It's official everyone... we're on summer vacation over here!!
And... on my last week of school I worked on 4 different days!... so pretty much every day I could (because no one is going to book me to come in and substitute teach when the kids aren't even there!).
How'd it go?
I had one teacher tell me that if she were a sub she wouldn't book herself for these last 2 weeks because the kids have checked out already (and lets be honest, a lot of the teachers have as well). Luckily, the kids I taught in elementary school this week (which was one day) were not checked out yet and still eager (for the most part) to work... and it may have helped that they were having a class party in the afternoon that the teacher told me to bribe them with.
Other than that this week at school I...
Watched a lot of movies (Despicable Me and The Incredibles, and one other that I can't remember what it was).
Gave students A LOT of time on the iPads (which I'm kind of on the fence about... I mean, they may as well stay at home if they are getting free time on the iPads since that's [likely] what they would be doing at home).
Did TUSC... and students got to decide what role they wanted to have this last time so there were a lot of "angry chefs" which meant a lot of sugary treats being passed around.
Took my classes outside.
Had a "gym riot" that was neither in the gym or rioty in the slightest (it was outside and very well organized).
All in all it was a pretty swell last week of work... and now I get to switch gears to "this week off from school" and enjoy some much deserved time off!
Psst.. I've got my next month worth of posts planned (for the most part) so you can expect regular posting to happen throughout the summer. Enjoy!
It was a busy last week of school before spring break or me! Full days turned into half days which turned back into full days and I ended up working every single day this week in the end!
Monday was the day after St Patrick's Day so I read my students "How to Catch a Leprechaun" and then they did a writing activity on how they would go about catching a leprechaun. I couldn't actually find the exact activity they did online but if you google "How to catch a leprechaun writing activity" a bunch will come up!
The next 3 days I spent at the school with only 9 kids. We now say it's like I'm their 3rd teacher (after he 1.5 that already teach there, the EA, and the secretary). They were busy making houses to test out different kinds of insulation. The plan was that on Friday (when I was not there) that they were going to put a cup of hot water in each of their houses and place them outside. Every 20 minutes or so they would go out and see what the temperature of their water was. What were they using for insulation? Largely shredded paper but also towels and Styrofoam. One group even spray painted their house black which I thought was smart.
After spring break they are going to be putting together a little indoor greenhouse to grow some fruits and veggies so we started to do some research as to what seeds do well growing in pots and have shorter growing times. When I had left on Thursday they had decided on cucumbers, strawberries, tomatoes, and lettuce
Being that it was the week before spring break 2 of the schools I went to had spirit week this week... so one of the days was twin day (which I knew about ahead of time but obviously wouldn't have been able to coordinate with someone to twin with them), then there was jersey day so my husband lent me his and I wore a Washington Capitals jersey to school, then we had read and feed which didn't require dressing up and instead I had them read from about 10:30-12:00 (which surprisingly went over really well with a lot of them). The feed part was they got to snack on fruits and veggies while reading. I also brought them some cookies because I had a bunch leftover from a dessert fundraiser I helped with the previous weekend (I had told them that they had to be good in order to get one at the end of the day otherwise as punishment they would have to watch me eat them all - needless to say they each got 2 cookies at the end of the day). And finally we had school colours day so I wore blue to work.
Friday I only worked the afternoon which was likely actually the easier time to work (and not only because it's the shorter half of the day). They had stations that each class went around the school to earn points for their grade group. At the end they totalled up all points for each grade and that grade won some sort of prize. I was in charge of the cup stacking room which just had 3 groups working together to make a stack of cups as tall as they could using cups and wooden sticks within 15 minutes. The tallest we got was 37 inches which was actually quite impressive.
Since next week is spring break I'll only be posting twice instead of my usual 3 times as I'll be too busy enjoying my spring break (hopefully).
Hopefully we are beyond our indoor recess' by now (at least when it comes to cold weather indoor recess) but for when they occasionally crop up because of rain here's an idea one of the schools I went to last month did. Let the kids leave their classrooms. At this school the gym was open and students were playing wii in one part of it and doing gym activities in another part and all of the classrooms offered something a little different for kids to do. My room was the reading/drawing/colouring room but I know at least one of the other rooms offered yoga (this teacher also made passes for the kids so that only 2 students/class could come to her room - likely due to them needing a bit more space for yoga). Other ideas I could see working well would be putting on some Just Dance videos (you can find them on Youtube), putting on an indoor recess video from GoNoodle and a board/card game room. At the school I was at the kids could also walk the halls but very few students did this.
I was teaching in a grade 7 classroom the other week where I happened to have a student teacher (huzzah!). When I asked him what the students call him he told me his name and then continued to say that some students call him “Mr. Cool” because he is starting up a Dungeons and Dragons lunchtime club.
Uh… k. To be honest never in my wildest of dreams would I have thought that “Dungeons and Dragons” would be related to a name such as “Mr. Cool” but different strokes for different folks… right?
Anyways, he continued to tell me that he was very excited for the group and was expecting it to be quite popular.
Uh… k. Never in my wildest of dreams would I have thought a Dungeons and Dragons club to be really popular. Am I really that out of touch of what these middle school kids are into… is Fort Nite not the “in” thing anymore… have we already moved on to Dungeons and Dragons?
I went back to the room over the lunch hour at some point to grab something when I noticed this club consisted of the student teacher and just 2 other students. At this point I felt a little bad… I mean he was genuinely excited for the group. But this did not get him down… he was quite certain that the low attendance was due to him not putting a message in the announcements.
The following day I was back at the school in a new classroom. And guess what came up on the announcements?
“Do you like dungeons? Do you like Dragons?...” yes the Dungeons and Dragons group announcement had hit the airways… or at least the announcement sheet in the office. And do you know what the class I was in did when they heard about this new group? They cheered. And it wasn’t just like one or two of them in was about half the class that was pumped to play Dungeons and Dragons at lunch. So maybe this student teachers enthusiasm will pay off and he will get his quite popular Dungeons and Dragons group after all.
This is something that was just becoming an idea in a division I worked for while I was teaching in my grade 5/6 classroom as I was leaving that division... so I'm going to be honest... I don't know much about it. But the internet definitely knows about it!
I was only in 1 classroom throughout this entire school year that had a Maker's Space in it... and this is what it looked like
Posters for ideas of what can be done with paper and expectations
And a bunch of supplies on the shelves below the posters... not pictured was all the Lego they had (I guess in the past it had become a problem so it was away in the cupboard)
From my understanding a Makerspace is a safe place where students can design, build, and test ideas they have.
We ended up using the Makerspace the day I was in this classroom to build a specific habitat (that the student groups chose) with any of the supplies they wanted (and yes, the Lego was a HUGE hit).
The students versions of different habitats
Anyways, this was this classrooms Makerspace... I can imagine if a school had a shared Makerspace a lot of other materials might be found in it or if the students were older (this was a grade 3 class) they might be able to use more complicated things like building circuits, robotics, or photography.
Do you have a Makerspace at your school (or have you been at a school with one)?
There wasn't a whole lot to do this last week of school. I would have had my students present their debate topics in the process of an actual debate but they were doing very little in all their other classes it just wasn't working out for them to get much accomplished in ELA. We did do a couple of them informally though.
I went for many walks to the local 711 with my students. When one girl walked out with an extra large slurpee announcing that her mom doesn't even let her get a medium I told her that if her mom happened to find out about the size of slurpee she decided to purchase that she should just tell her mom "but mom, you don't let me get mediums"
I even found time to squeeze in a half day personal day in this last week.
I helped teachers stuff report card envelopes.
I helped a new teacher start the process of setting up her classroom.
And on Friday I got appreciated at a staff lunch because I won't be there next year.
For those of you wondering... as it stands currently I don't have anywhere to be next year. Hopefully a lovely grade 4-6 position opens up in a lovely school that I manage to snag soon... hopefully it's also permanent because then the classroom is actually mine. Boy would it feel great to have my very own classroom where all my teaching stuff can just stay for forever instead of always having to come home with me at the end of every school year.
But anywho, I hope all the teachers reading this have a lovely and well deserved break... and remember... I'm available to sub for you!
How you could potentially make an entire day out of Madlibs...
Confession: Sometimes I write blog posts a month or so in advance. Then something comes up that I feel like is more applicable to that time or week and the post gets bumped again, and again until FINALLY it makes the cut to just get posted already because I wrote it a month (or 2 ago)... this is one of those posts.
A couple of months ago I was in a rural classroom during a snowstorm and so the teacher wasn't fully prepared for a sub. I only had the students that I did Madlibs with for one class but while I was teaching them I realized that a person, if in a pinch, could likely teach Madlibs for the entire day.
Here are some ideas:
1) Do Madlibs. Don't have any on hand? You can use your own friend Google to locate some or go to Wacky Web Tales (which is the one I use)
2) Talk about adjectives, adverbs, verbs, nouns, etc. have your students do an assignment on each of them.
3) Write a short piece (it could even be a sentence) but tell students to focus on one of the above aspects. Adjectives would be the easiest I think so they would just have to really describe something. You could even have them all describe the same thing and then share what they wrote to see how similar or different they are.
4) Make their own Madlibs. Have them write a story and then erase a bunch of the adjectives, verbs, nouns, numbers, clothing items, etc (but write in what needs to go in that place) and then have them share their Madlibs with the class by doing them together... if the class was learning about something specific you could even say they have to create their stories about that particular topic (Ancient Greece, a science experiment, fairy tale, Canada, etc)
Confession: This isn't the first time I've talked about this wonderful topic see here for another post about Madlibs
The other week while subbing the teacher had left me this sheet for the students to do as they walked in. She said they would know what to do with it.
All they had to do was use their imaginations to come up with what this picture was the start as. Most kids did something to do with a diamond but then this one kid shared his and said it was an alien with a Christmas door in the back... now that's thinking outside of the box!
It reminded me of when we were in middle school and would doodle in church. One person would start a doodle and the next person would have to finish it into a picture... so if you don't want to photocopy a bunch of papers with a simple shape on it then just do a random simple doodle on the board and the students could copy it onto a paper and go from there!
Last week I showed you a drawing one of my students had done for me (of me) and I thought it was a pretty good representation of what I look like. Then this happened...
I feel like it's actually a doubly bad photo of me. I look strange in the actual colour photograph of myself and I look strange in the drawing. In the defence of the girl that drew it... the scarf and badge combo was likely a hard one to draw. She did well on my hair though... I actually think she did a better job on my hair than I did that morning.
Ah well, you can't win them all... a lesson I learned many years ago when I received this drawing of myself with a giant tenhead... yes my forehead is so big in that drawing that I don't think it could be called a forehead.
When I go subbing one of my students favourite activities is to draw pictures of their new favourite substitute *ahemMEahem*. Sometimes they turn out great.. and well sometimes you begin to wonder if that is actually what you look like. I've been holding onto one of each of these for a while now and I went back and forth whether I wanted the more flattering one up first or not and I've decided I do. So come back next week to see another portrait of yours truly done by a student!
You can't tell in the picture of me but that cardigan has elbow patches and she nailed it!
She even had me giving the peace sign... one of us was Asian.
To see other examples of pictures students have drawn of me click here (he even included the car I would drive and it's pretty cool).
Don't forget to come back next week to see the picture(s) that make me question what I look like
Because.. tomorrow is the last day of school before Christmas break (oh how it's flown by... or not)
For those of us that are throwing together a Christmas Party for our students last minute have no fear!... I'm here to help!
Kids are easy to please... all they want is to eat and to hang out (most of the time)
So...
Make a sign up sheet for what kids can bring to the party (baking, drinks, veggies, fruit, chips, and whatever else you want to show up at the party!) I've never had problems with kids not being willing to sign up... in fact last year I made them sign up for one party each (Christmas, Valentine's Day, Spring Break, and end of the year) so that we wouldn't have an abundance of food and all go home feeling sick.
One year I looked up a bunch of Minute to Win it games on Teachers Pay Teachers. There are tons that are free and the supplies are super easy to get your hands on. We formed teams and battled each other in them.
One year I made my students sugar cookies in the shape of gingerbread men and we decorated them (this likely wouldn't take very long... but it could take up part of the time AND you could even get students to practice measurement by getting them to make the cookies (and icing).
Movies. All mine ever wanted to do was to watch a movie. And so, we often did that.
One year I had a karaoke machine show up to a classroom party (you can find a number of karaoke songs on Youtube)
A little while ago I posted about Just Dance. I think students could still be into Just Dance even without the actual game... you can find it on Youtube too.
Get students to bring in any games they want to play.
When I was teaching grade 8 one year I wrapped a pencil up again and again so that it was in a box that a bunch of plates came in eventually. I had students sit in a circle on the floor and roll a dice. Anytime a certain number was called (like 1 for example) they had to put on a pair of oven mitts and try to unwrap the present... only using their hands. They really liked it. The pencil ended up breaking at some point in the madness though.
Print off some Christmas colouring pages and there you have it... you sir (or ma'am) have yourself a great party that took you no time at all to plan.
Are you having a Christmas Party in your classroom? What are you doing for your Party?
Once again I'm linking up with my other blog: Confessions of a Modern Day Mennonite for Blogmas! If you've found your way here from there... welcome!
I'm also linking up with Doodlebugs Teaching for another Five for Friday post (only I'm posting mine early - because it is currently Monday)
No matter what grade level you teach (I would like to think) your students are going to get excited come Christmas time. It may be because they get a break from school (where I live we get 2 weeks) or because they know Santa is coming, or perhaps they are excited about presents.... Whatever it is, one thing is for sure, they are going to get excited. Just imagine how happy you'll make them when one day you come in announce that you need help setting up a Christmas tree in the corner or decorating the classroom door? I think they'll be pretty excited.
So here are five ideas for ways that you can decorate your classroom for Christmas
1.
Get a Christmas tree
Here is a tree that was in one of the classrooms I subbed in this past week. The kids made some ornaments to put on it and the teacher left some that he bought at the dollar store to add on as well. Unfortunately, the lights weren't all working... but no one was complaining about that!
If I was doing this (and I had a newer fake Christmas tree at home) I would just bring in my current tree. I'm thinking of getting new lights at the end of this Christmas season so the ones that are currently on there could be used for my Classroom tree AND I have a bunch of extra ornaments from when I made an Ornament Wreath.
2.
Do some Christmas art...
to put up on the walls.
This art project was super easy and the teacher loved the variety of things the students did for theirs!
3.
3D snowflakes
If I had table groups in my room that were numbered I think I would hang a snowflake above each table grouping.
I also found these stars (that light up!) at Ikea that I think are great. But paper is much, MUCH cheaper (and likely free from the school) so I would likely go with that option.
4.
Decorate the classroom door.
5.
Christmas handprint tree.
When I was teaching kindergarten I traced all my students hands (and then cut them all out) and made a bulletin board of a Christmas Tree using them. In one of the craft centers that I would have up in my classroom we used as a Christmas ornament making center and anything they made there we stuck on the tree. It all happened a number of years ago so I don't have a picture... but this is the same idea of the tree that I made.
Did you decorate your classroom for Christmas this year?
Use the comment section below and leave a link back to any photos you have. I would love to see them!
For whatever reason kids LOVE this game. Warning: it will get loud and you will always have at least one student that never wants to go out. But they love it! I've used it where you add the dice and multiply the dice.
Know any other really great and easy games to play in the classroom?
Did you know that you can find Just Dance on Youtube?
Did you know that doing it with your class of nursery and kindergarten students is just the cutest thing ever?
The class that I was substituting for loved their One Direction!
We used is at a break after carpet time and as a replacement for gym.
Of course it doesn't actually monitor if you are doing it correctly but that class didn't know the difference! Plus, the older grades might just want to dance and be happy with that!
I could also see this being used:
- For indoor recess
- To do during a class party (at the end of the year last year all the grade 5 and 6 teachers worked together to plan something different in their rooms. We had a game room, movie room, and karaoke room (maybe this could have replaced my karaoke room).
How else could you use Just Dance in the classroom?
The other day I was in a grade 4 classroom where they subscribed to the idea of "Funky Friday". This meant that at the end of the day; once the classroom was all cleaned up and everyone had filled in their agendas the students would stack all the chairs, push the tables to the side of the room, and turn out all the lights (yes, we even closed the blinds). And then... we danced.
Here was the set up... they knew Funky Friday was coming and we were writing in our agendas and let me tell you... I've never seen an entire class get their agendas done faster than this one. I barely had time to put down the white board marker and pick up a pen (and find the princess stickers in the teachers desk because they insisted on stickers) before I had a line up of students waiting to get their agendas signed.
Then all of a sudden I had a student pulling a chair up to what I'm going to call the dj station (he was creating a play list on YouTube of all the songs we would listen/dance to in a couple minutes. Another student found a disco ball somewhere... I swear they just pulled it out of their pocket. And another one had a flashlight.
Then the lights went out and the blinds went down and the music started playing.
Most of the class was dancing.
I had one student hiding under a table and one student was always holding the flashlight while sitting on a table. Their job was to apparently shine the flashlight at different people and then they would have to dance for everyone. This didn't always happen though so their job was also to shine the flashlight at the disco ball (because it wasn't a fancy disco ball that lite up anything). Another student was in change of holding the disco ball... although they also told me that they hang it from the lights (which were about 10 feet above the ground so I didn't let them do that).
What kinds of dance moves did we bust out? I had students "break dancing" which is also known as acting like a crazy person on the ground. Others were doing the worm. But the best part was when pretty much the entire class danced to Watch Me Whip/Nae Nae
It’s nearly here… Halloween that is. I always liked doing some activities specific to what holiday was coming up when I was in school and so when I’ve been a teacher I’ve also always enjoyed giving my students a little booklet of holiday activities to do. Today I’m doing the hard work of finding the work to put in these booklets for you (and I’m dividing it up by skill level and subject!). I’m also making sure it is free because that was ALWAYS a selling feature for me. Of course some of the material may be a little too easy for some of the groups or too difficult… so just use your judgement!
Warning: This post is going to be long and full of link... just scroll to through to the age level you teach and scan for the activities you want... I've given a brief description of them all.
To start with we have the early years (or kindergarten-grade 3). I always find this group the easiest to find free material for (and there is always so much of it!).
First, we have some writing paper. I found it on Teachers Pay Teachers but don’t worry… it’s free. The pages have big lines for kids who are still learning how to write.
Some reading comprehension pages (so a short story to read and a few questions) can be found on Itsy Bitsy Fun.
Here is a really simple crossword for your students that I got from ESL Themes.
An ABC maze (just follow the path in ABC order) from education.com
and also from education.com is a cut and paste Frankenstein activity (if you are putting this together in a book just make sure this page is not double sided)
On Halloween Ideas I found a matching worksheet where you match the word of a Halloween thing to a picture of it and a maze (that looks kind of difficult).
Next, I found a counting and colouring worksheet on tlsbooks.com. Students just have to find and count all of the ghosts (amongst other things) and write down the number… they can colour them as they find them so that they don’t count the same one multiple times.
Here is a colour by number page on education.com. There are a ton of similar ideas like this out there… just put in colour by number into Google for lots of other options.
Here is a Halloween themed page for adding one digit numbers to one digit numbers by Twisty Noodle.
I found this connect the dots page on Big Activities… I just picked one that was fairly simple. Finding more difficult ones isn’t hard with a simple Google search.
You can teach your students about bar graphs using this activity from Printables 4 Kids. All they have to do is count the number of the different kinds of candies and fill in the graph.
Have students work on their patterning by deciding what comes next in these Halloween patterns from Classroom jr.
For a whole class activity you could play some Halloween bingo. Artsy Fartsy Mama has 10 different cards ready for you to print.
And of course there are a plethora of Halloween themed colouring pages out there… just put it into Google or steal one of the following (or all of them).
Use one of these sheets for students to practice adding punctuation
There is a Vampire version or witches
Students can learn about monsters around the world with this worksheet from education.com or all about vampires (complete with a quiz at the end)
I found this vampire bats reading comprehension activity on Teachers Pay Teachers (don’t worry, it’s free)
Some Halloween themed word problems from Teacher Vision
I really like this idea on Teachers Pay Teachers. Just give each student a bag of M&M’s and have them complete this fraction activity. You could also add in a graphing activity.
Finally, some art ideas for Halloween can be found on
Rainbow Skies and Dragonflies (this one isn’t necessarily Halloween – which is great if you are at a religious school or any other school where Halloween may be a taboo topic.
A Faithful Attempt is one of my favourite art idea blogs. This art project could also be considered a fall art project and not necessarily Halloweeny.
Of course you can go up and get the bingo game from the other group above for some whole class fun too!... there is probably another Halloween themed bingo game out there that has more than 10 cards too.
Finally, the rest of the grades. These grades were the most difficult to find things for. What are they even into above grade 6? It’s a real mystery.
Pretty sure they would still a word search. This one from ESL Themes looked a little more difficult
The Teachers Corner has some different Halloween themed writing paper for your students to write a scary story on.
My students LOVED working with coordinate pairs last year (in grades 5 and 6). Math Aids has some 4 quadrant ones to make things a little more difficult for those upper grades.
And there you have it… a rather long list of fun, free, printable activities for you to do with your students this Halloween.
When all else fails.. plan a Halloween science experiment (or just show a bunch of Steve Spangler from YouTube
Am I missing anything? Is there something you like to do with your students that I didn’t include? Feel free to link it below in the comments section!
I was lucky this past week and with the one day of substitute teaching that I had I only ever had a quarter of my class at a time (I was doing running records with the ones I had in the room with me). This meant that I only had 5 students with me... needless to say it was a pretty nice day for substitute teaching (the downside being that I had to listen to a story about Monopoly about 20 times). With the group that I had at the end of the day I asked them what they wanted to do with the last 15 minutes or so of school... I offered to put something up on the projector for them to watch but no one seemed too keen on that so then I suggested Telephone Pictionary.
And that is what we played.
telephone pictionary progression
I think it would have worked slightly better with just a few extra students but they had a lot of fun playing it and reading (and showing) the results at the end of each game (we played 2). It was a great way to end of off the day!
Much like Mad Libs, Telephone Pictionary is a fun time and people (you included) want to know about it! Plus, it can have kids practicing descriptive words to really describe the scene that was drawn to get it as accurate as possible.
Do I use it in my classroom?
I haven't yet. The problem with Telephone Pictionary is it works well with about 10 people. My class size last year was 22. Maybe I'll try it this year if half my class is ever out with the flu or something.
I made it into a little math activity by having them double the recipe the first day and then I THINK we tripled the recipe the second day.
I would highly recommend doing this with your students if you live in a place with tons of snow.
My 4th graders LOVED it.
Confession: I got this idea when one of my friends posted the above link on Facebook announcing that it was the worst thing you could do because of all the chemicals in the air. She said it was worse than drinking rain water. Well, the day after I read that I was outside for recess duty and saw a bunch of my kids eating the snow (it wasn't dirty snow) and I decided that it would be fine. Besides, we are out in the country and not getting the snow off a main highway or anything.
What else did we do?
- I made sugar cookies and we spent some time decorating them.
- We drew names for secret santa (everyone remembered to bring in their gifts and we didn't need to use my emergency extras - I had 3 extras just in case) and obviously opened presents the morning of the last day.
- My teaching partner and myself also opened our gifts. I got a lot of chocolate (and lots from Germany), baking, ornaments, honey (this isn't as surprising as you think it would be), and Tim Horten gift cards. But the most surprising present? A webkin (that was from one of my grade 8's).
- We went sledding
- In the afternoon they also had their party where they ate a ton and watched a movie (I was with my grade 8's in the afternoon though)
