It's About Time, Teachers!: February 2023

Monday, February 27, 2023

ST. PATRICK'S DAY FREEBIES and MORE!

It's about time for St. Patrick's Day, teachers! I've got FREEBIES and more ready for your learners.

FREEBIES

These Leaping Leprechauns will give your students practice adding 3 numbers within 20. It is a digital learning product made especially for TPT's Easel platform.

Luck o' the Irish is a FREE sample from Destination: Imagination via Creative Thinking.

CRITICAL THINKING

Square Puzzlers are differentiated, making them great for any elementary classroom. Your students will beg to do them.

Exercise deductive reasoning, inferencing, drawing conclusion, problem solving, sequencing, and computation with Leprechaun Logic. This product is also exclusive to TPT Easel.

Outwit the Wee Lads is another digital only, TPT Easel product that exercises critical thinking.

The March Edition of Vocabulary Fractions provides print and digital versions of these task cards that challenge learners to find fractional parts of words. They combine the fractional parts to create March vocabulary. Challenging, but oh, so fun!

ELA

Everyone loves Hink Pinks, et al. and your students will, too. Tons of ELA skills are disguised as fun word riddles.

St. Patrick's Day and more March topics are addressed in these 11 poems. Each poem has skill lessons and teaching points custom designed for it.

MATH

Create a fresh bulletin board for March that doubles as a math center, fast finishers' challenge, and/or enrichment activity. It's differentiated to accommodate K-6th grades.

Leprechaun Riddles provide practice with multiplication facts in print or digitally. Kiddos will enjoy the riddles!

Primary students will love these March Tangram Puzzles.

MULTIPLE SUBJECTS

Mad About March is a thematic unit perfect for primary grades.

SCRATTLE combines word work with computation. This product is differentiated to accommodate students with varying math abilities.

Saturday, February 18, 2023

IT'S ABOUT TIME for IDIOMS!

Idioms are phrases that have meanings quite different from the individual words. Understanding the figurative meaning of idioms is essential to fluent speaking, reading, and writing. And, thus, they are particularly problematic to English Language Learners. Even native speakers may struggle with the non-literal meaning of idioms. Hence, it's important to include idiom instruction in your curricula.

Research tells us that optimal instruction for students includes these tenets:

choose a theme
engage learners in discovery
reinforce with games
discuss specific idioms
combine idioms with pictures

Now you just need teaching materials. That's a piece of cake with these resources. Thematic and formatted similarly, each offers:

card sets that illustrate the literal meaning
and give the figurative meaning
instructions for 4 games
Scoot grid master
digital activity on TPT Easel

The last 5 units are available in a money saving bundle.

All of the above resources are CCSS aligned for grades 3-5.

These 2 units are FREE! They allow your learners to display their creativity as they make the illustrations of the literal meanings.

Thursday, February 9, 2023

It's About Time for Presidents Day!

I reached into the archives to pull out this craftivity. It's a fun way to make a Presidents' Day display.

For every student you will need 1 sheet each of red, white and blue construction paper. I used 8" x 8" square sheets, but you can avoid a lot of cutting by using 9" x 12". You will also need cardboard patterns of Washington & Lincoln. I found silhouettes online, printed them, and then traced them on cardboard. Cut them out and your resources are ready.

Since paper weaving has been around forever, I'm assuming you know how to create the woven background. After each student has chosen which 2 colors to use for the weaving part, ask them to exchange 1 of those sheets for about 6 - 8 pre-cut strips of the same color. I supply the 1" strips.

When the weaving is completed, each child should borrow the silhouette pattern of their choice to trace on their remaining sheet of paper.

The beauty of this project is that by encouraging your students to choose 2 colors of their choice for the background, saving the 3rd for the silhouette, you will give your classroom a burst of color without having all 20+ projects look the same.

Following are some resources for Presidents' Day that I think you will love: