Five for .... Sunday!

To say I am running behind this week is a tremendous understatement.   It was already a short week,  but I was a bad teacher and already missed a day!   I went home to Michigan last weekend and spent an amazing weekend with my extended family. My cousins and aunt and uncle came in from NC and another cousin from PA,  my brother from CA.   We had such a great weekend and surprised my 90 year old grandma by all being there! It was so wonderful!  I even got to see MC Hammer while I was there!  He was performing at a street fair near my dad's house!  It was Too Legit... LOL.  Here are a few pictures from the weekend!

I returned to work on Wednesday and hit the ground running.   I am so lucky this year,  I have 14 kids in my class (for real!), and they have amazing parents.   We are working learning about citizenship (through our PBL) community helpers, and first responders.  We are lucky to have both a firefighter and a police officer among our class parents and they both came in to present on Wednesday.   The kids had the most fun interviewing them.  

Speaking of our PBL - we have been moving v-e-r-y slowly with this because my partner in crime is having her class split (she was over the limit so we are getting a new teammate - yay!).  This week we should be able to go full speed ahead.   I am very excited.  We need to plan our trip to city council!   Luckily our procrastination has worked in our favor.   Over the summer I received a Donors Choose grant for four digital cameras and all the memory cards etc. They just got here on Friday so the kids will be able to use them for this project!  Yay!   I love Donors Choose!

While we have had a great week,  I have not had a chance to catch up with everything the second week of school brings.   I went in today to catch up.   One of the things I needed to do was make new Word Wall Wordo boards.  I needed to make new cards because I CAN NOT find the old ones.   I hate to admit how often this happens to me.  I love this simple game.  For years I had a word wall and did very little with it.   I referred to it often but my kids would never really remember what words were on the wall. I made a big effort a few years ago to add a lot of practice to my word wall routines and this game is my favorite activity.   I use these simple boards (get them free here), laminate them and have the kids pick 9 or 16 words from the word wall and write them in each box.   Then we play bingo (wordo) with the words until someone gets a WORDO (3 or 4 in a row,  a quadrant, half a board or the whole thing depending on my mood).  Then they erase their whole card and fill it in again.  They beg to play and they get practice spelling and reading the words.  They also begin to know which words are on the wall so when it is time to spell them they can find them! Simple Awesomeness!

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Word-Wall-Wordo-Boards-FREEBIE-415159

I print them front and back so that the kids can just keep the board in their writing folder and use the same board all year.

My fifth thing this week is this fun website http://www.picmonkey.com.  Have you used this?   With our new cameras,  I wanted to find some fun sites to edit pictures and I LOVE this one!   There are so many fun options and so many fun possibilities. My son Grant's school's theme this year is Mustaches and I thought this would be so fun to do to the kid's pictures! I played on it for a long time tonight,  so indulge me for a minute here...

Hope you had a great week!