It’s Freebie Friday Time!

  

1. I’m going to begin with a funny story from the week- I could easily fill our blog with these (as I’m sure could you), but this one cracked me up an extra bit more than usual, so thought I’d share. 🙂 One little boy said to me this week, “Mrs. Claahsen, I don’t like these jeans! It is hard for me to bend down in these.” So, I was like I’m so sorry, that’s too bad, thinking they were a size too small or something. And then he goes on to say, “It’s because they are skinny jeans!” He was so serious and so very frustrated by those darn skinny jeans I couldn’t help but love the little convo we were having!  The reason I find this extra funny is because I can’t even tell you how often in the past two years boys have come up to me to tell me something about their skinny jeans– it’s just too funny, especially coming from kindergarten and 1st grade boys! And let’s be honest, when skinny jeans are REALLY skinny, it is a definite struggle to bend your knees! 🙂

2. As a reading specialist I love incorporating writing on a daily basis in our literacy activities.  I really enjoy teaching writing and I like to provide my little friends with lots of ways to practice their writing through lots of graphic organizers to help them build up their ideas.  Since summer is so close, I have been using my End of the Year Writing Pack with my friends to get them writing and thinking. It’s always fun to get kids excited about summer as long as you can get them writing about it! Here are some of the activities we’ve been working on– there are several more fun graphic organizers in this pack, but there are only so many days in the week. 🙂

The “If you were a fly on our classroom wall” one had some great responses. The one pictured above said that he sees kids yelling, hears music and would feel scared.  He explained that he would feel scared because if he was a little fly people would want to swat at him…ha! He also explained that when he said he sees kids yelling, he was really thinking of the lunchroom. 🙂  If you are looking for some fun writing graphic organizers to help you get through the last few days/weeks of school (just print out and use!) you can check out these graphics organizers and several more in this pack here!

3. My favorite part- a freebie for this Friday! This freebie fits right in with my End of the Year Writing Pack. I did not do much with dialogue with my little friends at all this year, but I thought this would be a fun little activity for my friends to do just to give them the chance to “say” something fun! In this writing activity, they drew a picture of themselves and a friend in whatever setting they wanted and then added quotes of what they and their friend were saying about why they are excited for summer.  I had to include a pic of this one below because it cracks me up how tiny he drew the people when there was SO much white space to fill…but whatever, at least he got the overall idea (even if he also added zero color and a setting, but again…overall idea). He told me that the picture was of him and his brother and they were excited because they are supposed to be getting a new house this summer; now, the way he wrote what they are saying sounds much more like a command, but still cute, in my opinion. 🙂  

I’m hoping to do more with quotes/dialogue next year! (Especially because I know quotes/dialogue came up plenty of times in the leveled readers we read throughout the year but for some reason I never really got more into teaching them other than a relatively basic explanation…it’s always good to have goals for next year, right??) This activity was just one simple way of adding it into our literacy activities with a little summer twist.   You can download this freebie right here!

4. Well just like everyone else we are doing TONS of end of the year assessments right now…this week and last week we have been very busy with Fountas & Pinnell testing. This is our first year using this assessment system and wow am I loving the information we are getting from it! I’m mainly loving it because it is so amazing to actually see what level our little friends are reading at as opposed to just knowing how many words they can read within a minute. I said this with our AIMS testing too, but I am just so proud of our little friends and how much they have established themselves as little readers. Now, they are still little readers who haven’t quite made it to the end of the year levels they are “supposed” to be at, but they have jumped a whole lot of levels showing true progress which makes me very happy! 

5. And last but certainly not least, our best blogging buddy Kristin over at iTeach1:1 is having her 400 follower giveaway! I know we talk about her frequently, but let me just say, if you haven’t checked Kristin’s blog out yet, it is a must- she has crazy good ideas, amazing products and a super cute blog! Plus right now you have the added benefit of possibly winning lots of goodies (including an item from my store and from Amanda’s)- yay!