Hello Everyone! It has been raining like crazy here in Texas the last couple days. Our back yard just a couple days ago had nice cut grass, and is now a muddy puddle. But at least it is going to cool everything down so summer doesn't come so soon! And we got to wear our rain boots this week!!!!
I love my rain boots, well not the part where they make my feet look 2 times bigger. I actually got them in New York City, we went there a couple years ago in the winter and didn't realize that are feet were going to get soaking wet and freeze from walking around so much! So on day 2 I picked up some rain boots =] Rainy days though always make me want to go through old things, and I was looking through Monkey's brain book I made her last year, it has a bunch of different games for her to play covering a ton of different things. And since everything I am currently working on is not complete yet I figured I would give you one of the games I made her for vowel sounds. It just covers Vowel sound "a" long and short. But if you like it I'll look at making more for the rest of the sounds! The game is called Shoot for the Stars: This game is to help students have fun learning the different sounds the letter "a". It could be used in centers or groups. Game is for 2 - 4 players. Similar idea to the bump it number games with words. all words focus on the vowel "a" sounds. Students must read the words aloud with the proper vowel sound, long vs short.
Download the Shoot for the Stars game for FREE at my TPT store
Good Afternoon, Are you having a Sunday fun day? Or a lazy one like me? I love staying in all day and not having to deal with the outside word. What have yenz been up to this weekend? I have been trying to find printable's to take with us on our vacation over the summer. It's never to early to start planning! To help any of you looking for some good websites to find activities these are a couple really good ones: If you are looking for:
If you have never heard of them before this is what they are:
http://www.tangram-channel.com/
You are given a silhouette of something and then you have one box of shapes and using one complete box you try and make the picture. The websiteTangram Channelis amazing because it has so many different silhouettes and then it shows you the answer, and after you see the answer you can print them out for personal use. I'm so excited for Monkey play, she LOVES puzzles! I excited to do it too though!
To make the Tangram box you can just print it out and laminate or print it out on card stock. What I did was used some foam I got from the Dollar tree and cut out the shape, one down side was my foam was rectangular, It took 2 sheets to get a full box, but I did 9 sheets of different colors only. They definitely are not perfectly cut, but I like that they will last long.
But while I was doing all this I have been trying to think of a way to get some Phonics into Monkey's day to day, we don't always have time for games. So I made a Phonic Chart, it has 100 different Vowel sounds, Consonant Blends, Silent letters, Endings. It is all on one page with one or two examples for each one. I'm hoping Monkey can go over the page either Daily or Weekly just to refresh on them. She can also refer to the chart while reading independently and is stuck on a word. Lastly I can take sections of it when we focus on certain vowels or blends, so we have something to refer to.
Download the Phonics Chart for FREE at my TPT store
I did not want to get out of bed this morning, I just wanted to sleep, sleep, sleep! Not only is my Husband awesome and lets me use him as my pillow, we sleep in an awkward upside down L shape way ( the way we sleep is never on those "What your sleeping position tells you about your relationship" articles). But I also have the cutest puppy (50lb puppy) that sleeps right next to me, and my senior citizen puppy (11 years old) who sleeps by my feet!
Meet, Zack, Senior on the left, Zoe, Puppy on the right
Who would want to leave these 2 in the morning and go to school?!? (NOT I, yet I did :-/) But the best part is our "gardener" (Lawn man) came over this morning to cut our grass for the first time since October! I cannot wait to go home and see the nice cut grass!! Me and Zoe are going to play for hours! Who else loves the first grass cut of the year?
However, until I get home I wanted to give yenz ("Yenz" means "you all", I grew up close to Pittsburgh, yenz is slang from that region of the country, and it is etched into my sole!) the Number of the Day for the middle elementary levels. This is the number of the day I put together for Monkey for over the summer.
In Number of the day there are 40 day worth of problems.
Hello hello hello, I hope everyone had a great weekend! Monday is over and we are on to Tuesday, one more day and we will be halfway through the week! I can see Friday already. Though I go to UTA (University of Texas at Arlington) and only have classes on Tuesday and Thursday so today is my Monday and Thursday is my Friday. Which makes it really tough because ever morning I wake up and don't want to go because I either just had a nice long weekend or am about to! (I have only missed one class and I was sick :-) But SUMMER is in the plans! I'm so excited for our trip to be soon. Monkey does not know when or where we are going so I am going to keep the destination on the DL, but round trip we will be driving for 52 hours!!!! and we only have a week to do it! With all the driving though I still want to keep Monkey learning, and her cousin is coming with us. She is is 5th grade this year, and I didn't think it would be fair to Monkey to have to do some school work when she didn't. So I am now putting together 5/6th grade activities as well. (I am so out of my league!) But I think it is coming along well. (I promise I am not working them to hard! Just keeping them fresh!) I started with some basics Number of the Day and Word of the Day 5/6/7th grade edition. So far I have completed the Number of the Day, working on the Word of the day. The basic outline is to multiple a four digit number and also divide it. Then use either the number of the day or word of the day to create a word problem. There are 27 different numbers, so 27 days worth.
Good Afternoon, I hope everyone's week is goingamazing! Only one day left and it is Friday! I feel like this week has just flown by! But ready for a great weekend, Fuller House comes out!!!! Who else is going to watch it all by Monday? I know Monkey and I are, we have been planning this for months. Also we have a birthday party to go to, the birthday boy is turning 6, what do you get boys? We got him a castle tent I hope he loves it! Today though is notFriday, so we have been practicing spelling words! We did a practice spelling test and after Monkey completed it I rewrote all her spelling words in cursive. (BTW she got an A++) I just wanted to show her how cool cursive looks. By 2nd grade I had already learned cursive! I think it is so sad they do not teach it anymore. Though my name does not look that pretty in cursive. It is like a little mountain range is going on in the middle of my name.
But to the title of today's post, why do I mention the middle line? Maybe you are wondering what this middle line is. Well I am no expert on it, though what I have learned is it help cross the invisible line in our brain that connects our creative side to our academic side. There are exercises that can be done and different activities that can be done. Here is a great website that talks about it ilslearningcorner.
Also though I've read about cursive writing is able to help cross that middle line. Which make sense considering writing is a academic thing and cursive is an art. A while back I put a cursive handwriting activity together to teach Monkey, but time got in the way and I plan on teaching it to her this summer. But maybe one of you will have time now so I wanted to share it with you, and if not now hopefully later it will come in handy for you!
Get the complete handout for FREE at my TPT store here:
Good Afternoon Everyone! I hope everyone's Monday went amazing! Ours had it's ups and downs but ended on a high note. We went to the Japanese grill, I WISH I could cook like them! I was so yummy though so I'll leave it to the professionals. Also today marked the first day of the 5th 6 weeks. I have to say I do not like the 6 weeks increment thing. Where I Grew up we had four 9 week periods, which I prefer. 6 weeks is not enough time to give a fair assessment of your child's progress. If you live in Fort Worth ISD it was hard this year, to make the semester end before winter break the 6 weeks were under 30 day. I felt like Monkey was coming home with a progress report or report card every other week! Any who, fingers crossed for and awesome 6 weeks! I am working on a lot of things for summer and we started summer vacation planning! Woot Woot! But until then I wanted to give you all something I made last year for Monkey. I wanted to see where she was truly at academically, so we knew what to work on throughout the summer. So I made her a Knowledge Check Test:
There is 14 pages total of work to be complete, half math and half reading.
This will help with getting an idea of where your student or child is doing well and where they are struggling.
Math has:
Adding with regrouping
Math Adding Facts
Place Value
Shapes
Money
Fractions
Word Problems
Time
Reading has:
Grammar
Constant Blends
Vowel Sounds
Verb Tense
Sentence Fixing
listening to reading
** Not included** Also the one I made for monkey I had taken a Coloring page off google, that had a lot going on in it and had her write about what she thought was going on, **
Here is what the Place Value page looks like and a snip it of the Vowel Sounds page.
Sorry it has been so long, it has been a very hectic year. From some of the hardest struggle my family has experienced, to some of the best things to ever happen for us! But now it is 2016... which is already flying by! Though the learning never stopped! Monkey is now in 3rd grade and I am already getting things ready for the summer! Crazy! However I wanted to share somethings I worked on over the last 12 months. Monkey has changed schools since last year. Her school rating now doubled from the school she went to last year, which has been a big challenge for her! We absolutely love, love, love her new school. Though she did start out academically way behind her 3rd grade class. We are so proud of her though, with lots of hard work she improved a whole grade level in 6 months, so now we are only a little behind. But with 4th grade is right around the corner there is no stopping! Our biggest struggle is reading and reading comprehension! Which snowballs into every other subject. I didn't want us to just be able to read words though, I wanted her to comprehend it! So I created Story explorers for her:
This is to help your student dig deeper and think about there text, improving their reading comprehension.
It is one page that offers 6 different ways for the student to explore reading comprehension in the story they just read.
It is not specific to any book, and can be used with a variety of different books and levels.
This handout will help with: Vocabulary development, prediction, character description and development, and providing details of the story.
Hello Everyone, This is a little late. This was our first ever day of Little Saturday School.
How I do Little Saturday School, (LSS), is; I pick one book out to focus on. Then I find different things that will touch a bit of most subjects, to teach about. I discovered the world of lap books as I was planning the first lesson.
*DO YOU KNOW WHAT LAP BOOKS ARE!!!!*
If not that's ok, check out this video I found on youtube, it gives you a nice little over view. I showed this to Monkey on day one, she was super excited.
Now that we know what lap books are, I try and make a lap book with each lesson. Monkey loves it and I truly believe they help her retain information. We did this Make Way for Ducklings lesson about a month ago, and she can still convey to me a bit of every thing we learned. And we learned a lot this time, I started this lesson out big, to kind of see what worked for us.
Lesson Plan For Make Way For Ducklings by Robert McCloskey
I started the day out with, our fluency sheet, Soccer Camp, I got this from TeacherSites.SchoolWorld. -They have a ton of great fluency sheets!- *I worked with Monkey once on Thursday (The day we started) She only got 25 wpm, by Sunday she was up to 68wpm! I can express how excited I was, in only 4 days!!* Little story, Monkey gets a fluency sheets at school, so back in August she got her first fluency sheet. They get a new one as soon as they can read the whole story in 1 min. It will be April in 2 days and she is still on that first fluency sheet. =( However she is not with us full time unfortunately so we do not get to help her improve.
My process for fluency sheets
We read it together and find all of the unknown words, or struggle words.
Than before we read it, we go over each of those words once. Eventually she has learned the word without even needing to look at them.
I try and have her read it twice on school days, and 3 times on the weekend. It may seem like a lot, but it only takes a couple mins, and is totally worth it!
We went into our Word of the Day and Number of the Day, from 2nd Grade Stuff, next
Monkey is having problems with digraph sounds and vowel sounds, so each lesson I pick a sound to focus on. We are working through the vowel sounds first. I believe they are some of the most important because the are in all words in some way.
Vowel Sound Long "A"
I created the Word of the Day for Monkey, we used an online dictionary for the definition.
I got this great idea from, Third Grade Doodles. Every one takes a turn adding something to the picture. We started with a blank page, and ended with this:
<This one was original
Now to start the Book!
We read the book.
I wasn't feeling good and I wanted to slowly ease Monkey into LSS, so I actually found a video on youtube of the book being read. Unfortunately the video I originally used was taken down.
Sentence Work Sheet.
Even though she didn't read the book, I pulled out different sentences from the book to go over, for our vowel lessons.
We learned about Mallard Ducks, Days of the Week, and Months of the Year
Then we played a game of Make Way for Ducklings Candy Land!
This took a group of questions from the book, questions about long a sounds, and spelling word questions. I got the game board from, First Grade al a Carte. I created a set of cards, to go with my lesson though.
Next we learned about Boston, also from Home School Share.
Now for math games, I gave Monkey the choice between Addition or Subtraction Board Games.
Then we went back to some of the Home School Share activities, Food Chain, Baby and animal and their parents, put the ducklings in ABC order, and Duckling Math.
Then to end our day we awarded Monkey a Certificate of Completion!!
One thing I forgot to mention, I create a simple Power Point that keeps me on track and in order.
Here is a complete folder of the worksheets I created.
As always if you use any of the files please link it back to me. Don't forget to share me =]
So far everything I use has been Free or I have created on my own.
Thing that could have been improved!
To much right at the beginning. I would not get rid of any thing, just spread it throughout the day. Example: Do the word of the day before or after Candy Land. But definitely keep the morning activity: Shared Doodles.
Spelling words, I did spelling word this first time around. However they may have been a bit much. I didn't really do anything with them. If I was completely home schooling Monkey I would encourage them. But we only do this once a week, so it becomes a side note, and unimportant, I'm not a fan. I'm not a fan of side notes when it comes to learning.
-Monkey learned a lot and I learned a lot about how to get stuff going. Every lesson is exciting, both to plan and to do. She is asking to do more and more, very exciting.-
*If you see anything that you have a question about, please ask, I am here to help the best I can! If something looks like it was missed let me know.*
