A Giveaway and a Sale

I'm kicking off February right by joining in on a giveaway and having a sale! 

My fabulous blogging buddies Jessica from Joy in the Journey and Rosie from Rosie's Rambles are hosting a fantastic Favorite Things Giveaway! You can click the picture below to get all the details on the giveaway. There are some fantastic prizes from 28 bloggers and 2 boxes full of goodies!! I saw Snickers bars and Sharpies in the mix...what more could a teacher ask for? 

In celebration of the Super Bowl I'm having a sale in my TPT store. Click the picture below to check it out! 

Thanks to Teaching in the Tongass for this super cute graphic! 

Reference Sources and More Snow {Five for Friday}

It's time for Five for Friday!! I did go to school a few more days than last week, so I can actually link up this week and share a few things! 

It snowed and once again wreaked havoc on our schedule. We had two 2 hour delays, an early dismissal, 2 snow days, and a 12-4 delayed schedule today. Reading back over that it doesn't even seem like it's possible to fit all that in one week! 

Our super photogenic Aussie out having some fun in the snow. He always enjoy my picture taking adventures! 

We are still working on reference sources, so we broke out the Thesaurus and worked on finding some synonyms for commonly overused words. You can find the snowflake sheet by Michaela Almeida here on TPT for free! 

We also tried out the Dictionary Roll-A-Word by Common Core and So Much More. Again, another fantastic freebie! This one was a big hit with my kids! 

I used the snow day time to do a little decorating for Valentine's Day. I've also been working on some cards for all my Valentines, but I'll have to wait until Monday Made It to post pics of those...I don't wanna give away the surprise! 

This mess was my desk today around 2:30. I can't handle a messy desk, so needless to say I was at school until it was all cleaned up! With all the snow days and delays I've been sending home more practice for my kiddos to do and that means more grading for me. 

Do you have any time saving tricks for delays and snow days? It seems like there are not enough hours in the few days we are at school each week! 

Pronoun Freebie and a Giveaway

Happy Monday, friends! I am keeping my fingers crossed for some time at school with my kiddos this week! I've had plenty of time off, so that means a new freebie for you! 

I needed a quick lesson to review pronouns with my kiddos and get some notes into their Interactive Notebooks, so I came up with this little freebie. You can click on the picture above or here to pick yours up. 

I'm helping Amy from Eclectic Educating celebrate 300 blog followers!!! Click the button below to go over to her page and enter. If you've not checked out her blog you don't know what you're missing!! Every post from Amy is full of great resources and activities I can use in my classroom!! 

ZipList Virtual Recipe Box, Meal Planner, and List Maker

With all the snow and cold weather we've had I've not been to school enough lately I went to school on Monday this week and that was it, so I don't really have any great educational insights for you (like I do anyway..haha), but I do have a pretty neat site to share with you called ZipList! 

It is an online recipe box, meal planner, and grocery list maker and it's FREE!!! It has made finding and trying new, healthy recipes so much easier! 

When you sign up for an account you just drag the recipe clipper to your bookmarks bar, then anytime you find a recipe you like you just click on the recipe clipper and, Ta-Da, you've got it forever! 

Here is a screen shot of me clipping from Allrecipes, but I mostly get my recipes from blogs and this is such much easier than pinning them all or printing them! 

Here is my ZipList recipe box and the new recipe I just added. When you hover over the picture it gives you the option to add it to your list and plan it as well. I've started using both these features and I love them! 

Here is my grocery list for the week. You can create a standard list that you can just add to each week, which I think is a great time saver. I shop each week, usually on Friday or Saturday, so I like that I can get a start on my list earlier in the week and not lose the paper it's written on! 

And you know there's an app for that!! Just tried this out for the first time last weekend and it was great. The list is broken down into sections, so I wasn't running all over the store because I'd forgotten cheese in the dairy section! 

ZipList does not know I exist, I just think it's a really neat site and app that is a great timesaver and who couldn't use a little extra time? 

How often do you shop? Daily, weekly, monthly? Some weeks I feel like I should just get a 2nd job at the grocery store because I'm there every day!! haha 

It's Recess Time!!! {Trending Topics Linky}

I'm loving this new linky party from Jessica at Literacy Spark. Each week the topic is different and this week it is all about recess! I just knew I had to link up because some days I'm living for recess! haha 

Our recess is scheduled for us and is from 2:00 - 2:25 every day. Right after recess we have resource and then dismissal, so if I can make it until 2:00 every afternoon I am good to go! 

We have a very nice playground outside with a grassy area and a lot of playground equipment as well. If the weather is nice we are out! I am just wimpy and don't like the cold so it has to be in the 40's before I will go out. 

I do sometimes take 5-10 minutes of recess from students for their behavior throughout the day, but it has to be extreme circumstances for me to take more than that. By that point in the day they have had all their academic instruction and they need to move and get some of that energy out! 

Inside recess is not my favorite thing in the world, but I'm working on some things to make it better. We occasionally play board games, card games, and puzzles I have collected over the years. This year my kiddos love to watch movies, so we do that quite often. I have a subscription to Amazon Prime, so I stream videos on the SmartBoard. 

Episodes of Arthur seem to be the most popular right now. They are just the right length for our recess time and the kids are always very engaged. I'm happy with a little character education during recess! 

Last week we tried a very simple art project for recess and that went really well, so I think I'll try to find some more simple things we can complete over a day or two. 

I've started a Pinterest board of ideas for inside recess. If you'd like to take a look you can click on the image below! 

Follow Courtney Slemp's board Inside Recess on Pinterest.

What is your recess like? Head over to Jessica's blog to link up and share! 

What is your favorite inside recess activity? 

Media Messages Lesson Ideas

Do you teach your students about media messages? Last year our SOLs (standards) changed and we had to include media messages into our Language Arts curriculum. The state wants our students to be able to categorize a message as auditory, visual, or written. In addition, students need to analyze the source, authorship, purpose, and intended audience of the message. 

As with anything new, resources are sometimes short so I thought I'd share a few resources I've found and one I created.

First up. I found this amazing site last year called Admongo and it is fabulous! Like the name suggests, this one focuses more on advertisements and I felt that is where my students needed the most teaching. After all, think about how many ways our students are exposed to advertising in a day and some of them are so subtle it is difficult them to even understand they are being the target of an advertisement. 

Both the teacher and student sides of this site are great! The student side is a very fun, interactive game where they look at and analyze different types of media. The teacher site has a lot of great lesson ideas. 

We read bits and pieces of this book, but it is definitely for the older crowd. There were a few things that were over my kids' heads, but still a resource worth mentioning! 

We also looked at a lot of advertisements I pulled from the internet and some funny commercials from youtube. It was a really fun couple of days! 

I always like to include some movement in my lessons, so we created some hand motions for the 3 different types of messages: 

Visual - use your hands to make "glasses" over your eyes

Auditory - cup your hand behind your year

Written - fold your hands out like a book and "read" 

I also created a foldable for our interactive notebooks and a quiz for my students. You can click here to see it in my TPT store. 

I left the front of the foldable blank so the kiddos could add their own drawings in and they came up with some really creative stuff! 

And here we are working on the quiz. Even though I labeled it a quiz, I let them reference their notebooks because this is such a new concept. 

Do you teach media messages? What are some of your favorite resources? 

Dictionary Skills and a Sweet Freebie {Five for Friday}

What a whirlwind week it has been! We had a snow day on Wednesday and a 2 hour delay yesterday and today. We've also been trying to use 22 or so computers to give all 64 of our students a math benchmark test, so needless to say it has been a cRaZy week!! Like always, I didn't get to everything I planned this week, so our schedule is looking pretty packed next week. 

I'm linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching to share some randomness from the week. 

Hello my name is Courtney and I'm addicted to Instagram!!! This little bit of inspirational goodness came from Holly Switzer at just the right time this week. I love getting glimpses into classrooms and seeing fantastic work from students! It has really been very motivating for me and I can't get enough. If you've caught the bug too you can follow me at polkadotlessonplans.

Do You Want to Build a Snowman has become a  favorite little brain break in my class. Confession: I want to listen just as much as the kids! The songs from this movie were just incredible! 

As part of our word reference study we labeled this dictionary entry in our notebooks. I'll be honest here, I'm up in the air about this activity. On one hand I'm thinking it may have been a little too time intensive, but on the other it was a great way to sneak in a lesson on diagrams and labels! 

In all the dictionary talk, we've been working on guide words and determining which words would belong on a page with certain guide words. We needed more practice, a lot more practice, so I made this little worksheet. You can click on the picture to pick this up this FREEBIE with an answer key! Woot woot! 

On Wednesday I took some time to work on lesson plans and I had a little Ladybug helper. I just love this picture of her. At the rate we are going with snow and scheduling I'll be doing those plans in two weeks....haha!! Anyone else over plan?