{Giveaway Winners!}

Congratulations to entrants ‘Andrea’ and ‘Mandy’!  You are the newest owners of my May Early Finisher/Challenger Packets! Check your emails ladies! I hope you enjoy them!!

If you didn’t win, you can pick one up for $4 in my TPT store!

MAY Early Finisher/Challenger Packets {GIVEAWAY} !

Happy Spring! The weather here has been fabulous and don’t my kids know it! They are aching to be outside, but we’ve been stuck inside taking LOTS of standardized tests. I kept them busy with my “Testing Boot Camp” (future post to come on that!), but this is our last week of testing and then we’ll be done! Wahoo!

My school does ‘hub’ style testing for certain tests- meaning that instead of the whole class going in together, they call certain students at a time so all day long I have students coming in and out of class. This makes it very challenging to teach any kind of lesson. Luckily I just finished my MAY EARLYFINISHER/CHALLENGER packets! (Click here for info about how I use these packetsin my classroom each month.)  I handed these out last week so that my students had something fun that they could work on between tests that would keep them engaged!  This month I even learned a little something myself as I was creating an activity page for the packet about the history of our calendar. Did you know May was named after the Roman Goddess Maia? If you’d like to grab this packet, click one of the preview picks below to head over to my Teachers Pay Teachers Store.  In my store you can also download a full preview.

 

I can’t wait for you guys to check out this month’s packet, and so it only seems natural to kick it off with a Giveaway!

{GIVEAWAY} As a thank you to my followers, I am going to give away TWO May Early Finisher Packet!. Just enter through Rafflecopter below. Winner will be announced on Tuesday, May 7^th.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Beat the Post-Break Chattiness!

My students returned from Spring Break last Monday, and let’s just say… we weren’t accomplishing much. Does this picture sound familiar? The first half of the day they were zombies, and the second half of the day they came alive and didn’t want to stop talking about all of their Spring Break adventures! We have ISATS (our Idaho standardized test) right around the corner (as in, starting Tuesday!) and I knew this week needed to be extra productive! So I whipped up this little activity:

Spring Break~ Brain Break!

 Just make a copy for each student, and tell them the rules. The rules in my classroom are:

1.   Each student can sign one of their own boxes (like a free space)

2.   You can only have a classmate sign ONE of your boxes.

3.   You have to ASK your classmate what they’ve done- this means that one person can’t stand in the corner yelling “I saw a movie!” while everyone trudges over to get their paper signed. Instead, they have to go up to one person, and ask questions from their paper like, “Did you sit in a hot tub?” until they have a match!

4.   I give them about 10 minutes, and whoever gets the most names on their paper gets a small prize- I like to give Free Time on the class iPods because the kids love it and it costs me nothing!

If you’d like a copy of this for FREE, just click the picture to download it from my TPT store. I hope your students love it!

"Snowmen at Night" Chalk Art! {Art Lesson Tutorial}

 A few weeks ago Jen over at Runde’s Room posted about a super cute art project called 'Catching Snowflake's that she had done with her 5th/6th graders, via an idea posted at Artisen de Arts.  I had never been to this art blog and now I am hooked!  She has so many awesome ideas that are perfect for 5^th graders to take art a little further than just cutting and pasting.

One idea that I loved was working on blending, highlights and shadows by creating snowmen out of chalk.  And perfect for this time of year because we haven’t been without snow on the ground in over a month now. We also read the fun picture book “Snowmen at Night” which has beautiful pictures that were inspiration for our art!  I truly believe that even at the ripe old age of 10, 5^th graders can still truly enjoy a picture book- mine did!

They turned out SO cute! Here is what the final products looked like:

 {Scroll down for Tutorial}

Tutorial for Chalk “Snowmen at Night”

1.   Gather your materials. You’ll need dark blue construction paper, and a chalk set for each student- the essential colors are white, dark blue, and purple.  The other colors come in handy when students are decorating their snowmen with hats and buttons towards the end of the project

2.   Use a pencil to sketch three circles for the snowman and a line for the horizon.

3.   Use the white chalk to fill in the snowman and the ground.  Don’t worry if it looks kind of ‘scribbly’- once you blend, it will all smooth out and look like freshly fallen snow!

4.   Use one finger to blend! Move finger in a circular motion over chalk.

5.   Use the blue and/or purple and/or black chalk to create a shadow.  A little goes a long way!  I instructed students to put the darkest color on the edge of the snowman’s body and then use less as they move towards the center in a C-Shape.

6.   Use a different finger to blend the shadow with the white.  At this point some students thought they had too much shadow or too much white- Luckily the chalk is pretty forgiving so I just told the students to add more white, or add more blue, and blend, blend, blend!

7.   We added the snowman’s shadow next.  Draw three much smaller circles at a diagonal under the snowman’s body.  For the shadow, completely color it in with shadow colors and then blend.  It looks best if colors are darkest closest to the bottom of the snowman’s body.

8.   When all of that is done, it’s time to ‘freestyle’!  Let the students use the other colors to decorate and dress their snowman however they wish!

{I couldn’t find my pictures for these steps, but if I find them I’ll add them later, sorry!}

February Packet Winners!

Congratulations to entrants ‘AMC’ and ‘Holly Snyder’!  You are the newest owners of my February Early Finisher/Challenger Packets! Check your emails ladies! I hope you enjoy them!!

If you didn’t win, you can pick one up for $4 in my TPT store. Just click one of the pics below.:)

My kiddos have been hard at work on these this week.  I even saw some students dusting off the dictionaries to help with some of the activities- love that!