead but then we had a lot of silver coins put into our jar- so sad. Who puts silver (negative) coins in a kindergarten jar!?

2. Teacher trivia- each day the secretary will make an announcement in the beginning of the day with one interesting fact about a teacher. The students will make a guess as a class about which teacher the fact belongs to. The correct answer is announced at the end of the day. I found out that one of our teachers grew up down the street from Elvis Presley! Who, by the way, none of my kindergartners knew!

3. Prep-work for vocabulary parade- Today we met with our prayer partners to complete the prep work for our school wide vocabulary parade. Tomorrow morning each student will come in to school dressed up to represent a vocabulary word. For example, some of my girls will dress up as princesses to represent the word "royal". Today we met with our prayer partners so they could help us make signs to wear that display our vocabulary word. I can't wait to post pics tomorrow!!

4. Writing prompt for bulletin board- Each of my students had to come up with one goal they had for the rest of the school year. In order to "raise" their standards, I asked them to think of one thing they would like to improve on between now and the end of the school year. I plan on putting up their writing on our bulletin board tomorrow and taking a pic to share.

Tomorrow we have our teacher luncheon ( a full hour with no students where the teachers finally get to relax together and chit chat about non-school related things.. can you see why this is my favorite week of the year?!) and our vocabulary parade- yay!

Mardi Gras Unit and a Few Engagement Pictures :)

Happy Hump Day! I love Wednesdays because the week is all downhill from here :) I finally got around to uploading my Mardi Gras mini unit to TPT. I cannot wait to use this unit in my class!

 

Last week we got to see our engagement pictures and I thought I would share a few of my favorites with you :)

I especially love this one with our little four legged baby in it!! It makes me so happy :)

Monday Made It and Snowman Glyph

I have finally gotten around to posting the jars that I made for my fiance and I to use as our "exercise jars". These jars that I decorated for us have to do with our New Years Resolution. Every time that we exercise for at least 45 minutes, we get to put one dollar in our jar. By the time Easter rolls around, the person with the most money in their jar gets to keep the money in BOTH jars! It is neck and neck right now!! He is only beating me by one dollar-- which is killing me that I am losing!! I am seriously considering working out for a second time today just so we can at least be tied. 

Anyway, here are our jars:

 

1. I started with cheap jars like these that I found at Wal-Mart for $3.99 (I think??) and then used supplies I already had at home in my craft box (which has now spilled over into three craft boxes-- I'm addicted!!)

2. I used my paint pens and a touch of ribbon to decorate our jars to make them a little more pleasant to look at and voila!

 It is amazing what a little paint, ribbon and time can do!

Onto my school "made it"... my kids actually made these last week but I forgot to take up close pictures of them. They had to write about one reason they like winter and then decorate their hot chocolate mug with a wintry scene..

 "I like hot cocoa." The picture is supposed to be of other hot chocolate mugs.

This one makes me smile.. it is a Rapunzel snowman with the caption "I like snow because I like to make snow princesses." It just warms my heart!

I love the little marshmallows they glued above their hot chocolate mugs.. although some of them are floating off :)

We also made these snowman glyphs from my "Full Year of Glyphs" packet on TPT.

 

You can tell how old this sign is by how simple it is! I am definitely going to have to make a new one after this year. I look at that sign and see how much I have learned in the past year about making cute documents!

Maybe some new updated signs can be next month's "Monday Made It"?!

Mardi Gras FREEBIE!

I am working on my Mardi Gras unit and wanted to share with all of you a little freebie :)

Using the colors purple, green, and yellow, the students should write the sight words listed next to the line. The first handout are words used from the Journeys reading series that we use at my school (which I LOVE by the way!). The other handout uses words from Fry's list of 100 Words.

This will be in my Mardi Gras unit as well as 30 more pages of other fun material. Be sure to check it out when I upload it in a few days :)

Have a great day!

Snow Much Fun in Kindergarten :)

It was soooo nice to finally have a full week of school again. No more of the choppy weeks where we are only here for 2 or 3 days. We were able to get so much accomplished this week and I could not be more proud of how hard my little kiddos were working! Here are a few of the activities we did this week:

This week I had ordered the Instant Snow from Steve Spangler's website but our Science Lab teacher beat me to it and made it with them already. So sad. Looks like I will just have to save mine for next year. This is the video from when he made his snow on the Ellen show. I love Steve and Ellen both and these two together are so much fun!

 

This little snowman project was one of our centers this week. The students got to pick as many squares as they wanted to make a snowman. When they were done, they had to count how many squares total they used to make their snowman and write it on the line. When they were done they could use a white colored pencil to draw snowflakes. They turned out so adorable!  

 

This is our hallway bulletin board. The students had to write a sentence or two or more (depending on ability) about what they like about winter. When they were done, they got to "decorate" their hot chocolate mug by drawing their wintry scene on the outside of their mug. To finish the project they got to glue a few marshmallows on top of their hot chocolate. As you can see we have quite a few floating marshmallows, I may have to be a little more specific next year ;)

Unfortunately we are about as far from actually getting snow as we can get. Today's temperature was 64 degrees and tomorrow is supposed to be 73! How are we supposed to enjoy mittens and scarves and wintry things with weather like that?!

I have so many more pictures that I should've taken this week of our work but just never got around to it. Especially our adorable snowman glyphs from my Full Year of Glyphs unit. I will be sure to come back and post a pic sometime early next week.

Have a great night... TGIF!

 

Back to School Pinterests!

How did this Christmas break go by so fast?? Every time we have a few days away from school I always find myself saying "I just need one more day!" Well this time around is NO exception. I have grown quite used to how clean my apartment is. If any of you are like me, laundry is not a priority during the school week.

So in order to get back into the spirit of school I have been pinning like crazy and found some really good stuff to share!

 

This teacher has the BEST ideas for word work! So many different ideas and they are all organized so well. This is definitely worth taking a look at. Click on the picture above if you want to check it out.

 This Tacky the Penguin craft is adorable!! This would look great with some sort of Tacky the Penguin writing prompt.

 

This melted snowman craft is so cute I know we will definitely be doing this one!! How precious would all these different snowmen look hung up in the hallway??

 

This is one that we are doing tomorrow actually! The link to print this off is attached to the picture so click on it if you want it too:) We love adding up the two sides of dominoes to see what the total is. These colored dominoes are too cute!

Currently January

It's Currently time!!

 

 This year for Christmas my sweet baby Tucker got a stocking full of goodies from "grandma" aka my mom. He has been in nonstop doggie heaven ever since!!

 

Speaking of Christmas gifts... I am LOVING my new Frye boots that I got. They are one of those purchases that I would probably not buy for myself since they are so expensive but I will definitely take them as a gift!!

 

While I am looking forward that all 2013 has to bring.. I am so ready for it to be May 3rd already. I know this semester is going to be crazy in grad school right before graduation along with wedding planning and tutoring after school. I am just so ready for all of it to be done!!

Once all of that is behind me... my fiance and I get to start meeting with realtors and looking at buying a house together after we get married!!! Yayy!!! I am so excited for us to have a home together and for little Tucker to have a yard to play in :)

And my OLW this month is "Breathe". Sometimes when I get stressed out the most helpful thing I can do is just sit down, realize I am only one person and can only do so much and take a deep breath. Hopefully I won't be doing so much of that this semester!!

Have a great new year!!!