Love is patient, love is kind, happy feast of St. Valentine!

Oh my gosh last week was hands down the most exhausting week EVER! Let me give you a quick run down of what last week at our school looked like:

Monday- 100th Day

Tuesday- Mardi Gras

Wednesday- Ash Wednesday

Thursday- Valentine's Day

Friday- Collapse with exhaustion :) 

Did anyone else have everything happen all at once for them this week?? I am soo happy about our 3 day weekend to recover! Especially since we got a little snow!

 My little one got his first day EVER in the snow :) He LOVED it!

 

So this Monday was the most favorite of all school days... the 100th day!! I do not remember the 100th day being such a big deal when I was in kindergarten but boy oh boy is it a big deal now! We started with our 100th day crowns from Julie Lee's website (who was one of my first blog loves by the way, she is a genius!).

 

After making our adorable crowns, we began on our 100 compliments poster in the hall. The students had to write 100 compliments for their friends and teachers and stick them up in the hallway for all to see! This was a really fun lesson because it was a confidence booster for all my little ones when their friends wrote a compliment to them! 

After the 100th day came another one of my favorite days of the school year... Mardi Gras! At our school we love celebrating this day before lent with silliness and snacks and a big parade at the end of the day. 

I am so mad at myself that I didn't take more pictures on this day. We started with our Mardi Gras masks and discussed the three colors of Mardi Gras (purple, gold, and green) and what those colors stand for (faith, power, and justice). I found this free mask for them to color on Pinterest:

 

Rather than use string to make it stay on, we glued it to a Popsicle stick so they could hold it. We also put a feather on them for a little decorative flair :)

We played so many games and got to eat our yummy king cake on this day but I was too busy to take pictures :( Next year!!

Wednesday was Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent. Throughout Lent we are using these "Lenten Path" handouts from Catholic Icing (another one of my favorite blogs).

 

This one is colored already for Wednesday and Thursday but you color it all the way through to Easter every day that you successfully give up your item you've given up for Lent.

Finally on Friday, we celebrated Valentine's Day! These are the glyphs we created:

 

These glyphs are from my Full Year of Glyphs unit on TPT.

Have a great Sunday!! I hope you all do something exciting on your day off for President's Day :)

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!

Monday Made It... On Wednesday?!

I was all excited that I had another Monday Made It to post but somehow this week has completely gotten away from me. Here we are and it is already Wednesday- I am certainly NOT complaining!!! Is anyone else's week going this fast?? We have been so busy making all of our Christmas crafts and hunting down our gingerbread man (who ran out of the oven by the way, gingerbread men tend to do that apparently :) ). Here are a few pictures of the many things I have made either at home or in class this with my kiddos this week:

 Earlier this week I had to make cookies for my end of the semester grad school party. I saw these adorable cookies last year on Pinterest and took the lazy way out put my own little twist on them-- pre-made dough instead of making it from scratch! These are peanut butter cookies with chocolate covered pretzels as antlers and M&Ms as eyes and a nose. Just pop them in the oven to bake, take them out, decorate while they are still hot and voila- reindeer cookies!

Last week with our prayer partners we made these mangers to kick off our study of Advent and our excitement for Christmas:

They ended up on our bulletin board in the hall with some of the lyrics from "Away in a Manger". When it gets closer to Christmas we will make little Baby Jesus crafts to tuck into our mangers... so cute!

We also made these Christmas trees as one of our centers this week. I had all of the pieces set out on my kidney table and they had to follow step by step directions to complete it. All of you kindergarten teachers know how difficult following directions can be sometimes!! It was very challenging for some of my little ones to determine which piece was the longest just by looking at them. They had to set them all next to each other to figure it out. They built their trees from the bottom up, cut out their star, and then decorated with "snow" (white paint) using a Q-tip. As you can see we had some with just a few snowflakes and then some who made an all out blizzard!

Two more things that we are doing in class to celebrate Advent/Christmas are our chocolate Advent calendar and our countdown to Christmas chain. Every day we pick out our next chocolate and talk about the shape of the chocolate and what that symbol represents and we cut one more ring off our countdown to Christmas chain. Needless to say, we are super excited about Christmas in K2!

I hope you all have a great rest of the week!!

4th Grade Prayer Partners- Saint Kateri Native American Craft

Since we are a Catholic school, we get to meet with our prayer partners (the big kids at school) at least once a month to complete a religious activity. Our class gets to work with the 4th graders because I have many students with siblings in 4th grade. Our prayer partners also sit with us when we go to mass and come to read to us (and eventually WE read to THEM!) a few times a month. My kiddos LOVE their prayer partners and love giving them hugs and waving to them every time we pass them in the hall. I also love seeing former students who I would not expect to be very nurturing rise to the occasion and work so well with a little kindergartner. Long story short- I love prayer partners!! 

Tomorrow, Kateri Tekakwitha, the first ever Native American saint will be canonized by the Catholic Church. In order to celebrate this exciting new saint, we worked with our prayer partners to make little Saint Kateri crafts. Of course, we were so busy I forgot to take pictures :( The website we got the idea from has pictures though so I will upload those since ours looked essentially the same as hers. What I love about this craft is that you can do this even if you are not Catholic- it can easily be made for Thanksgiving or for a Native American study.

 Now we did not make the vests, just the headbands due to time constraint but I thought I would post the pics of the vests anyway since they are so cute and maybe someone else will be able to do them. The headbands came out so cute-- I wish I had remembered to take pictures!! 

We found this idea through Catholic Icing, a website that has great ideas for Catholic teachers or Catholic Sunday School teachers. The website has step-by-step directions on how to create these if you would like to create your own.

Now I am off to go look at potential wedding reception venues!!! Have a great day :)

Creation Booklets

Happy Tuesday! We have finally gotten around to finishing our Creation booklets from my TPT store and I wanted to share them with all of you. These projects took us about a week and a half to make with us focusing on a different day of Creation each day. Here are a few of the pages once they are completed:

 

This is the front cover.

 Our page for light and darkness with the tissue paper squares.

 

Our cotton ball clouds with our page copied on blue paper.

 

We were going to use stencils to trace in a sun, moon, and stars before painting but I had to leave for a meeting and leave another teacher in charge and didn't want to put her through all that so I made a copy with a sun, moon, and stars already there for them to paint in.

 This is one of my favorite pages!! I love how the blue cellophane makes their fish look like they are under the water!

 

And our last page, the "grand finale" for the parents, is a picture of their child resting to represent how God rested on the 7th day. When they are all finished (our last two pages still have to be laminated) we bind them together and make a book out of them.

I did not upload every single page because that would be too many pictures, but if you want to check it out a little more you can head to my TPT store. In the packet are directions for how to make the page each day.

I keep forgetting to take pictures of our apple crafts and worksheets but will hopefully remember tomorrow. We will have a cute new apple bulletin board tomorrow too so I will try to post pics of that. I hope you're all having a great week!!

Tell me more, Tell me more!

When I saw this adorable linky party on Mrs. Lemons blog (which I can now add to my list of blogs I am obsessed with) I just had to jump right on it! An excuse to share pictures of things I love? Yes, PLEASE! So without further ado, Tell me more, Tell me more!

1. I am 100% terrified of bugs. I scream and run and act completely ridiculous yet when I was little I used to be able to pick them up with my bare hands as if they were nothing. What happened to me?!? Has that happened to anyone else?? 

2. Possessionista is one of my favorite blogs to stalk. I love knowing where all the pretty clothes they wear on my favorite TV shows come from!

3. I got to go to Harry Potter World this year at Universal Studios and had an absolute blast! The Butterbeer is to die for. If you ever go, you MUST get the Butterbeer!!

4. I LOVE yoga, especially during the school year. It is the perfect way for me to keep my body healthy and keep from going insane with all the stress of school. I haven't tried hot yoga yet but just found a yoga studio close to my apartment that does it and will be starting as soon as I get back from my vacation. Which leads me to number 5...


5. I leave for ALASKA tomorrow!! Woohoo!! I have never been there and I am going on a cruise. I am so excited to see and do things I have never done before! Don't worry, many pictures will be posted!!


6. Living in Charlotte and being a fan of the Bachelor/Bachelorette has turned me into a little bit of an Emily Maynard stalker. For those of you who don't live in Charlotte- don't judge, I promise I am not the only one! Yet everyone else around me seems to see her out in public. Two friends saw her at the mall on two DIFFERENT days, another friend teaches at her daughter's school and saw her at carpool, my sister saw her at Target... sheesh! One day maybe I will get to see her!

7. I love the Bachelor/Bachelorette, Modern Family, Pretty Little Liars and Law and Order:SVU. Yes, they are all very different but I love them all equally!!

8. In case you haven't figured this out already, I am beyond obsessed with Pinterest. It is scary how much time I can spend on Pinterest pinning school ideas and not get bored!! My favorite categories are education (of course), home decor, food and drink, and women's apparel.

9. I love to read for fun and my most recent book obsession was the Hunger Games. If you haven't read it yet, you need to ASAP! I read all three of them in one week, during the school year while taking grad school classes at the same time. They were that good. I seriously could not wait to get home from school to read them (yes, I realize how nerdy that sounds!).


10. My sweet dog Tucker is the current love of my life, I think my boyfriend may be starting to get a little jealous!! I will miss spending all day, every day with him when I go back to school in just a few weeks.

Ok, now it's your turn! Link up with Mrs. Lemons and share your "Tell me more, Tell me more!"

P.S. I just posted a new lesson on TPT that is a cute touchy-feely student made book on the story of Creation for all my other teacher friends that teach in Christian schools. There is an adorable little surprise for what the students do on the last page. It is guaranteed to make parents smile (and don't we all love that?!?) Click on the button on the right to go see it!

Happy Easter!

This whole week (Monday-Wednesday) we celebrated Easter before we left for our Easter Break (woohoo!). We made Easter Egg "Stained Glass" art projects to hang up in our windows. These are similar to our "Stained Glass" crosses we made during Catholic Schools Week. It is hard to tell from the picture, but the template was made from a deep purple cardstock which we then put contact paper on one side, let the kiddies put cut up pieces of tissue paper on them to decorate, and then covered the other side with contact paper again. I wish there hadn't been a strange glare that makes everything look so dark, but they ended up turning out very cute!

Then we had our Easter Egg hunt. The children in my class all have numbers they are assigned to which helped to make filing their papers, changing centers, etc easier. Prior to the hunt, I labeled all of the eggs with each child's number. This made the hunt a little more challenging. Instead of just running around grabbing every egg in sight, they had to go find the eggs that had their numbers on them. This also helped me make sure everyone had the same number of eggs.

Two of the boys checking their numbers :)

One of my boys checking the numbers.

Then came the highlight (for me!)- our Easter Cross lollipops. Each student got to make their own cross lollipop. I swear, they were more excited about this than the Easter Egg hunt because it was something they've never done before. They were super easy to make too! The kids picked out 5 Jolly Ranchers, put them in a cross formation on the shiny side of aluminum foil, and we baked them in the oven on 325 degrees for 6 minutes. When they were done, I pushed the sticks into the melted Jolly Ranchers and gave them a little twist. Once they cooled down, we put them in sandwich baggies, and tied them with cute ribbon. 

 

 I cannot take credit for this wonderful idea, it came from www.catholicicing.com.

More Hidden Eggs and Classroom Decor!

Wow, this week totally got away from me! I feel like yesterday was Monday! It probably doesn't hurt that I had two presentations in grad school this week so i was SUPER busy! Anyway, I finally have my pictures of my classroom and some more hidden egg pictures! These were SUCH a big hit! I loved that they not only had to find the eggs, but had to answer an academic question inside :)

This one was hidden inside our Lego table. This one took them awhile to find because it is hidden down below the table.

This one was inside our Tattle Monster. The kids were like "He is going to eat my hand if I take it out!!"  They make me laugh :)

This one was in our sticker bucket in the back of the room, an easy find.

This one was found surprisingly pretty fast. I thought this one would take them forever! 

Now for pictures of my classroom... I took these pictures at the end of the day, when my room looks like I had a tornado go through it, and I had grad school at night so I tried to do a quick clean up. It's still a little messy, but much better than it was!

This table is in the back of the room and is where I pull out for small groups. We also use this table for centers and it is always where we do our big activities like making soup on the day we learn about "S". There obviously aren't enough chairs for everyone so they all stand around it.

This is a big view of the room. Our Smartboard up front (it is very old but as long as it works, I am ok with it). Their little tables and the carpets up at the front. Their snack cubbies are off to the side, and the classroom library and bigger carpet are off to the other side. 

This is our behavior management plan. Each boy or girl has a number and a frog with their number on it. They start in the middle lily pad, and if they make a good choice, they move to the left and if they get to purple, they get a sticker on their sticker chart. If they make a wrong choice, they go to orange and yellow and they get a note home on yellow.

There is a lot more to my classroom but like I said, it was kind of a mess. I only took pictures of the parts that are cleaned up :) Maybe next week if I get in the "Spring Cleaning" mood I can take a few more.

Have a good week!

Yay! It's Easter Season!

We are finally close enough to Easter to begin hiding our Easter eggs around the classroom! This week I will hide five Easter eggs per day for the children to find when they come in. Inside each egg is a question the students have to answer. If they answer it correctly, they earn a prize!  This all leads to our GIANT Easter egg hunt around the playground and school on the last day before Easter break. It will be so much fun! Pictures to come!

Also, I will (hopefully remember to) take pictures of my classroom and how it is set up to post on my little blog.

The Luck of the Irish

This week and last week we have been focusing on St. Patrick's Day. We have had many fun filled activities and have been on the receiving end of some Leprechaun tricks ;) We have been graphing the marshmallows from Lucky Charms and the different colors of Skittles, have made leprechaun traps and glyphs (glyphs from Deanna Jump's unit but changed a little) and will be making green milkshakes with our dads this Friday. 

Catholic Schools Week

This week is Catholic Schools Week! Woohoo! For those who don't know, Catholic Schools Week is an entire week of school dedicated to celebrating attending a Catholic School. We have many fun activities planned for this week and I can't wait to post them!

One of the fun activities we did was a door decorating contest. On our door, the students made stained glass window crosses out of tissue paper, construction paper, and contact paper. They also colored in the CSW symbol for this year and we made them into a class quilt. Sorry for the blurry picture!

Here is a close up of one of our crosses. My wonderful assistant cut out the hearts for them to put in the middle and then they placed the little tissue paper squares all around to make it look like one of the stained glass windows we see when we go to mass!

Here are our crosses hung up on our windows after the door decorating contest was over. They look SOOO much prettier on a sunny day so I will have to take another picture when it is sunny. The kids LOVED making these so we are making heart shaped ones for Valentine's Day. I can't wait!!