Happy New Year SALE!

WOW! I can't believe it's the last day of 2013. Time is just flying way toooo FAST.

I hope everyone is having a wonderful break. I know I am feeling refreshed and almost ready to go back.

I'm having a ONE DAY SALE at my shops. I hope you'll check it out.

I couldn't find any sale buttons so I made my own. If you're having a sale and want to use it- help yourself. 

(Clipart and fonts are from Scrappin Doodles, From the Pond, and Khrys Bosland Fonts)

Click on my sidebar for a direct link to my shops!

Book Crawler

Oh man! I'm so excited! I found a great app to catalog my hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of books!
When I was a little girl, I would play school. I'd line up my dolls and stuffed animals and play for hours. I even created a library with my 30 or so books by putting check out cards in each book and organizing them alphabetical. (crazy childhood huh?) Well, years later I AM a teacher with a lot more than 30 books. I've always wanted to somehow catalog all my personal books that I use at school but I had never found an easy way to do it- until NOW. My daughter (who also LOVES books and has a ton of them) shared this app she just found. She tried out the free lite version and LOVED it.

It's called Book Crawler.

What makes this app so great is the many different ways you can add books. My favorite is the ISBN scanner. You just focus on the book's ISBN bar and the app finds the book and all of its information. Then you just click save. Of course, you can enter each book in manually too. It also has tons of ways to tag, filter, sort, categorize and flag your books. So if you use a certain book for teaching Compare and Contrast, you'll tag it and be able to find it easily. Here is a great review about Book Crawler that explains the app much better than I can with all its cool features:

  http://www.148apps.com/reviews/book-crawler-review/

The best part is the price. You can try out the free lite version. But it only holds 25 books. See if you like it then upgrade to the whole app for only $1.99!! Another great feature is you can sync it to your other devices and save it to your Dropbox.

Now I won't buy a book I already have or spend hours looking for a book I thought I had but is still in my Amazon cart waiting to be purchased. 

This is a wonderful find for teachers that LOVE books and want to keep them organized!

Linking up with Simply Kinder for a blog round-up. Check it out!

Merry Christmas!

I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas filled with love, joy and peace!

Christmas Math FREEBIE & Giveaway Winners

Hi everyone! I hope you are all surviving these few weeks just before the holidays. It's starting to get CrAzY in my classroom. It doesn't help that we have had 6 straight inside recess days. And it looks like the rest of the week will be inside as well. It didn't get above 15 degrees today. A little too cold for my firsties to go out to recess. Thank goodness for Adventure to Fitness and some fun dance videos to get all that energy out.

We did a great math activity today. It was suggested by my terrific first grade team.

Our district has been BIG on math tasks this year. Which are real world activities that the students have to solve on their own with very little help from me. They are pretty simple on a first grade level but lots of fun. Here is the one I did today- called Decorate the Trees. The task was: "You have a total of 10 ornaments to decorate each Christmas tree. You need to use 3 different colors. Make each tree different. Write a number sentence for each tree." I was very surprised at how well my class did. Even my struggling students were able to do at least 2 different trees. We have just introduced adding 3 or more numbers so this was a great activity to reinforce that concept as well as changing the groups of addends to get the same answer. We have also been working on combinations of 10 and doubles. I let them use tiles or cubes if they wanted to. Tomorrow I will increase the number of ornaments for my higher kids and let them try it again. 

Here is what the activity page looks like.

You can download a FREE copy HERE.

A BIG THANK YOU to everyone who commented on my last post. I just LOVE this fun, amazing, friendly, teacher, blogging world. The Christmas Spirit just hit me BIG today and I just couldn't pick only 3 winners. So I sent my Christmas FUN packet to everyone who commented before midnight yesterday. I hope everyone got the packet. I hope your students enjoy the activities. Thanks for reading and commenting on my blog!!!

Christmas FUN Packet Giveaway!

Finally I got my Christmas FUN packet finished!!!

It's packed full of FUN learning for the holidays. If your class is like mine, they are going CrAzY right about now. I try to keep in my regular routine but sometimes that is hard to do with assemblies, Christmas programs, elf on the shelf, and snowstorms. I put this little packet together to help my kiddos "stay calm and work on"! I find if I can keep them busy in a fun way, I'll have less behavior problems. I try to do some reviewing and keep them engaged.

If you've purchased any of my packets before like: Find a Friend, Dot It, Scrambled Sentences, or Tic-Tac-Toe you'll find some of these kid favorites in this packet but with a Christmas twist.

You can check it out at my shops by clicking the side bar. Oh and it's on sale on TpT until Monday!

I'm feeling the Christmas spirit and would like to give 3 lucky followers this packet. Please comment before midnight  Monday and I'll use the 'ole random generator to pick 3 winners on Tuesday morning. Don't forget to leave me your email address.

Thanks for following and reading my blog!

Early Christmas Present

My class got an early Christmas present yesterday.

5 Mini iPads! 

 This cute little firstie's dad's company donated them to us.

 I purchased this cool power dock to keep them charged. Along with some nice cases to protect them. My kiddos are EXCITED to start using them! Only problem is, I'm still trying to find apps and ideas. How do I use just 5 iPad with 28 kids? I'm going to use them in centers of course but I'd like to find more ways. If any one has suggestions, I'd LOVE to hear how you are using them in your room. 

Kimberly over on Funky First Grade Fun does a Technology Tuesday and has some great ideas I'm going to be trying for sure. She does a class journal on a free app called Kids Journal. It sounds like a great idea. So I've downloaded that one and I'm in the process of figuring it out. 

I tried this app yesterday and my kiddos love it. It's called Visual Timer. There are several timer apps out there. Some are free. This one cost $2.99. 

It's kind of like the quiet game while they are working. I set the timer while my kids were working at there desks. If they could work quietly without getting 3 strikes before the timer is up then they got a little reward. The cool thing about this timer is it reveals a picture as the clock counts down. I projected it onto my Smart board so everyone could see it. It was a good visual reminder. To do that, I have airplay on my computer which lets me connect the iPad to my computer. I wrote a post about it HERE.

If you have any suggestions for me, I'd LOVE for you to comment. I'm off to search more blogs and the app store for ideas.

Have a great weekend!