Another Valentine's Day Flash Freebie!

Today's FLASH FREEBIE is --     

There are 60 Heart Idiom Cards to extend your students' understanding of common idioms. Challenge your kiddos to match the idioms to their figurative meanings in a variety of ways:

• small group instruction
• partner work
• individual work
• literacy centers
• games (instructions included)
• whole class Scoot activity

Although it is offered as a Valentine flash freebie, Heart Idioms Cards is actually holiday neutral. Thus you can use it any time of the year and with all students.  Moreover, it is CCSS aligned.

If you take advantage of this freebie, TPT store followers and product feedback are greatly appreciated.

If your students love this product, check out these idiom products:

   

Be My Valentine FLASH FREEBIE!

Just in time for Valentine's Day, you can make my heart happy by trying Valentine's Day Square Puzzlers absolutely FREE!

If you are not familiar with square puzzlers, you are in for a treat! Here's how they work:

The 2x2 puzzler is perfect for introducing the task and can be solved by students as young as kindergarteners. The degree of difficulty increases exponentially with each iteration of the puzzlers. My intermediate enrichment students beg to do the 3x3 and 4x4 puzzlers.

These puzzlers are a wonderful challenge for any student in that they promote visual discrimination, problem solving, flexibility, and perserverance. 

Give square puzzlers a try. I think you'll like them.  But hurry.  They are only free today.

You may find that your students want more of this fun thinking challenge. Not to worry! Here are some other versions:

     

Day 6 of Freebie February

It's about time for Valentine's Day, so today's freebie is Friendly Frog's Valentine's Day Syllable Sort.  I wrote about this literacy center a couple of days ago, but in case you missed it, here's the upshot:

Friendly Frog appears in many of my syllabication products. This time he challenges your students to sort word cards according to whether they have a prefix or a suffix. Friendly Frog's Valentine's Day Syllables Center is a low prep literacy center.  

Just for today, you can score this center for FREE!  I hope you enjoy it.

You can also get these Valentine's Day centers for FREE: 

And this one is quite inexpensive:

Freebie February Day 4

It's about time, teachers, to reveal Freebie February's 4th offering...

Valentine's Day Square Puzzler is a critical thinking activity that will really test your students' tenacity and problem solving skills. The challenge is to recreate a square using the square puzzle pieces so that all of the images match on every interior side.  Like this:

In this example, the last piece will NOT fit there. The other pieces will have to be rearranged.

This product includes 3 puzzles; a 2x2 (above) that is perfect for starting out and for young learners, a 3x3 (at right) which is exponentially more difficult, and a 4x4 that is challenging, even for adults.

These puzzles are quite versatile. You can put them in a center and easily differentiate for your students. They are useful as an anchor activity and are absolutely perfect for fast finishers.  This is one activity they are unlikely to finish in a flash.  They also make a sane activity for a Valentine's Day party.

My G/T students beg to work with square puzzlers, but I find almost all students love them. (Students who are easily frustrated may shy away from these puzzles.)

This activity is utterly awesome when you want/need to observe how your students problem solve.  

Grab your copy now! It's only free for 1 day.

If your students love these puzzles, and I'm sure they will, you may be interested in these:

February Centers and Freebies

It's about time, teachers, to focus on February.

I'd like you to keep calm and focus on some new centers for your classroom.  

Friendly Frog's Valentine's Day Syllables Center is a low prep literacy center. Friendly Frog appears in many of my syllabication products. This time he challenges your students to sort word cards according to whether they have a prefix or a suffix.

February sports a lot of pink, so you may like Valentine's Day Hink Pinks, Hinky Pinkies, and Hinkity Pinkities.  These riddles that evoke pairs of rhyming words, are wildly popular. They work well in a literacy center, as an anchor activity, a sponge activity, and are the perfect challenge for fast finishers. This set is FREE! So download your copy now.

Scrattle: The Valentine's Day Edition is also FREE!  This center combines word work with computation and spurs your students to create more difficult words through competition.  It really and truly is appropriate for K through 5th grade because you can effortlessly differentiate for math abilities.  3 different recording sheets are provided.  One requires students to use addition, 1 calls for multiplication, and the 3rd uses mixed operations (+, -, x) with parentheses. My students beg for Scrattle. As a result, there are many versions available and all of them are FREE! 

Have you heard?  It's Freebie February in my TPT store.  Each day this month, a different priced item will be offered for FREE for just one day. So check in daily to see what I'm giving away.  

Today's offering is How Many Ways? -- February Edition. This product, like Scrattle, is appropriate for all elementary grade levels. It is a critical thinking, interactive bulletin board activity that could be used as a center, an enrichment challenge, an anchor activity, and/or for differentiation. You can read more about it here.

Valentine's Day Hink Pink FREEBIE

Ever since I attended my 1st state conference for Gifted and Talented Education early in my career, I have seen, heard and read about Hink Pinks.  These vocabulary building, problem solving, critical thinking riddles are staples in GATE.  Perhaps my connection with Hink Pinks, et al, is best explained by the fact that my students absolutely love them!  They loved them when I was in the classroom and when I became an enrichment resource teacher, my pull-out students literally begged for more of them.

If you are new to the land of Hink Pinks, here's how they work:

• Hink Pinks are riddles wherein the clues lead you to a 2 word answer.  Each answer word must have just 1 syllable and the 2 answer words must rhyme.
• Hinky Pinkies are riddles seeking answers with 2 syllables in each word.  The 2 words must rhyme.
• Hinkity Pinkities are rhyming answer word pairs with 3 syllables each.

Some teachers like to distribute Hink Pink clues on a work sheet, but I continually strive to eliminate worksheets from my teaching. About 20 years ago, I started putting the clues on 1/4 sheet cards. By doing so, I was able to create a resource that was ready to use year after year, saving me bunches of time and conserving paper big time!  

Armed with my Hink Pink, et al cards, I was able to use them as an anchor activity when students were arriving each morning. They also work well as a sponge activity and are great at a literacy center.  Now, working as a pull-out enrichment specialist, I use these cards as a warm-up activity. Without a doubt, G/T students are enthralled with these riddles.  But, I also found that "average" students were intrigued and set their caps to solve them. 

It's about time, teachers, to offer you my FREE set of Valentine's Day Hink Pinks, Hinky Pinkies, and Hinkity Pinkities.  Here's a preview:

The answer to this Hink Pink is smart heart.

The answer to this Hinky Pinky is sandy candy.  

The answer to the Hinkity Pinkity below is valentine turpentine.

There are 24 cards in this FREE set.  Naturally, there is an answer key.  Did I mention that it is FREE?  You can retrieve your copy here.

I hope you enjoy Hink Pinks, et al as much as my students and I do.

If you like this product, you may like these, as well:

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