Giveaway and Exciting Things

The Teacher Wife is having an awesome giveaway for $15 to HeidiSongs and winner's choice of any 3 items from her TpT store. How awesome!

In other news, I won my very first giveaway earlier this afternoon. I won "Furry Forest Friends" from Teacher Bits and Bobs. It looks awesome. I'm so excited to use it in a classroom soon! Go check it out!

I was also able to get a blog button from Ms. M. Unfortunately, I probably won't get it added to my blog for a few days. I am super excited for it, but unfortunately, I am pretty busy right now. I leave at noon Thursday (13 hours from now!) to drive to North Carolina. My entire family is renting a beach house in Nags Head for a week. SO EXCITED! Because of that, I've been shopping and packing, need to get at least a little bit of sleep tonight, then have to run errands and pack the car. Then, I'll be on the road for 2 days and without internet. Who knows if I'll get the new button put on my blog while in North Carolina- hopefully, it's warm enough and sunny so we can sight see and enjoy laying out on the beach so blogging might just have to wait. We'll see how things go once I get there.

I changed the name of my blog. I originally had Staying Young With Children because it's the ONLY thing I could think of at the time of setting up my blog. I thought of what makes up a teacher's heart and qualities of good teachers... so with those thoughts came the idea to change my blog name to The Teacher's Heart. I already like this blog name better.

I went to help clean out a Kindergarten classroom today for a teacher I worked with last semester. Today was the last day for the teachers! Woohoo. I've been going into one classroom or another ever since finishing my student teaching so I'm just as excited as the teachers are. Other than still not having a job for next year, it's been a great and exciting day with exciting things to come on my trip for the next week and a half!

The Lesson Plan Diva: A FREE Give Away For My Followers!

Woohoo! Check out the adorable dictionary skills and guide words activity pack you can get. All you have to do is post about is follow The Lesson Plan Diva and post about this free activity pack. Easy Peasy Nice and Cheesy (as my first graders says).

The Lesson Plan Diva: A FREE Give Away For My Followers!: "Here is a Free activity pack for all of my followers! All you have to do is post the message below on your blog in a post and add me to your..."

Giveaways

1.) Education Journey is giving away $10 to TpT!

educationjourney: Giveaway Time: "It was such a nice surprise to find that I had my 50th follower this morning! I'm pretty excited considering just a few months ago I barely..."

2.) Runde's Room is hosting her first giveaway.  She bought a premium membership to Graphics Factory. As part of her membership, she gets to giveaway one premium membership to a friend so she's having a great giveaway for it. Awesome!!


3.) A Special Kind of Class is giving away up to $10 worth from her TpT store. Winner's choice. She has some mighty cute-looking activities for sale!

Primary Graffiti Giveaway

Primary Graffiti is giving away her Diary of a Ladybug, Camping Alpha Line, and Camping with Books Resources. Check it out:

Primary Graffiti: Diary of a Ladybug + Giveaway: "I'm really excited for my annual Camping with Books Unit during the last week of school. Each year I choose different insects to explore..."

A bowl full of lemons.: May Silhouette Giveaway!!

Check this out: a giveaway for a Silhouette. Awesome! Of course she already has over a thousand comments, but there are numerous ways to enter many times.

A bowl full of lemons.: May Silhouette Giveaway!!: "Im so grateful to be able to give away Silhouette SD machines on my blog. This week, I am offering another chance at a giveaway! This set ..."

Last Day of Student Teaching

Today was my last day of student teaching. THis means that I am officially done with college- well at least in terms of my undergraduate studies! This sounds like a GREAT thing... but to me, it's sad. Don't get me wrong, I'm excited to be finished with college and be able to have my own classroom FINALLY.... but I had to leave a great bunch of first graders that I adored teaching. Not only did I leave a great class, but I left one of the greatest teachers I've ever met and a most marvelous and amazing team of teachers as well. I left there with no idea where I'll be headed next. I've had one interview so far, but have not heard back from them yet. It's scary leaving my student teaching class not knowing when, where, and even IF I'll ever teach again. I desperately hope that I am able to find a job. I already feel like a piece of my heart is missing and I haven' even been out of a classroom for an entire day yet. So I'm torn about leaving for many reasons, but I got some great gifts from my class. Take a look:

The cutest gift bag I've ever seen, a scrapbook they made for me filled with notes and pictures, calendar headings, magnetic clips, push pins, pipe cleaners, craft pom poms, plastic shot glasses (my CT clarified that she thought they'd be cute for small manipulatives such as dice or coins), craft sticks, cards with little fairies on them (my CT's idea was to use them for the desk fairy), star stickers, a star pointer, an adorable flyswatter with a flower attached, and huge sunglasses (my CT's idea was looking glasses to look for punctuation or sight words).

This ADORABLE poster. It says what children are A-Z and gives an encouraging word on how to treat them. Then, each student put their handprint on the edge and wrote their name on the handprint. I about balled my head off when my CT came out with this. SO PRICELESS!

Each of my first grade loves got a page to write a note to me on. Then, they attached their school picture and used the fancy letters to spell out their name on the page. SO CUTE! In the back of the book, there were random pictures of my students that had been taken throughout the year.

A little better view of my gift bag and all the goodies that were in it.

The whole shebang- poster, scrapbook, and all the purchased goodies. LOVE IT ALL!

If and when I get a job, I am going to have fun thinking of uses for these things and the many other numerous books, posters, and goodies I've accumulated during my college days!

Teacher Created Materials FREE ebook

How awesome is this! I just picked up a free ebook with 30 graphic organizers for K-3 content areas. There were other choices too, so it was hard to decide, but oh my goodness, it is awesome. I now have ideas flowing on using these in my units next year!

Book Giveaway!

Teacher Created Materials is giving away a FREE book ($39.99 value) to every teacher who registers online during our Every Day in May Giveaway promotion.

Step 1: Register online at http://www.tcmpub.com/free/books/ Step 2: Choose your title (shipping free for U.S. addresses only) Step 3: Enjoy your book

$500 Prize Giveaway!

Be one of four lucky winners who will receive a $500 Gift Certificate good towards Teacher Created Materials products. When you register online for your free book, you will automatically be entered into our weekly prize drawing. One entry per person, per week. Visit http://www.tcmpub.com/free/books/ for rules and details.

Frog and Toad: Writing a summary

My firsties read The Kite from Days with Frog and Toad. While doing so, we worked on problem and solution. Therefore, our writing about the story was to write a summary to tell the characters, the setting, the problem, and the solution. I created a simple writing page with a picture of Frog and Toad. Since the copy machine only prints in black and white, the students were able to color in their picture of Frog and Toad when they were finished.


We made a list of possible titles for our writing, rather than just The Kite. I told them that this is not the actual story, it's just a little information about The Kite to make other people want to read the story. As a class, we discussed and made a list of titles we could use for our writing assignment and then the students picked their favorite for their writing page. Then, we discussed how the by is not the author's name, but their name because they wrote this particular summary (whatever they chose to title theirs).


The requirements for the paragraph were to give the name of the story, the author's name, the main characters, the setting, the problem, and the solution. They each had a web to fill out, which they worked on themselves before we gathered as a class to complete the web. Then, they turned their web details into sentences. Finally, they organized the sentences into an order that makes sense and wrote on their writing paper. It's pretty simple, but here is the writing paper they used.


*UPDATE: I am SO excited that I finally figured out how to put up a document on Google Docs and actually have it appear how it is supposed to and therefore be able to post it onto my blog to share! Yay for learning more about this whole blogging thing!*