Gingerbread Palooza is almost here!

Four days off have been well spent wearing jammies, eating good food, setting up the Christmas tree, playing with my kids and getting outside in the snow we finally got.

December 1st is creeping up and I'm so excited because it's my second annual Gingerbread Palooza and it's going to be bigger and better this year and I hope to inspire you to get in on the fun!

These 4 friends will be up to their usual hijinks in our classroom for the whole month of December!  Each day when they walk in the door, my students will find them: playing with LEGOs, fishing for Goldfish, planting gingerbread seeds, sledding on our "Read to Self" chairs and many more outrageous things!  One of the best things about doing this is the daily journaling that goes along with the hijinks.  This year especially, I'm struggling to find enough time each day for writing and this will be part of their "Morning Work".

Here it is....I'm so stinkin' excited!

I've been looking HIGH and LOW for anything and everything gingerbread, so this unit is as fun as possible!

I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving and enjoyed time at home with family as much as I did!

Pigeon Week

I fell in love with all of Mo Willems' "Don't Let the Pigeon..." books!  They are so funny and make me want to read about more of the pigeons' ideas.  

This one started it all:

I decided to bring the pigeon (which I named Pete) the life so he could create a bit of havoc for the first week of November.  Why the first week of November?  You'll have to read his letter to my students.

So here are some pictures of the fun we had:

I would change the text everyday to silly things.

This is what lead us to discover Pete the first day.

Camped out in his nest, with a letter and a book for us.

Helium balloon pigeons!

He's such a little troublemaker!
He replaced the binder cover of every one of my students!

Everyday we got a letter from Pete which taught us about pigeons.

Does this sound like fun for YOUR classroom?  If so, check this out

We had so much fun during this special week, the kids were so excited to come into the room each day to see if Pete did anything :-)  They didn't want him to leave. . .but the void in their hearts will soon be filled by 4 little Gingerbread men because the 2nd annual Gingerbread Palooza is coming up after this week. Stay tuned!

I'm baaaaaaack...with a FREEBIE!

Hi, my name is Jaime and 

I haven't blogged since September...

This school year has proven to be very busy and challenging and it's been getting the best of me and kicking my butt.  But, with Thanksgiving break in sight, I'm getting my mojo back and decided to carve out time to blog and offer a FREEBIE.

I've got a few readers right now who really need to focus on fluency at school AND at home.  I purchased a fantastic leveled reading passage kit from Lakeshore Learning that helps me accomplish this in 1 minute increments each day that I do my small reading groups.

I created a self assessment rubric to go along with any passage, whether at home or at school.

But since Thanksgiving is coming up, I wanted to find a way for students to work on fluency AND learn about turkeys so we can do an informative piece later this week.  So voila

I feel like the little engine that could, seeing that Thanksgiving break is only 8 days away....but who's counting?  ME!