Teacher Appreciation Sale and a Freebie!

 Yay it is sale time again!!! Now I can get the rest of the stuff on my wishlist :) Here is a quick shout out the Zip-a-dee-doo-dah Designs for their great sale graphics. Trust me when I say if you haven't discovered her clip art you are missing out. Click on the picture to discover her awesome work !


Everything in my store will be on sale with deals up to 20% off. Please be one of the smart shoppers and use the TpT code of TAD13 to get an additional savings of 10% off. OK, time for some math.... That means with my 20% off and TpT's 10% off you can get 28% off!!!!What a great way to approach the end of the school year.
The 10% off from TpT during check out is only good until midnight May 8th, Hawaii time. Aww sandy beaches of Hawaii......sorry I digress.  Anyways, I am keeping my store on sale for the 9th as well, but you will only be able to get the 20% off this day. I know I want the whole deal so Sunday will be my shopping day and do I ever have a lot in my cart waiting.

If you are looking for some great deals for your cart here are a couple of my products:

My Best Selling Item

Best Seller

Math made fun

Click here to check out all my 141 products on TpT !

 Ok, Ok... I know I said there would be a freebie. Well here it is. I use this story and worksheet for introducing the importance of government. My students always love it and the trolls make their way into many of our conversations. Click on the picture to download the file.

Have fun shopping and don't forget to check below for other great TpT sellers putting their stores on sale.

Cheers,

Kandinsky Trees

I thought I would share with you all one of the art projects my students had a ton of fun doing. They were super excited that they got to rip up old book pages and even one of the novels we did this year, Maniac Magee. Don't worry the novel was already ripped and missing pages (unreadable) ! 

I got the inspiration from Jennifer, from Runde's Room. She has so many wonderful art ideas and is the blog I pin the most to my Pinterest boards :) 

Materials Needed:

*Old book pages

*8.5 x 11 card stock

*Water colour paints

 *Black acrylic paint

*glue sticks

To inspire my students, I first showed my students different pictures of Kandinsky's work and we talked about all the concentric circles. They were surprised that someone could be famous for painting circles. 

 We then started to work on the Kandinsky Trees. First of all they had to rip old book pages and glue them randomly on the 8.5 x 11 card stock paper. Once the glue dried it was time to paint the ground. They could use any colour of water colour paint they wanted to. More drying time...... Now for the acrylic paint. After a chat about how acrylic paint cannot be washed off their clothes and that they would need to be careful we began with the drawing/painting of the trees. I first had students sketch LIGHTLY with a pencil the shape of their tree and then paint them with black acrylic paint. You guessed it... more drying time....

While the paint was drying in each part, students worked on colouring their circles. I printed them a page with a bunch of different sized circles and they decorated them with markers or pencil crayons. Since it was Spring time the criteria was brightly coloured circles.

Once all the paint was dried and the circles were coloured it was time to cut them out and glue them on the branches.

Here are some of the final paintings. I may be biased but I think they turned out pretty great :)

Cheers,

Crazy Busy

I just wanted to let you all know that I am still a round and have been crazy busy with finishing up my masters degree. My posts are few and far between lately but I will be back in full force soon :) I have lots of pictures on my camera and can't wait to post on here about what has been going on in my classroom !

Cheers,

Easter Planning

Back to work today and focused on Easter. It is weird to me how our Spring Break doesn't run into Easter as we just got back from a week off and now we have 2 short weeks in a row.

If you are planning like I am check out the Easter items in my TpT store. The last one is one of my highest downloaded freebies! Just click on the pictures to get the items :)

Here's a fun one for any grade level. Easter BINGO complete with 30 playing cards and 30 cute graphic calling cards.

A 52 page Easter package that includes Language Arts and Math activities. Fun, colorful graphics are used to add fun to your resources!
Activities included are:
*Vowel Sound Sorts
*Rhyming Activity
*Contraction worksheets and Concentration Game
*Compound Words
*Alphabetical Order
*Sentence Writing
*Acrostic Poetry
*Writing Paper
*Addition and Subtraction Facts
*Pattern Building
*Jellybean Graphing
*Counting
*Word Searches
*Crossword Puzzle and Mazes
*Coloring Pages
And now for the FREEBIE!!!!
 A fun Concentration Game with a focus on building contractions.

 
I always like to find picture books to read to my class that is grade appropriate. Sometimes it is hard and so far this is the only Easter picture book that I have found that my Grade 4/5 students enjoy. If you know of any other I would love for you to leave a comment below with the name of it.


Happy planning and Cheers,

Catching Up...

Wow I just realized how long it has been since I posted on my blog. As usual life is crazy right now with finishing my masters degree. My first ahhhh date is April 8th because my action research is due on April 7th and then all I have to worry about is my course work. I look forward to having more time to blog this summer when everything is done.

Well anyways I thought I would share a few things that have been going on in my classroom over the past while. Warning this is a long post....

I was looking for a Valentine's Day ( I know... I know it is almost Easter and I am sharing about Valentine's Day.... Read above :) ) activity to do with my class and saw heart maps all over the internet. Most people have used them for writer's workshop but I thought I would give them a try as a relatively easy Valentine's project. I was a little worried how the boys in my class would like them but they were actually more excited than the girls to work on their hearts.

Here are some close ups of a few of them.

The heart maps will do double duty because when we start writer's workshop this term I will remind them of all the things they put in their heart maps as inspiration.

OOOHHH I am so excited to share this with you. Right now we are working on inferring using Jennifer Runde's Inferring with Chris Van Allsburg Unit and my class is LOVING it ! ! !

 Here is the anchor chart used for the first unit for The Wretched Stone. Me being me I even colour coordinated it to my classroom colours :)

I have to say I was pretty impressed with my students' responses. I was even shocked that one student understood Chris Van Allsburg's hidden message right away. Smart cookie he is! I guess he does have a great teacher after all :)

Here is my anchor chart for inferring inspired by Pinterest of course.

Isn't Pinterest great for classroom ideas. Here is a link to my Pinterest boards if you want to check out all the treasures I find there.



Well since I shared a great find on TpT I thought I would also share my latest item I posted on TpT. It is a fun one for sure. Are you just as addicted to 4 Pictures 1 Word as I am? Well Guess the Word is inspired by the fun game.

Along with the 20 cards (which can be laminated and used as a literacy centre) there is a recording sheet so students/teacher can keep track of which ones they completed.


Today is the last day of my Spring Break so I am back to work tomorrow. I am excited to hear all about the adventures my students went on over this past week. I am sure they are more exciting than what I did. The highlight of my Spring Break was spending Thursday with my husband and son driving (3 hours) up North  to snowy Mackenzie so my husband could do 30 minutes of work and then shopping for soccer gear for my son on our way back. Oh yeah and I checked out the new Dollar Tree in town.

Cheers and have a great week,

Super Sunday Game

As I mentioned the other day I am not a football fan but I did find a way to make the Superbowl fun this year!!! Some wonderful blogger friends of mine all got together to have a TPT Super Sunday Sale Game of our own. What can be more exciting than this???

How to Play the Game: 
All of the resources posted below have a letter hidden somewhere in them. (Hint: You can find this hidden letter on the second page of the resource.) All of the letters will spell out: 49'ers or Ravens. 
So for instance if you purchase my Valentine's Day BINGO Game you will find a number 9 hidden on the second page. Collect the letters to spell a team's name, or even enough for both names, and then cheer on  your favourite team!! After the game, check to see if you have the letters to spell out the winning team's name. If you do, be the first to post your name and email address AND the items you purchased that spell out the winning team on The Diary of a Not So Wimpy Teacher's blog. Within 24 hours all of the sellers listed below will email you one free item from their store. Ready....Set...Game on !!

4 CUPID-A Sweet Sight Word Game
9      Valentine's Day BINGO Game
E Enemy Pie Reader's Companion or, Super "e" Heroes-A CVCe Word Game, or It's About    Elapsed Time
R Prefix/Suffix/Root-of-the-Day-Book-and-Bundle
S St. Patrick's Day Craftivities
R Roll and Graph a President
A American Symbols Activities
V Valentine's Literacy Centers Aligned to Common Core
E Enemy Pie Reader's Companion or, Super "e" Heroes-A CVCe Word Game, or It's About Elapsed Time
N Mixed Numbers Concentration/Matching Cards
S Iditarod Themed Bulletin Board Project with Student Activities and extra clip art images




Cheers,

Sunday Sale!

Well most people are excited that the Super Bowl is on Sunday. Not me. I am not a football fan at all. For me the game stops too much. I am sure some of you are thinking I am crazy but hey, I live in Canada and hockey is the craze here!! 
What I am excited about on Sunday is the HUGE Super Sunday Sale at TpT!!!!
Everything in my store will be on sale with deals up to 20% off. Please be one of the smart shoppers and use the TpT code of SUPER to get an additional savings of 10% off. OK, time for some math.... That means with my 20% off and TpT's 10% off you can get 28% off!!!! Now that is better than football (and maybe hockey) any day !!!!

The 10% off from TpT during check out is only good until midnight Feb. 3rd, Hawaii time. Aww warm Hawaii......sorry I digress.  Anyways, I am keeping my store on sale for Monday as well, but you will only be able to get the 20% off this day. I know I want the whole deal so Sunday will be my shopping day and do I ever have a lot in my cart waiting. Good thing yesterday was pay day :)

If you are looking for some great deals for your cart here are a couple of my products:

For Intermediate Grades:

My Best Selling Item

Math made fun

Perfect for FSL

For Primary Grades:

50 pages

3 Great Games

Best Seller

  
Click here to check out all my 141 products on TpT !

Have fun shopping on Sunday (and maybe watching some football) and don't forget to check below for other great TpT sellers putting their stores on sale.

Cheers,

Winter Wonderland Art

Well the last two weeks have been busy at our school with 4 days of skiing. We lucked out and had beautiful weather with around -2 degrees Celsius all days :) It feels like we didn't do much school work over these 2 weeks. During the first week skiing was Wednesday and Thursday so on Friday my kiddos were EXHAUSTED. I decided that we would watch Maniac Magee since we just finished the novel. It isn't the best quality but hey it filled the time while my class recouped from skiing.
During the second week we went on Wednesday and Friday so they were not as tired and we could get some work done. We completed a winter art project (inspired by this Pinterest link) that had to be done over 3 days because of waiting for paint to dry. Biggest lesson my class learned....patience ! 
As I did my example I took pictures so you can see the steps.  
Step 1: Paint the snow at the bottom of the page. I told my class that about 1/3 of the page should be the snow base.

Step 2: THE HARDEST STEP
Somewhere in the top part of the page paint a white circlish (new made-up word) shape. We used plastic plates for the paint and students had 2 colours only (white and blue). To the white add a SMALL amount of blue paint. Paint around the white circlish shape with the new paint colour. It is okay (preferable even) to overlap the paint to help with blending and not making it look like stripes around the middle circle. Then continue this with gradually adding blue paint to make it darker as you move outward from the white circlish shape. Let dry

Step 3: Using black paint only, paint shilouttes of things you would see outside during winter. Let dry. 

Ok this is where my students struggled with patience. They wanted to do the final stage and set he finished product.

 Step 4: Add snow if wanted. I used a Q-tip here but some of my students used a paintbrush. It is up to you. Let dry and then display.


My school only had a lighter blue paint so it was hard to make it dark. I would love to have done this with a navy blue paint but that is life. I think they still turned out okay and the bulletin board is eye-catching in the hallway. 

Here are some examples that my Gr4/5s did.

 

 

Have fun painting with your class and if you need an idea for paint containers in your classroom check out my previous post on reusing Lunchable containers for paint ! 

Since this project was inspired by Pinterest I thought I would leave a link to my Winter Pinterest Board ! I would love for you to follow any of my boards. If you have a great Pinterest board dedicated to art I would LOVE it if you could leave a link in the comments so I can follow it also. I am obsessed with Pinterest and finding new art ideas :)

Cheers,