Five for Frunday?? Yeah, I'm a little late!

Linking up again with Doodle Bugs for  Five for Frunday? Yes, I am a little late but I had a great week so I wanted to share!

1. Toro, the Houston Texan's mascot came to visit our 3rd and 4th graders to share some testing tips before our big state tests this week. He was full of energy and the kids ate it up. Lots of excited kids and now I am ready for football season!!

2. Simile breakthrough! We have been talking about similes on and off all year. I am hitting poetry hard right now before our big test so we were doing a fun figurative language foldable (more on that later) as I put up the definition on the board I asked the kids to create their own simile rather than just using my example. At first many of them were stuck but after a bit, I couldn't get them to stop! They were awesome and so excited to share! After the test we are going to revisit these. I think I'll let me kids illustrate and hang them in the hallway. The best part? They started "seeing" them everywhere.

 A girl was wearing this shirt and proudly stood up to model the simile she had found. Then someone pointed out, "This Girl is on Fire" is another example of figurative language and we had a debate about it being a metaphor or an idiom... Love it!

3. STAAR Wars: On Friday we (all 6 third grade teachers) spilt our kids up and let them rotate around the room to play games and practice for the STAAR test. We had a fabulous day and the kids had no idea they were learning. This is a tough group but with a little preplanning we were amazed at how smoothly the day went. No. Drama. = Amazing! I plan to write more about what we did tomorrow - stay tuned!

Not my best picture. I am the one in the back - behind the green and aqua shirts!

4. Team Party: We have a fabulous bilingual teacher on our third grade team and we found out a few weeks ago that she was one of our campuses A+ teachers. She is new to our team this year and we adore her. In fact, we all voted for her without even talking about it ahead of time - she rocks! Anyway, this Friday we all got together after school with husbands and kids and celebrated her. Lots of fun, lots of laughs.

Um, He didn't really want to stop eating for a picture. HA!

5. Crawfish Boil: Every year we get invited to my good teacher friend's crawfish boil. It is another great party with really great food. I don't eat the crawfish but my husband eats enough for the both of us (and then some!) I did eat the sausage, corn, potatoes, and mushrooms though. Yumm-O

I love reading about everyone's week each Friday. If you haven't linked up yet, what are you waiting for??

For all my Texas Teacher friends, good luck this week, we made it!

Inspiration Monday: Poetry Edition

I am linking up with Fun in 1st Grade to share my inspiration for today!

Since we are hitting poetry hard core this month, I thought I would share two of my favorite poetry pins.

The first one comes from Mary over at Pitner's Potpourri. I love the way she "coded" the poem to point out dfferent features. Click on the picture to go to her blog post about it.

Please don't pin this from my blog,
Head on over to here's and pin from the original source. Thanks!

The second pin comes from Using My Teacher Voice. She has lots of ideas for using this website and it looks fabulous. In fact, I am on my way over there right now.

Click the photo above to head to Sarah's blog post!

If you you are interested, I would love to have you follow my poetry board (or all my boards) over on Pinterest.

P.S. if you are looking for a super fun poetry book, check out Mirror, Mirror by Singer. She writes the same poem but in reverse order to show character point-of-view. Amazingly cool.

So, what's inspiring you today? I'd love to read all about it!

Tried it Tuesday: Sticky-note management

I am linking up with Fourth Grade Flipper for this weeks Tried it Tuesday.  I have mentioned several times that I have a very challenging group this year. They are sweet (for the most part- wink, wink) but impulsive and chatty does not even begin to describe them.  I have tried lots of management techniques this year. I use a combination of Whole Brain Teaching and a clip chart system but after awhile it stopped being effective for this group. Getting everyone to move their clips up or down was starting to cause more problems. Kids would push, talk, move someone else's clip (seriously?)  Then I tried Class Dojo. Loved it but I wasn't consistent enough with it. I don't get cell service in my classroom so I couldn't use the app and it was unrealistic to have it up on the board all the time. Often, I would be teaching and need to give or take away a point so I would have to stop teaching, pull up the screen, etc. As you can imagine, that was tedious and lead to more off -task behavior. If I can ever find a way to use the app in my room, I will go back to it. Love the idea and the kids did too. That brings us to where I am now. Each day each student gets a sticky note to add to the top corner of their desk. They draw a line down the center and add a happy face to the left and a frown-y face on the right. Then, just the same as using the clip chart but without having to leave their seats, students can earn tally marks on either side. I like it because I can quickly look around the room and see who needs more positives and I can even save or transfer the data from the sticky for RTI data. 

At the end of the day, students either earn a ticket for our class drawing or have to pay me Cougar Bucks (school money). The kids love it and I find I give more positives than when using the clip chart because I don't have to worry about a "pile up" or worry about getting in and out of their seats over and over. At the beginning I had the kids bring it home each night for their parents to sign. Now, I only do that for a few friends! *side note* If we are at the carpet or away from their desks I just tell them to add a smiley and they add it when they get back to their seats... they don't forget, trust me!

So many things to share.. Let's start with Personification!

I have about a million (hyperbole) things I want to post about. I have been taking pictures and meaning to write posts but then, they never get written... Today, I write about figurative language. Specifically, personification! We have been learning about and practicing similies and metephores. The kids have been doing a great job. I used the most adorable simile freebie from The Peanut Gallery (if you teach grades 3 - 6 and have not been to her blog, run there now! Mrs. S. rocks!) and the kids had a blast.

Here is my favorite example. It was created by a little artist in my class!

When we moved into personification I introduced the idea by showing this page in my notebook file.

Click the picture above to get the Notebook File from Google Drive

Then, I put up the lyrics to Zac Brown Band's Martin on the screen. If you have never heard this beautiful song before, please listen to it below.


After listening to and reading the lyrics, I had my students make predictions about who or what "Martin" was. Then, I advanced to the next slide and showed them a picture as the big reveal :) On the next screen we went back to the lyrics and underlined the text evidence and explained what the author (Zac Brown) meant.

A little preteaching note. The lyrics have the word naked in them. OMG the laughter and giggling that ensued was hillarious. My awesome teammate Tracy, who came up with this super cool lesson, told the kids about that word before hand. She had her class brainstorm what kind of things could be described as naked other than people. Her class came up with chicken wings/tenders so she used that as a spring board to prepare them for the word. Kids. Sigh.

I am linking up with Mrs. O for some fabulous poetry tips/ideas. Head on over there to get some more ideas~

If you grab this file please leave me a comment below, I would love to hear from you!!

Bloggy Love

All week long I wanted to link up with Christina over at Bunting, Books, and Bainbridge.

 I love her adorable button and she is seriously one amazing teacher/blogger. I swear, she is able to create 3 quiality, I want to use them in my own classroom right now, products every day! How does she do that??? I digress. The blog that I can't get enough of is Math Coach's Corner.

Donna is a fellow Texas teacher (in fact she is in a near by district and I am dying to meet her- too stalkersih??) and she has the most amazing math ideas and products. I swear, I get new ideas from her every time she posts on FB. 

Currently, my class has been in love with playing her There's Nothing Alien about Multiplication! 

Anywho, you should click on her blog button above and check her out. Her blog is filled with quality teaching ideas and freebies to help you get started! If you head over there, tell her I sent you :) 

Five For Friday - Spring Break Addition!

Hi there! I am linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching for this weeks Five for Friday. I am on spring break this week but I have to say, this year's break has not been the best. Sigh. maybe next year??

1. My baby boy had his tonsils and adenoids taken out this past Friday and had to have a one night stay in the hospital. He is doing much better during the day time but is still have a lot of pain at night. Needless to say, none of us are well rested this week. I am hopeful he'll be ready to go back to school on Monday so that I can go back to work/

2. We were going a little stir crazy being inside all week so we took a mini trip to Discover Dinosaurs, a traveling dinosaur exhibit. They were very real looking and it was cool to read about them and see how massive they really were!

3. I've had time to read this week and my love bug at school (secret pal near Valentine's Day) gave me this book to read. I am really enjoying it!! It has given me some interesting perspective on high functioning autism. 

4. I have also had time to work on some products I am looking forward to using in my classroom after break. I made these triangle flash-cards to practice multiplication and division. My kids will take timed tests to prove mastery over each factor and I will chart their progress as a classroom display. More on that later...

I am also working on a Smart Board fraction number line game to use with my small group. It is self checking and I am having lots of fun creating smart files!

5. My husband and I are "trying" to follow Dave Ramsey's financial teachings (does that make it sound like a cult?) So this means no more new cars. Along with no new cars, means having to fix older cars as things go wrong. Something I have never had to do before as I have always leased or gotten bored with cars before they broke :) This week though, I took my car to the shop for what I new was a transmission problem. Yup, I needed a whole new transmission. Awesome.

What did you do this week? I'd love to hear or read about it!

Currently March

Hi friends! I can't believe it is March and Spring Break is next week... yikes! Not ready for state testing yet!!

My playlist is ridiculous, country, pop, explicit rap, classical.... I LOVE music!

I had invited all the grandparents to Disney when we go in June but my husband's side wasn't interested and my parents were planning a cruise. I booked our trip and then we got a Valentine card that read, "See you in Disney" my parents surprised us by booking their trip!! Yeah, love that they are coming and I am excited because this means hubs and I can go have some grown-up fun too!!

Our benchmarks were crazy hard. As in, 20% of my class passed hard..... sure hope that is not how the STAAR test is going to go.  The whole districts had scores like that, but still, I have been in tears a lot this week :(

 I have been talking about joining WW for 2 weeks, I need to do it. I started walking after school this week with a teacher friend and I am trying to eat better too!

My shoes hurt my feet and I do not need an excuse to not exercise, KWIM?

I love scategories but the letter H is hard to use!! So, I like that everyone is in good health currently, I love my husband (most of the time) and I hate homework. I hate listening to the excuses parents and kids give and hate all the extra "paperwork" it causes. I also hate the "homework" I have to do like grading stacks of papers and lesson planning.

Head on over to Farley's to link up