Saturday Stray, Sale, and a Freebie!

Ok so I really never understood the time blogging takes!!  Is it just me or did I underestimate?!  Maybe I don't know something I should.  Sorry I wasn't better about keeping with my weekly linky...I promise I will get better!

This week was a short week because we had a teacher in-service Friday plus Valentine's Day festivities on Thursday; we really had to squeeze in a lot of work!

Working at a Catholic school I am always trying to integrate faith into other areas!  This year I have also been trying to incorporate more virtues in our religion.  Our topic for January was love and kindness, so to accumulate all of our studies we did a writing on how we could live the greatest commandment.  We read the book Do Unto Otters by Laurie Keller.  This is a wonderful read aloud - - like the kids clapping saying "AGAIN, AGAIN!" kind of wonderful.  We then did a quick graphic organizer to get started.  The next day we put our writing into a paragraph in our speech bubbles.  On the final day, I taught the kids how to make an otter with a directed drawing and then we decorated.  The kids did such a great job making the otters unique and one of a kind.  This may be an all time favorite activity for me! 

This pack will be 50% for the long weekend!!  Check it out at my TPT store!

                 

Teachers are clever thinkers!  Especially as a newbie teacher I am learning each and every day and of course my colleagues help me along the way, so I thought to share something that you may not know.  Every once in a while we work with partners on assignments.....sometimes I just pull sticks and let the kids pick their partners but other times I need a clever way to mix them up.  I use contractions, compound words, place value, and really any possible skill that can be matched to quickly and easily review skills and pair the kids - two birds:one stone.

We touched briefly on homographs in our reading this week so I whipped up this super quick activity: each student got a sentence and they had to find their partner that had the same homograph.  There are two versions - one with the word underlined and one without.  Grab it below for FREE by clicking on one of the pictures!

   

We had our Valentine's Day party on Thursday and it was blast!  My parent volunteer made this adorable pin the kiss on Mrs. Valentine!!! A-DORABLE!  Then all the super sweet valentine cards that my kids made were awesome!                                      

Of course we couldn't have just a normal day so we did some fun Valentine's themed activities.
Our morning work was a fun freebie word search from Kathy Ryan I found on TPT.

In Math we discussed comparing numbers with equal to, less than, and greater than with this fun math freebie from Love of First!  This concept is really lacking in our math series!  I introduced it with the kids picking numbers from a bag and then talking about which one is greater or less than the other.  Of course the kids were good at telling which one was greater but they had A LOT of trouble verbalizing WHY!  It was an amazing lesson - - I let the kids pick two numbers from a bag and we wrote them on the board.  The kids started saying things like one number is bigger or higher - so then of course I would write the other number BIGGER (literally) or HIGHER (literally)!  The giggles were priceless!  After about five times they changed their reasoning to the greater number having more digits, or more tens etc.  It was very successful!

Thankful I get to call this crazy girl my own!  We were happy to get a few warm days last weekend and made sure we spent as much of it outside as possible!  Here are a few pics from the small walk through petting zoo we visited.

 

Thanks for visiting and if you would like to share some randomness from your week just grab the images and link up!