Winner! Winner!! & *Friday Freebie

And our winner is.....


Thank you to everyone who followed our stores and who entered our give away! We all appreciate you so much! Sheila Felder, we will be emailing you and sending you our packets soon! Congratulations!!

1. Seriously, Mr. Groundhog....an early Spring?? I was soooo hoping this would be true...but alas, in the middle of reading groups this morning I was interrupted by a very excited little boy telling me to look out the window because it was SNOWING!! Ugh!!  I know it is difficult to see because the photo is a bit blurry,  but it was really coming down! {Oh, please warm up soon!}


2. I'm working on updating my Plant and Flower Packet and it is almost done! I'll post about it as soon as it is updated on TpT! In the meantime, here's a little Missing Subtrahend Freebie for you!

    

3. Look what came in the mail today!! I love this magazine! My mom gives me a gift subscription every year for Christmas...or my birthday...I can't remember...But it always has useful information. I love the article on easy tips for cleaning when you just feel like you don't have time! Seriously, teaching full-time, blogging, creating for TpT....who has time for cleaning???  By the time the weekend rolls around I'm lucky to have any energy left to stare at myself in the mirror.

But hey, suggest a few awesome cleaning products and you have peaked my interest! Nothing like when someone gives you a good cleaning product recommendation! {I seriously sound more pathetic than I thought....}

4. Only 5 more days until Spring Break!!! To celebrate the {hopeful} coming of Spring, I did my art lesson on Georgia O'Keefe today. Painting LARGE on a big piece of paper is difficult for first graders. Even with modeling and step-by-step instruction, my cuties still wanted to make their flowers from a "normal" perspective....or even smaller...instead of the perspective of a bumble bee or bird landing on a flower. Look at their darling work! It sure has brightened up our hallway!

5. My darlin' step-children are on their way here from California even as I type! With no children of my own, {and after a very long 44 years of waiting to find my sweetheart and best friend to marry} I feel oh-so-very-blessed to have these four Luv Bugs in my world! We have a wonderful relationship and I miss them so much when they aren't here! So, here's a photo of my cuties! I'm so proud of each one of them!

Have a wonderful weekend! 

Love,

                                                        

Give Away Winners Announced!!

Thank you sooooooooo much to all of YOU for supporting my give away this week! I appreciate all of your wonderful comments and thank you for following me on Facebook and TpT. Congratulations to my three winners, Amber K., Bren P. and Cindy C. I will be emailing you shortly! I hope you enjoy your packet! :)

If you are in the mood for more spider activities, you are in luck! I'm joining up with my best bloggy buddy, Jennifer, over at Rowdy in First Grade to do Web of a Spider Give Away! Head on back here tomorrow to see the cute packets we are giving away and how to enter!

I know it is only Wednesday, but today was my Friday! We are officially on Fall Break through next MONDAY!!! I am soooo happy to just have a couple of days to get caught up on sleep! My Fall Break isn't going to be much of rest, though. My Hubby and I are getting ready for a multi-family garage sale on Saturday. Last weekend we went to our storage unit and hauled boxes and boxes of our precious junk belongings and placed them in our living room. Combining two homes into one little townhouse makes for a lot of stuff! 

The plan was to sort through things while we watched t.v. in the evenings. We are wonderful at making grand plans! It sounded so perfect...just sort through a box or two each night and we'd be ready for the big sale on Saturday. Yah, well, the boxes are still sitting there, untouched, collecting yet more dust...Ugh! So, tomorrow we MUST start sorting....Yah, there's that much stuff! 

My Hubby is sooo cute! He has been coming in once a week to help me do an art activity with my students. We've been studying about shapes this week and I adapted a cute pumpkin art activity I found on Pinterest into an activity on shape. We cut triangles, circles, ovals, squares, and rectangles to make these cute Jack-o-lanterns. 

(See the cute pumpkins that inspired this project here.)

Since we have to connect our art activities to the curriculum we covered shapes and we also wrote "How To" stories. We brainstormed ideas that they could write about. The children came up with "How to Carve a Jack-o-lantern", "How to Grow a Pumpkin", "How to Go Trick-or-Treating" among others. 

I had introduced the "How To" story structure two weeks ago, including a title, introduction, first, next, then, last, and a conclusion. We have the story map up in the classroom so the students can refer to it as they write. We took the story through the writing and editing phases and we are just starting to put up their final drafts. I'm so excited! They are doing a great job!

Wish me luck on tackling my "To Do" list the next few days! I hope you enjoy the rest of your week!

And remember, be kind to yourself...

There is Only Love,