What we've been up to in 2nd Grade...plus a classroom management FREEBIE!

Happy Friday!! Woohoo, it's March which means spring will be here soon and spring break season is upon us!  I only have 10 days between me and 2 weeks of spring track-out.  Lots to do between now and then, but it'll be here before I know it!
So, we've been up to a lot since I was on my little blog here last.  If you follow me on Instagram, you have seen we have gone full flexible seating in our room.  I'll have to dedicate a whole blog post just to that.
First up, this quarter I started having STEM Friday's each Friday during our Excel time (intervention block) using Brooke Brown's year-long STEM pack. I'm not sure that they have yet learned anything about science, technology, engineering, or math, but if they can learn how to get along and work in a small group, I'll call it a success in the end.
This week we made wind-powered mazes.  I only gave each group 1 box of unifix cubes and they had to make a maze from that box of cubes.  Some struggled working together, and one group, when it came time to race their marbles, had a huge gap in the side of their maze - so they had to problem solve and fix that before they could navigate the maze.

I realized after school, I forgot to give the kids the straws to help them blow on the marbles - OOPS!  That would have probably helped this sweet one!

The past couple weeks we have been tackling money in math.  With St. Patrick's Day coming up, I made this fun activity to make a colorful bulletin board and get the kids using coins to make a specified amount of money.

Each kiddo got a cloud and they have to show me how they would make that amount of money by drawing the coins they would use.  Then they got to go get their coins (clipart) to cut out and put on their pot.

Easy differentiation - there are amounts above and below one dollar.  We hadn't yet done amounts over one dollar, so I gave a few kiddos a challenge - and they mastered it!

Now, I will tell you, I did the rainbow part for my kiddos.  Before we did the project, I layered the colored strips of paper and taped them so they looked like a fan.  Then, as the kiddos finished up their pots with the coins and cut out their clouds, they brought it to me and I put the rainbow part together.

I knew it would be a total disaster if I had my kiddos do that part and I would have pulled all my hair out, so I helped them with that part.

You can grab this activity {HERE} from my TPT store!

Now, for a a little classroom management FREEBIE!

I'm not sure if you have watched Teachers on TV Land or not (I wasn't a fan), but in one of the first episodes, one of the teachers got her kiddos attention by saying Quiet Coyote.  I thought it was a fun idea, so I started using it in my class too!

We even use Quiet Coyote when we are in line.  I ask them for my Quiet Coyote line and they all show me their coyotes on their hands.  Now, if you are in North Carolina, you will also know this as the NC State wolf...this may or may not have been even more reason that I use it - Go Pack!!

Then, I was listening to Ron Clark one day on the way home from school and he was talking about attention getters and getting your class to stop FAST!  So, we started to make it a game.  We practiced a few times and they kept getting faster, so then it was time to start keeping score!

When the kids stop moving and talking super fast, they earn a point.  When they are slow or keep talking, I earn a point.  This is similar to the smiley/frowny game that Whole Brain Teaching emphasizes.  At the end of the day, if the kids have more Quiet Coyote points than I do, they earn a whole class point on Class Dojo for a Quiet Coyote Class Win.

After a couple weeks of making my own little game board on my whiteboard each day, I made this cute little game board with coyote clipart from Melonheadz included!

Grab the freebie {HERE}

Hope you were able to grab a new idea and maybe even a new resource or two!

Have a wonderful weekend, sweet readers!

Gearing Up for November!

Hello friends!  I'm back!  I can't believe it has been a month since I last blogged.  In that time, I went to Disneyland with my dad for a week and then enjoyed my second week of track-out at home enjoying sleeping in a little later, working on some fun projects, and doing a little shopping. I've been back at school for 2 weeks and we are gearing up for Pumpkin Week this week!  My kids did the class "YAY!" on Friday when I told them this coming week was going to be Pumpkin Week!
But, with the final days of October looming, it's time to start gearing up for November!  I've been working hard to get some of my Thanksgiving products updated, plus some new ones!
First, I updated my November "Party Like a Pilgrim" math centers.  Last school year, I began creating monthly math centers.  As the year progressed, I got better at it, design and content wise, so this year, it was time to go back and revamp some of the early sets.

Come the holidays, I am all about reading holiday-specific books, but I also need to be able to keep my kids accountable for their learning and applying reading skills and strategies we have learned.  These activities are perfect for those short, holiday weeks where they kids are wired and antsy.  

This year, I added a new book to this set - The Great Thanksgiving Escape.  All of the books included in the set, I have gotten from Scholastic Reading Club in previous years.  If they are not available from Scholastic anymore, you can find them pretty cheaply on Amazon.

The Great Turkey Escape

The Amazing Turkey Rescue

The Silly Turkey Party

One is a Feast for a Mouse

'Twas The Night Before Thanksgiving

Who Will Carve the Turkey this Thanksgiving?

The Great Thanksgiving Escape

After updates - it was time for some new Thanksgiving goodies!  I have fallen in love with making writing craftivities - that's for sure!  This Gobble Up! set includes 6 crafts plus writing prompts for each (some duplicates), and once assembled, the character that is made looks like it is holding the student's writing, wit the exception of the Mayflower craft.  These are perfect bulletin board activities!

Mayflower Boy and Girl

Native American Boy and Girl

Mayflower and Turkey

I think my favorite is the googly-eyed turkey, but I also love the Pilgrim and Native American ones too!  I can't decide which ones I want to use for my bulletin board for November. 

Speaking of my November bulletin board...in math, we have finished double-digit addition, and just started double-digit subtraction with regrouping this past week.  So I'm thinking the first week of November is a perfect time to work on a review of both skills!  So I made this cute Recipe for Regrouping double-digit addition and subtraction activity that ended up as a forever freebie in my TPT store!

Students have to use the picture code at the top to write, and then solve the problem.  3 addition and 3 subtraction, all with regrouping.  I'm thinking I'm going to pair this with one of the crafts from my Gobble Up! set for my bulletin board.

And last, but not least, I created It's a Pilgrim Party - 5 ELA and 5 Math centers for Thanksgiving - these are also perfect for those short holiday weeks - keep the kids moving around the room and learning at the same time!

ELA skills include grammar, facts/opinions, parts of speech, ABC order, and phonics (making words from a word)

Math skills include double digit addition (with and without regrouping), place value, word problems, money, and telling time

The holidays will be here before you know it!  Our state fair finished up today, and with that the holidays just roll right in and don't stop!  Halloween, Veteran's Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas!  2 months till Christmas - that means its an acceptable amount of time to start listening to Christmas music right?!?! 

I'm already working on updates and new things for December!  I'll be back at the end of November to share with you what we will be up to in December.  Hopefully I'll be back before then with other stuff too!

Have a great week y'all!

21 Days in...how we are using Class Dojo!

Well, friends, today was the 21st day of school for me!  It's hard to believe that we are practically half way through the first quarter of the school year.  Assessments will be done by the end of the week which I will be so happy about!  Anywho...once I got my kiddos into the groove of using Class Dojo, we added some new fun things and I let them have some say in how we are giving/taking points, so I wanted to share that with you. The first week - I stayed ALL POSITIVE on Class Dojo - my kiddos didn't even know what the negative point sound sounded like until the middle of the second week of school.  I really wanted to focus on the positive and teaching students the expectations of what they should and should not do.  I also used that week to say, "next time, we will lose a dojo point for that action".  The first couple week of school my positive and negative actions for points were pretty generic and somewhat matched our classroom rules, which are the WBT 5 classroom rules.  After about 2 and a half weeks of school, we had a Dojo work lunch (since we eat lunch in our classrooms) and we, as a class, adjusted the behaviors for positive and negative points.   Here is what we ended up with:

Now, you know working with 7-year-olds meant they wanted to get really specific, and sometimes silly on these behaviors.  I couldn't put all of their ideas or we would have 20+ positive and negatives each, so I had to convince them that we group a lot of their ideas under some of the ones we already had (like poor choice).  What silly behavior would a 7-year-old come up with - one of my sweet girls wanted a positive point for "being awesome"!!

After ClassDojo's release of the Groups Feature this year, it is so much easier for me to be able to give points to a group of students at one time.  So, now, we have Table of the Week!  I have 4 tables in my classroom, so I have one group for each table.  When we are transitioning or working on a project, I'll look around for a table that is doing what they should be, or see which table is done the quickest, and they earn a dojo point for their table.  At the end of the week, we look at the Group points and the table with the most gets this fancy sign in their table caddy for the next week.  We then reset the table group points and start over on Monday.

Click the picture for a free download!

Now that we are 4 weeks into school, my kiddos are beginning to rack up some points!  Friday afternoon, we had our first members join the 100 point Dojo club!  I used monster clipart from ClassDojo to make these little monsters to display student names.

And lastly, our Dojo Leader of the Week!  Each Friday afternoon, I look on the Class Dojo reports to see which student has the highest combined points for the week and that student is the Dojo Leader of the Week.  They get a brag tag, a certificate, and their name gets added to our Class Dojo bulletin board.  They start asking me on Monday who has the most points - but I make them wait until Friday!

The monsters off to the side are preview Dojo Leaders of the Week - they might be a leader again, so keeping their monster nearby is helpful!

Have you started school yet?  Are you going to Dojo!?!?!

Saturday Night Freebie!

I haven't had a freebie in a while!  And I missed Five for Friday because I was rather feverish and sick last night...like in the bed before 9.  Feeling much better today and did some Christmas decor shopping with mom.  Came home tonight and made this little label to go on our new Box Tops and Campbell's Labels box.

I don't remember who it was, but I saw someone post a picture of repurposing a Cascade dish detergent container to use for a center, or something of the sort earlier in the week on Instagram.  I immediately thought that would be so cute to use for Box Tops!  Luckily, mom had one in the pantry that was close to empty that I could use.  It is a larger sized container since we bought it at BJ's, but that just means my kids need to bring in more Box Tops, right???

I printed this page/label at 70% in the printer settings and it came out just perfect. You may to decrease or increase the print size depending on your container.  I also printed one for each side since I had yucky stuff from trying to take the labels off.

Click the picture to download!

Clipart is Melonheadz, Fonts are from Hello Literacy

Have a great rest of the weekend!