Freebie February -- Day 11

As the enrichment specialist for my building, I'm charged with creating ways to challenge everyone.  That's no small task!  So, I try to come up with things that will cover multiple grade levels. Story Sleuths is one such activity.  Originally, I designed it for gr. 1 - 3. However, kindergarten classes and 4th graders begged to join in on the fun.  So, of course, they were included.

This project begins with students reading (or being read) a specific set of 6 Caldecott Award winning books.  Since these books were recognized for their illustrations, it's important to draw students' attention to the pictures.  Not to mention that 1 clue in every set makes reference to the artwork.

After all 6 books are read, I distribute the week's clues for my detectives to devour. And, devour they do! (Have I every mentioned how much I love this job? Or that I'm the most popular teacher in the school!!) 

Because there are over 600 students in my building and only 1 of me, I require that the classes submit 1 solution as a whole group. (No way I'm slogging through 100s of guesses.) This results in some pretty amazing collaboration among the students. 

Each Monday morning, I deliver a certificate to the classes that guessed correctly.  Just to further enhance the enthusiasm, I don a Sherlock Holmes hat and carry an over-sized magnifying glass. (Have I mentioned that I'm the most popular teacher in the building?)

Each set of Story Sleuths has 4 weeks of clues.  The classes read 6 books so that they still have to think as week 4 rolls around. Process of elimination will only take them so far in this challenge. Also provided are book icons that can be displayed in the classroom. Per my recommendation, the icons for the books that have been used are taken down, helping the students focus on the remaining books.

You need not be an enrichment specialist to make this project work. Classes within 1 grade level could challenge each other or do it independently. I've had some teachers form teams within their class so as to promote the collaborative thinking. This also works well for the school librarian, especially near the annual announcement of the Caldecott Awards. The art specialist can add great depth to this activity by exploring the art techniques associated with each book's illustrations. 

Inasmuch as it's Freebie February, today I am offering Story Sleuths III for free. So hurry up and claim your copy. It's only free for 24 hours.

There are 3 sets of Story Sleuths so far, plus an economical bundle of the 3.

Presidents' Day + Freebie February

One of my favorite activities leading up to Presidents' Day is a probability center.  My students work in pairs flipping a penny 100 times and recording the results:  heads or tails.  A great bonus to this center is that it is usually close to our 100th day, so groups of 100 are fresh in our minds.

Each pair receives a set of 10 ten frames. Prior to starting, they predict how many times they will get heads and how many times they will get tails.  They write their predictions on the back of their recording sheet.  

My students take turns being the flipper and the recorder, switching jobs after filling each ten frame.  They record an H each time they get heads; T each time they get tails.  

At the end, they compute how many of each they got.  The final step is to compare their prediction to their reality. My kiddos love this activity.  I'll bet your's will, too.

It's day 10 of Freebie February! 

Just for today, you can get Patriotic Squares Critical Thinking. This activity is also known as Latin Squares. 

Enjoy!

You might enjoy these patriotic products, too:

Freebie February -- Day 9

Today's freebie is a brand new product that I had such fun creating.

Meet Harry, the Hare. Harry is rather hairy, but as cute as can be. He is ready to challenge your students' knowledge of homophones.  

Most homophone exercises are multiple choice, fill in the blank. Harry has put a little twist on his homophones. Each of the 28 task cards gives a clue to lead your students to a homophone pair. This exercises their verbal fluency and higher order thinking skills. It also helps to build their vocabulary and it may lead some to consult a thesaurus.

You can snag your free copy of Hairy Harry's Homophone Task Cards for 1 day only because it's FREEBIE FEBRUARY!

These forever freebies are perfect for this time of year:

Freebie February -- Day 8

It's day 8 of my Freebie February. 

Today's freebie is Matching Mittens Literacy  Center. If you read any of The Mitten books to your class, this center is a perfect accompaniment to it. 

The foci of the center are initial consonant blends and rhyming words.  

This center activity is CCSS aligned for primary grades.

My favorite version of The Mitten is Jan Brett's.  What's your fav?

You may also like these literacy centers:

Freebie February Day 7

It's day 7 of Freebie February!  Today's offering is Animal Ordinal Number Task Cards.  

These task cards provide practice with ordinal number concepts and words from 1st - 35th. There are 4 sets of cards included; each set tells a story in a different animal theme. 

Through these tasks, your students will not only practice ordinal number concepts, but also patterns, interpreting data, logic, critical thinking, A-B-C order, and computation.  

If you are enjoying February Freebies, please consider leaving some feedback on TPT. Thank you.

You may also like:

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: