Leap into March!

 If you're anything like me, then you like to plan ahead.  With the first day of March being tomorrow, I thought today would be the perfect day to talk about St. Patrick's Day and get a head start on planning...if you haven't already.  

But before we get to all that, HAPPY LEAP DAY!!!!  

This couldn't be more true.  

If you happen to be checking this before your school day starts...or during your lunch/planning break....and you need some Leap Day ideas, you can check out what I shared last week by clicking the pic below.

In honor of Leap Day, I'm throwing a sale in my shop.

Click the pic below for 20% off!!!

St. Patrick's Day has always been one of my most favorite **holidays**.   The green.  The pinching.  The silly traditions.  I love it all.  My dad's side of the family is Irish.  My cousin's name is Liffey (after the Liffey River in Dublin Ireland).  And she has red hair.  AND...her birthday is on St. Patrick's Day!!!!  HA!!!  I LOVE IT!!!!!

Celebrating St. Patrick's Day in the primary grades is just my favorite.  I love the way the littles believe pretty much anything you say and almost everything that happens.  It's cute and endearing and it reminds me how magical life is when you're a 5/6/7 year old.  And I love that.  

I love to (tempera) paint the side of my fist green and leave little leprechaun footprints all over the desks...then turn over the chairs and leave the classroom a bit of a mess when the kids are out of the room.  OH, that CRAZY leprechaun!!!  The kids go NUTS!!!  I usually spray paint a ton of garbanzo beans gold and then leave the little nuggets all over the room & let my kids collect them.  At the end of the day the leprechaun usually leaves a little baggie full of gold nuggets, gold chocolate coins, Rolos, and froot loops for each of my kiddos.  The excitement is palpable.  They fall for it every.single.year.  And all of those silly shenanigans sure do make for some great writing experiences, too.  Not to mention the memories :)  

These are 17 of my most favorite St. Patrick's Day read alouds.  I read them throughout the week.

I think I've been doing these little loopy leprechauns with my kids since my 2nd year teaching.  I love the way they turn out and love the writing that goes with it.  

You can download the template and writing printable HERE or by clicking the picture below.

We did this little math craftivity last year in Kindergarten.

It was inspired by Erin's math craftivity.  Hers is MUCH cuter!!!!!!!

And I pretty much LOVE everything in Sarah Cooley's Shamrock Shenanigans packet.  Especially this darling writing craftivity!

Speaking of craftivities, here's another great one from Lindsey at The Teacher Wife.  And it's FREE!

I absolutely LOVE directed drawings.  Jennifer at First Grade Blue Skies has a WONDERFUL video tutorial for a leprechaun directed drawing activity.  I LOVE this!!!!  

This is a great resource for St. Patrick's Day science activities from Creekside Learning.

I have included several St. Patrick's Day themed printables in my March Print & Practice Math & LIteracy packet.

There are also some great St. Patrick's Day themed problem solving activities in my Spring Print & Practice Problem Solving packet.  

And there are also some great St. Patrick's Day vocabulary cards, labeling activities, writing task cards, and other writing activities in my March Work on Writing packet. 

The Science of March also has some great Rainbow themed experiments and activities that would be perfect for a little science tie-in!!  

Share your feedback on AdSense, AdMob, and other Google publisher solutions

It’s time to share your feedback! To improve our product and services, we send out a survey to a group of publishers every 6 months. The next survey will be sent soon and we’re looking forward to hearing from you.

Your feedback and comments are important to us, and we really do read and consider everything you write. Thanks to previous suggestions, we’ve launched a number of new features to improve our services and help you grow your earnings. These include a new Optimization tab that provides tips on increasing your revenue, improved AdSense interface for easier user navigation and more transparency on our policies.

You may receive a survey by email over the coming weeks. To make sure that you are eligible to receive the survey email, please 

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Whether you’ve completed this survey before or you’re providing feedback for the first time, we’d like to thank you for sharing your valuable thoughts. We’re looking forward to feedback!

Posted by Dan Makarov

 AdSense Publisher Happiness Team

Announcing the launch of AMP in Search

Speed matters, particularly on mobile devices. People are likely to abandon websites after just three seconds if the content doesn’t load quickly. This is bad for the user trying to access content, and also for the publisher whose business depends on users engaging with content. That’s why, last October, we joined others across the industry to announce the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project, an open source initiative to make the mobile web as fast as possible.

Earlier today, Google announced that web pages created using AMP will appear when relevant in the Top Stories section of the search results page, giving users a lightning-fast experience --- early tests have found that AMP pages load an average of four times faster and use 10 times less data than equivalent non-AMP pages.

A key goal of the AMP Project is to ensure that publishers’ existing business models are supported. To that end, AMP in Search will have what could be termed as version one of some new features aimed at helping publishers earn money and understand and engage their audience. Full details are on Github and on the AMPProject.org site, but here are the highlights:

• Ads: Advertising pays for a lot of the great journalism that we all love to read for free, so it’s essential that publishers can run ads on AMP pages with the ad servers and networks of their choice, in multiple formats (including native ads), and with full control over where they appear on the page. AMP also supports the new viewability metrics advertisers and publishers use to measure how users are engaging with ads. Currently publishers can choose from more than 20 ad tech providers who have developed support for AMP, including DoubleClick and AdSense. You can read more about the ads support in AMP in general here.

• Subscriptions: For many publishers, subscriptions and paywalls are critical to the bottom line. AMP lets publishers retain full control over which readers can access which stories, to ensure that publishers can continue to make money via subscriptions on their AMP pages. Visit Github for more details on subscriptions in AMP.

• Analytics: Analytics are important to publishers because they help them understand what people like to read and how they read. AMP provides an analytics framework that lets publishers measure data like pageviews, users, time spent, and more. The insights provided by these kinds of metrics can help publishers create appealing stories, build brand loyalty and ultimately make money. Learn more about the analytics support in AMP here and specifically about Google Analytics in AMP here.

While we’re excited to have collaborated with the industry to bring this project forward and improve the mobile web for users, we’re just scratching the surface of what’s possible. There’s much work ahead for the open source AMP project and we’re looking forward to the benefits this will bring to users, publishers and advertisers

Posted by Craig DiNatali
Director, Global Partnerships

Nitin Kashyap
Product Manager

Let's Talk Leap Day!

Leap Day is coming up...February 29th, to be exact.  Y'know..in case you needed a reminder ;) 

So HOW do we celebrate and make this day relevant for our kiddos?!  Well here are just a few fun ideas!!!

This is a GREAT book to read on Leap Day!  Leap's Day: February 29th, by Stephanie Bee Simmons.

Here's a great Leap Day video geared toward kids, too!

And here's another!

Of course, no new concept is complete without an anchor chart.  Here's the one I did with my first graders four years ago!

That year we learned that Leap Year babies are called "leaplings" or "leapers".  We did a little text-to-self writing craftivity where the kids write about what it would be like if THEY were leapers/leaplings!  Hilarious answers, by the way!!!

Unfortunately I don't have a pattern for this craft because I created it on the fly, but if you look really carefully you'll see that it's pretty easy to recreate!

Next up we played some Leap Day games.  I LOVE a good game...especially one where the kids don't realize they're learning as they play : )  I divided the kids into teams….Team Leap & Team Day :)  One player from each team got to go head to head to find the word with the correct sound on the lily pads.  Our spelling patterns that week were /oa/ & /ow/.  When I introduced the /ow/ pattern, I explained that it can make two sounds. I wrote /ow/ words on the lily pads…each lily pad had a word either /ow/ sound.  When I called out a sound to the teams, the players had to LEAP to a word with the correct sound.  Such a FUN way to reinforce the different sounds & spelling pattern!!!  Some of them were SO excited to be first to land on a lily pad, but they were bummed to find out the word they chose didn’t have the right sound :)  They LOVED it!!! 

Of course, if these aren't your spelling patterns, you could really use this idea with anything/any concept/objective.  You could also focus on long e/short e vowel sounds (lEAp).  

We also played this little game with numbers, too!!  I wrote the numbers 1-28 on each lily pad and the kids had to practice skip counting by 4 by jumping from one lily pad to the next.  After that, I called each student up and had them pick out a number.  Then I asked them to either move to a number that was 4 more or 4 less than the number they chose.  Then they had to give me a number sentence that matched.  LOVED IT!!!!! 

Speaking of math, here's a little freebie for you to use on Monday!  For this activity, the kids will identify amounts and total values that are greater than/equal to/less than 29.  Why 29?  Leap Day, of course!  

If you love making thematic hats for celebratory days, I think this one is adorable.  It would be great to give this an academic spin and have your kids practice representing the number 29 in a variety of ways all the way around the band.  

via City Teacher Goes Country

Feel free to add your Leap Day ideas in the comments and link back to any blog posts you might have about celebrating in the classroom so we can all add some more ideas to our repertoires!  

Science of March FREEBIES!

Last week I popped in to tell y'all all about the books Abby and I are using for our Science of March resource.  We just released it yesterday!  WOO HOO!!!  Here's a little sample..

Rainbows/Color Science, Clouds, Weather in Spring, and Sun/Moon Stars.  That's a mouthful!  Here's the pacing calendar for those of you who asked...

If you're interested in adding this to your science resources, just click on the pic.  Four weeks of detailed science lesson plans plus additional cross-curricular activities, too!  We always put our science resources on sale (20%) off for the first 24 hours, so you can grab through the end of the day today (Monday - Feb.22) for $12!  

Now let's get into the fun stuff....FREEBIES!!!

Here's a little weather week mathtivity that's perfect for this time of the year...

For this activity, your kids will need a pair of dice and the tracing templates provided.  Prompt the kids to roll the dice to determine the addends.  They'll write those on the umbrella.  Then prompt them to add the numbers together to get the sum (the third and final number in their fact family).  The kids will use the raindrop templates to write their related facts and then glue it all together to make a little rainy day (math) scene!  Simple and effective...and pretty cute, too!  hahaha

You can download the tracers below.

For the week we're learning about the sun, moon, and stars, I created these constellation sight word templates.  Constellation is one of the vocabulary words for that week as well and there are several activities included in the Science of March resource covering the concept of constellations.  Personally, the cross curricular constellation activities are my favorite!!!    I thought these would be a great supplement.

There are 10 sight words included in the freebie (was, said, down, come, where, make, would, have, did, so).  Unfortunately, this is not an editable freebie :(  But it is free, so there's that ;)  

The idea behind this activity is for students to connect the dots in each constellation to determine the letters in the sight word.  After they connect the dots for each letter, they'll determine the sight word and write it in it's entirety.  Simple, fun, and meaningful!   Hopefully these words work for you, and if not, I apologize.  I'm thinking about finishing out and entire Dolch word set,but don't know if that's even an interest, so I'll hold off unless I hear otherwise :)  

You can grab these constellation sight words below.

Hope y'all had a great Monday!  Here's to a great rest of the week!!!!

The Science of March Book List

Hello all!  March is quickly approaching and if y'all are anything like me then I'm sure you like to get a head start on planning.  Abby and I have been furiously working on our latest resource...The Science of March...and plan on releasing it it this Sunday, February 21st!  We are really excited about this one because Spring themes have us excited about the change in weather and well...the end of the school year, too ;)  

Last week Abby posted a few of the books we'll be using for our lesson plans and I wanted to quickly pop-in and follow up with the rest of the titles in case you're interested in grabbing them!  

Here are the themes we'll be covering in March

Remember that these titles are RECOMMENDED, NOT REQUIRED :)  Any non-fiction text you own or have access to that cover these themes will work perfectly!  The lesson plans are not dependent on these specific texts...again, just recommended :) 

Space is a broad topic, so we narrowed our learning down to the Sun, Moon, & Stars.  Perfect for our primary kids and part of the standards, too.  Win, win! 

Spring weather will cover rain, storms, wind, and tornadoes.  We won't be going into the specifics of the water cycle and whatnot, just diving into the weather we experience when the seasons change :)

Here are a few great titles to supplement learning as well!!  These are definitely not required, but when I'm teaching thematically I like for my kids to have a wide variety of books to read that cover the same concepts and ideas.  These are some of my favorites!!!!

Head on over to Abby's blog to see the rest of the books included in this resource and mark your calendars for Sunday, Feb. 21st!!!

If you haven't been using our comprehensive Science resources and you're wondering what they're all about, here's a little rundown.

Our science resources include a visual pacing calendar (this one is from February's unit)...

As well as table of contents, suggested book lists, and detailed lesson plans...

In addition to the science lessons, we include optional activities in both Math & ELA to give you the opportunity to carry these themes across the curriculum.  And we place a strong emphasis on vocabulary, too!!!  Teaching thematically is our favorite way to teach and research supports the idea that students learn more and retain more information when content is presented thematically.

These have been a labor of love for the both of us and we're so proud of our "babies" :)  We both believe in giving kids the "total experience" when it comes to learning...hands-on, fun, rigor, thematic, and everything in between!!!!   We love what teachers are saying about using these resources in their classrooms, too!   You can click on the pics below for a detailed look at what these resources look like up-close.

As usual, if you have any questions feel free to ask!  

In the meantime, let's get ready for March!!!! 

Happy teaching!!!!

Dental Health and President's Day

With President's Day behind us, I figured it would be a great time to take a walk down memory lane to look back in time to what went on in my classroom this time of year.

President's Day has always coincided with our study on coins.  These bubble maps focusing on both the coins and their attributes really tied in nicely with these concepts!

As usual, no unit on President's Day is complete without this darling George Washington craftivity and writing!  I think I've been doing this one just as long as I've been teaching!  An oldie, but goodie...always a favorite!

It took NO time to cut out the hats {steps below} and the kids used construction paper to make the eyes, nose, & mouth.  The art piece to this little project was really pretty quick! 

For the hat…

Cut a 12x4 piece of blue construction paper

Fold in half {bring the left side over to the right}

Cut off the right side bottom corner {diagonally} and cut an upside-down triangle on the top.

Now open it up and VOILA!  George Dubya’s hat :)

Too cute!  

Let's not forget about Abraham Lincoln, though.  No President's Day is complete without this historical figure.  So we always write about what we would keep in our hats if we had a hat like Abraham Lincoln.  The kids are always fascinated that Lincoln kept important papers in his hat...they think that is amazing!

 

Call me crazy, but cheese wouldn't be my first choice when thinking about what I'd keep in my hat.
#stanky

 

Dental Health Month is this month.  Have y'all started learning about dental health??

This is my son's most favorite dental health experiment...

Look at that face, LOL!!!!  Both of my boys ask to do this every.single.night.  I bet they'd love it if I said "yes". #lazymomproblems

We included this experiment along with an observation and investigation log in our most recent Science of February resource.  Good gravy we love creating these for y'all!!!

We also included some of these fun and engaging extension activities to go with our science experiments and non-fiction readings.  We love incorporating cross-curricular activities into our resources!!! 

You might remember me posting about this precious writing craftivity we did back in 2011.  Seems like forever ago!  I've been having my kids recreate this every year and they're always a hit!

And for a little reader’s response, the kids wrote about what they thought the tooth fairies did with their teeth!  And they made some cute little scrapbook tooth fairies to go along with their writing.

  This is probably my favorite thing we’ve done to date!  I LOVE how they turned out!

The kids did pretty much ALL of the work themselves.  I showed them an example, but told them they could make their fairies look however they wanted. I cut out the heads, arms, & legs.  I also cut out the star on the wand {using our die cuts}. I really wanted them to focus on the writing piece more than the art…but I LOVE how different they all came out!!! 

The kids have been having *12 kinds of* fun using their “teeth” and mouth math mats for dental themed problem solving in our math journals.  I know this is all shades of ridiculous, but I really love problem solving with the kids!  I think it’s so neat for kids to talk about their problem solving strategies and see that even though they solve problems in different ways, they can still come up with the same answers!!

The mouth mats and problem solving prompts are included in my Dental Health Mini Unit on TpT.

We’re still truckin’ along with money, too.

  This was one of the activities in my Coin Collection packet on TpT.

Here's a fun word work activity!  The kids loved it!  I love hearing them when they find one of these vowel combos in their reading books…they get so dang excited! 

This little activity is in my Dental Health Mini Unit, too. You can grab it at TpT if you’re still in the market for some tooth trouble ;)


Stay tuned for some fun freebies for counting coins and financial literacy!  I can't wait to show you what we've been up to!