Appreciation! {Five for Friday}

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Happy Teacher Appreciation Week to all of ya'll! It's a miracle I didn't gain 25 pounds this week from all of the luncheons, baked goods and sweets that were everywhere I turned. How generous the families and teachers at my schools are! This was my favorite treat that I got for Teacher Appreciation Week. It was an oven mitt filled with school supplies and candy!

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Happy Mother's Day! This little sweetheart made me laugh so hard when he was brainstorming facts about his mom for an acrostic poem. After I took a step back and read it, I realized he could be my son! Macaroni and cheese with hot sauce....always late for work! Pretty much sums me up. Kids really do say the darnedest things.

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This week I had my first of three days full of CSE Annual Review meetings, which means that my living room has become a full blown IEP writing office over the past month. I am finally starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel!

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Tonight my sister Julia had her senior prom! Didn't she look stunning!? Although it was a rainy day, it was a perfect sky for picture taking. It was so cute seeing all of the girls in their dresses with their hair done. Makes me feel ooooold!!

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After a long, stressful week, is there anything better to come home to than a delicious home cooked meal? I'm lucky to have such a talented guy who knows just when to make my favorite meal! Tonight we had this amazing seafood pasta. He cooked while I blogged. My kind-of Friday!

Have a great weekend!

You can link up with five things from your week here!

List-Group-Label: Vocabulary Strategy

On Tuesday we had an awesome professional development seminar in our building that focused on vocabulary instruction. One strategy that I couldn't wait to try with my second graders was List Group Label. A strategy from Reading Rockets, it's a good way to get students brainstorming vocabulary words and then using higher-level thinking to group them together. It also teaches students how to organize, categorize and label information. The thing I (and my kiddos) liked most about this activity was that there really weren't any wrong answers, they just had to defend why they grouped words together. We've been learning about planting and I used List-Group-Label to help us review for our planting test, discuss vocabulary and read and write these content words. This was an activity I did on a whim the morning after our workshop, so I didn't have any beautiful graphic organizers or anchor charts ready.. but take a look. My plan is to make a generic graphic organizer that I can use whenever we want to use this activity!

Read more about List-Group-Label here, and watch this great video for a demonstration!

Sweet Sunshine! {Five for Friday}

Last night I saw somebody tweeted: "The best way to get students to not act like the school year is over is by having teachers not act like the school year is over." Guilty. as. charged. Well, sort of. I don't think I've been showing it necessarily, but I certainly have been feeling it. It's something about sunshine that makes everyone itch to wrap it up. My IEP Annual Reviews are due in the next two weeks and it's been so hard to come home at night and get back to work and not just go outside and play. But like anything, this too shall pass and I will be playing outside after May 22nd!

{one}
This week I finally finished a product I have been working on since February! It's something I have been using in my classroom but I just didn't have it TPT worthy and ready to go (and there is still more that I want to add!) A wonderful special education teacher that I used to work with taught me to use Fry's Phrases to build fluency and progress monitor. So many of my students can identify sight words in isolation and then as soon as they see it on a page in a book they don't know it. Sound familiar? I made these cards that were big enough to use whole group, but small enough to be printed and sent home for repeated practice, with some great progress monitoring tools and charts to go along with them. It is a little more than 480 flashcards, and each one has a phrase that is made up of a combination of Fry's sight words. I will be posting about how I use them soon, but here is a preview. You can buy it here in my TPT store!

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I'm cheap when it comes to buying books. I am a library girl through and through (I get it from my mama). But this week I was in a bind and I had to buy an iBook on my iPad that I wanted to start reading with one of my tutoring kids. I knew she was reading it on her Nook so I figured it would be fun for us both to be reading on our e-readers. After we met yesterday, I fell in love with teaching reading on a digital book! I think there will never be a substitution for real, paper books and I also think kids need to learn to read with real, paper books, but this was a nice treat and it was certainly helpful for what we are working on. For starters, it gets the kids engaged. But it also has so many features that are good for teaching reading comprehension or to help a struggling reader. We went through and we highlighted all of the characters' names in one color, the setting words in another. We stuck post-it notes at parts that we wanted to take notes. We looked up the definition of unknown words by clicking on them. We increased the font of the book when we got to a tough part. We changed the font so it was easier on our eyes. We just had a ball.

Does anyone have a resource for free or inexpensive digital books for kids? I know you can get them through public libraries now but at my library you have to wait for a few days to get it. Any suggestions?

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This week I joined in the new #teachertalktuesdays thread on Instagram! I'm so happy the girls from What the Teacher Wants and Apples and ABCs started it because it used to be so hard to find other teachers on Instagram. Look no further! Come find me... @misseager.

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I also took part in Gabrielle's amazing giveaway this week. Have you entered? She collected over 100 products from so many great bloggers. You can win my Call the Cops pack! It ends on Sunday at midnight and you can enter every day! Click below to enter.

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This weekend my baby sister turns 15! Crazy town. She's such a special girl. I am always like a proud mama when I talk about my sisters, but I can't help it!!

Also on the agenda this weekend:

Arts and crafts...

...and exercise (because I started wearing sleeveless dresses again this week...oy!)

Have a good weekend everyone! And as always, thanks for hosting, Kacey!

Countdown to a Giveaway!

Hi sweet friends!

Who else is counting down the days to summer?! It has been such a crazy month. I'm teaming up with Gabrielle from Teaching Special Thinkers to count down the days until summer vacation! She's gathered up over 100 products from great bloggers and you can enter to win them all!

You can enter to win my Call the Cops pack which is a tool to help your little lovelies with their editing. Raise your hand if you're sick of telling your students to check for capitalization and punctuation! It includes posters for your classroom, bookmarks for your students to stick in folders and on desks, speeding tickets and get out of jail free cards. In my classroom I can just say "Call the cops!" and it sends my kiddos right back to their seats to check their work.

So what are you waiting for!? You can enter all of them below or by visiting her great blog.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

a Rafflecopter giveaway

  a Rafflecopter giveaway

Life is What Happens

The day we decided to move in was a day of celebration and victory. We had found an apartment in the city. A real, three bedroom, beautiful old apartment. An apartment with a driveway! A backyard! A dishwasher! Fresh out of college and unemployed, we were fearless and determined to make it work. It was all part of the plan. We rented a U-Haul that August 1^st. Unaware that the rental was from 9-3 only, we showed up at the U-Haul center at 1:45pm. We thought that 9-3 was the window of time that we could show up to pick it up and then return it whenever. As Bob, the rental manager explained, we were actually 5 hours late for our rental and only had a little over an hour left to move. After he explained that U-Haul meant WE-HAUL, I was nominated to drive the truck as the three of us piled in. We had officially begun our new life in the city.

Tomorrow will be the second time a U-Haul pulls up to our home. Understand that this is a day I have been planning for quite some time. I have been praying and hoping this day would come. A day I thought I was ready for only one short year after we moved in. My plan was to just live there for a year and then move on and start my life. You know, my real life. Four years later, and it is finally happening. I never understood the meaning of bittersweet until I started to pack my things this week. I am thrilled about my new home and I spend every waking second looking up furniture, DIY ideas, containers and curtains. I envision my future family and kids, my wedding, my real life. I have been waiting for so long for my real life to begin. I wish the years of my life away to a fault, waiting for better ones ahead. But as I move through my house this week I have found myself standing in each room and my breath catches in my throat as I remember the years that I now leave behind.

I stand in my living room remembering the day we got the landline. I stand in my dining room remembering the night we stood up on the window seat and danced. I stand in the kitchen remembering the morning we woke up to a burnt stuffed animal in the microwave. I find myself walking out the front door for work, remembering the summer nights that were spent drinking wine on those purple stairs. I stand in the hallway remembering the summer days that I walked through the door after job interviews, collapsing in their arms in tears. I find myself brushing my teeth at night, remembering the countless hours that have been spent with all three of us in that tiny bathroom. I find myself appreciating every moment that was spent in this house. Finally understanding that all of these moments were my real life.

They say you don’t recognize the most important moments of your life when they are happening and that life is what happens when you are busy making other plans. I have been making plans to move out since the day we moved in, and now I just want to rewind. I want to go back and live it all over again so I don’t forget how fortunate I really am.  

I have a vision of my own child’s graduation party 25 years from now. I see myself, standing with these girls, talking away, wine in hand. As my daughter is identifying everyone at the party to her friends, I hear her say, “My mom lived with those ladies for like, four years.” What nobody will ever understand is that we didn’t just live together, we grew together. And that is something that I, the planner, never planned.

So thank you, girls. For being such a beautiful chapter in my REAL LIFE.  

Shake It Up!

Okay so I feel like a broken record... BUT I promised to become a better blogger- and that means posting about some things I did a little while ago. And by a little while, I mean back in November.

I created these rice shakers after being inspired by Sunny Days in Second Grade. This was truly one of those projects that was as easy and simple as it sounded. Have you ever posted on Facebook about collecting things!? Holy moly I was getting Tropicana containers for WEEKS. My friends and family are awesome. Ask and I shall receive when it comes to people's recycling and leftover junk treasures.

So here is how they turned out. They were actually really therapeutic to make. Is that weird? Shaking the bags up and siphoning them into containers was a stress-buster for me.

I got this bag of rice for $7.99. Truth be told, 5 months later I am still eating rice from this bag because it was way more than I needed. I even found other miscellaneous ways to use it up and I STILL have more. I filled bowls for jewelry, votives with tea lights...etc. But nope, still eating.

I used white vinegar (about 3 tablespoons) and gel food coloring (because that's what I had). I shook the rice for a few minutes and voila! Colored rice. I didn't even lay the rice out to dry, I just opened the Ziploc bags and let it air dry overnight in the bag and they all turned out great.

After I filled my containers, I added simple Avery labels to each container that indicated what the game was. Most commonly, I used these for spelling sorts and patterns. Now that I am back in the primary grades, I am using them for sight words and math facts. 

Here is an example of a worksheet that I used with the shakers. It corresponded with one of our spelling units. 

Click here to download an editable word document to make your own word sort recording sheet! (This won't have the same font because it's a word document.)

Click here to download a PDF that kept my font. (You can print this and just write on the sheet before you make copies.)

Peaks and Valleys {Five for Friday}

It's certainly been a week of peaks and valleys over here for Miss Eager. No better way to describe what I've been reminded of recently, other than with this quote that my dad shared with me on the phone a few nights ago. He always has the magic of saying the right thing at the right time. Even when I don't want to hear it. I couldn't have asked for a better mantra than this one! Thanks, Daddy. 

“If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans.” -Woody Allen

Isn't that the truth!?

So, anyway. Here's my Five for Friday!

{one}

This week was my first full week with my new kiddos. It’s so much different than my previous job, but it’s a great position. I thought that traveling between two schools would stress me out, but it actually makes the day go by very fast. It’s nice to step outside and drive for a few minutes in the middle of the day. My students are great! I am so happy to be back in a routine. Although I loved staying home for a month and being a full-time blogger, I missed the school routine because, well, I am a routine kinda-girl. One thing I’m trying to enforce with going back to work is making a schedule for exercise classes. Amazing how if I write it in my calendar for the week, I am so much more inclined to go. This week was a success in that department. High five.

{two}

On Tuesday I made up an impromptu card game for my second grade math group when I had 15 extra minutes (when does that ever happen!?). A few months ago I got 4 mini-decks of cards at Michael’s for $1.00. We are working on triple digit addition. This is how it went:

I took out all of the royalty cards, but left the jokers in. I combined two of the decks. Each player picks three cards and has to add the three numbers together. They can try to add them mentally, or they can use the suit pictures on the card to help them count. If they get the question right, they keep their cards. If they get the question wrong, they have to put the cards in a discard pile. If they draw a joker, they only have to add the two numbers together. After all of the cards are gone, the winner is the player who has the most cards. So simple, but so effective and fun. It could also be modified for subtraction or double digit addition and subtraction. Now they've been asking to play it at the end of each day! Funny how we discover those games when we are on our feet.

I was also up late one night putting together this cute game with some new clipart I purchased. I made this for one of the little girls I tutor who loves everything fashion and girly. How adorable is this clipart?! I'm adding it to a unit I'll be working on for my TPT store soon.

{three}

It took me a week to decide how I wanted to organize myself for this new job. I’ve been holding on to this cute accordion file from Target, and I am excited to finally have a use for it. I bought it just because it was chevron, are you surprised? My old plan book system is too heavy to lug between schools, and I have planning time in both buildings, so I like to have my papers for both schools with me at all times. I made a file for each group, a file for each school, a file for originals and a file for each of the students that I tutor after school. In the back I have a few extra copies of to-do lists, thank you notes and other miscellaneous papers that I may need throughout my day. Now this accordion file and my clipboard with my plans are the only things I need to keep with me. On Fridays I empty the papers into my filing cabinet and reload for next week. Mission accomplished.

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Remember last weekend I was apartment searching?! Well, that apartment I fell in love with WAS negotiable, so I’ll be moving April 1! I am so thrilled. I’ll have to give you a tour when I am all moved in. I’ve been staying up a little bit past my bedtime every night this week because I am revisiting all of my home décor Pinterest boards and starting a list of projects and ideas. Here is a sneak peek!

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I’m really looking forward to this weekend. It’s a busy one- but good busy. Lots of fun stuff going on. 

Tonight I’m having my dear friend Whitney and her family over for dinner. She has two precious little girls (2 ½ and 7 months). I made cheese lasagna last night so it’s all ready to pop in the oven. 

This weekend it will be 50 degrees and sunny in Buffalo- woohoo! Days like that practically feel like summer when you’ve been through our winter. 

Tomorrow my little sister Julia turns 18. She is 8 years younger than me and I remember the day she was born like it was yesterday. I cannot believe she’s already 18. That must mean I’m turning 26 in a few weeks!?! She has grown up into such a beautiful young woman- inside and out. We are celebrating her birthday at my parents’ tomorrow night. I’m excited to give her her present (but she reads the blog so I have to hold off on telling you what it is). 

I might be the only one excited to lose an hour of sleep this weekend, but I look forward to this daylight savings change. I will gladly lose the hour of sleep if it means longer days and more daylight after work! 

Have a great weekend!

If you want to link up to the Five for Friday party, click here!

Week-at-a-Glance!

What do you do when you have 20+ students, 7 groups, 3 intervention programs and 2 schools? You make a lesson plan template that is easy to plan with and easy to refer to. My school uses a reading intervention program called Orton-Gillingham. That's what I do with most of my students so most of my days are based around those lessons. Since I am now traveling between two buildings, I can't lug my big plan book around and work off of elaborate plans. Most of my plans involve two or three words like: "Orton Lesson 27", "Spelling Sort" and "Decodable Text #41". Here is what I created today so I can always have it on top of my clipboard and ready to reference at-a-glance. I just love it!

March {Currently}

Happy Saturday to you! My favorite day of the week. I am so happy it's March. Even though March is the longest month of the school year (Hello! NO days off!) it is also the beginning of spring and the beginning of the downhill momentum of the school year. I feel like once we get to March it's fast forward to June. Tonight I'm linking up with Farley's Currently Party. Here is a little window into my life right now:

This week we started watching Boardwalk Empire and I LOVE it. Now I know what all the hype is about. I don't know about you, but the only way I can watch TV shows is when they are available on Netflix or HBOGo. I can't even keep up with DVR. I forget that they record and then it just becomes too much to keep track of. I need to be able to select "Season 1: Episode 1" and then have mini-marathons. 

I'm in love with my new blog design. I love how clean and simple it looks- I was ready for change. I hesitated and went back and forth, but I am happy I made the change. The best part?! I did it myself! I never, ever thought I would be able to figure out how to do everything but I did and I think that's why I love it even more. There is something so rewarding about seeing your own blood, sweat and tears come together. I wanted both of my blogs to match and follow the same look and feel. There is a lot more work that I need to put into it but for now I am pleased with it!

Today I looked at new apartments and I absolutely fell in love with one that was $300 above my price range. Of course. Why does that happen? I wish I didn't have such expensive taste. I blame Pinterest for putting these unrealistic homes in my face all the time. I'm hoping that maybe it's negotiable. :)

I hope you're having a great weekend! 

[Technology Tuesday] Running Records iPad App!

Do you ever call someone when you know they are not able to answer the phone, but you are so excited about something that you take the chance that for some crazy reason they will answer?! That was me today, calling my friend Dara while she was clearly still teaching. I NEEDED to tell someone about the app I discovered while I was getting materials ready for tutoring. I needed to tell someone who would appreciate how cool this app really is!

Meet the Record of Reading app. Here's what you need to know about it:

1. It's free. So that's reason enough to at least download it on your iPhone or iPad.

2. It was created by Clemson University.

3. It can be used with any leveled reading text or running record assessment.

4. It's simple, straightforward and user-friendly.

5. It saves you time (more time for blogging and Pinterest!)

6. It encourages paperless, organized assessment data.

7. You can email the results instantly to yourself, parents, other teachers, etc.

8. It audio records the students as they read, making it easy to go back, listen and analyze errors.

9. It automatically calculates the words-per-minute score.

10. It automatically determines whether the text was frustrational, instructional or independent.

The screens starts blank and you can fill in the student information and the information that you have about the passage- the running word count (RW), the lexile score and the running record or Fountas and Pinnell level (if that's what you are using). I use the Pearson Critical Reading Inventory so the only information I put in is the running word count and the lexile score.

If you are unsure of how to convert your passages- this is a helpful conversion chart that includes most popular reading level correlations. 

Once the child begins to read, you hit the red record button. I keep tallies of the errors as they occur, and make note of anything I want to revisit. The nice thing about having the voice recording as they read is that if you miss an error or you want to analyze the errors, you can listen to it over and over again. 

After he or she is done and the recording has stopped, you click on the E or SC column to begin counting errors and self-corrections. If you are unfamiliar with running records, you can learn more about how to administer it and analyze errors here.  

The app automatically calculates the words-per-minute, the accuracy rate and the ratio of self-corrections to errors.

There is an area where you can add notes and observations about the reading, and select a fluency score from 1-4.

After you are finished, you can save the record and create a folder for that child.

My favorite feature is that you can email the record as a .pdf or a .jpg! How cool is that?! I love the idea of going paperless and keeping .pdf versions of running records in folders for each of my students. I also love the possibility of playing the recording of a passage to a parent at a conference.

Technology never ceases to amaze me and Apple really means it when they say "There's an app for that!" Marie Clay is probably rolling over in her grave!