REWIND.... Pete the Cat Week

Sorry for the absence.  I had great intentions of getting back on here and posting about our Pete week, but kids got sick, we left after school on Friday the 21st and traveled to Cleveland, now I'm getting a cold, NEVER ENDS.  :)

So rewind back to the week before Christmas break. 
Teaming up with our Kindergarten and Second Grade, we had a Pete the Cat week!  We took a look at all Eric Litwin's Pete books and did some writing, graphing, compare and contrasting. 

It was Pete the Cat Spirit Week as well. 
Monday:  Wear BLUE  (because Pete the Cat is AWESOME)
Tuesday:  Wear your "Grooviest" shoes (For Pete the Cat: Rocking in My School Shoes)
Wednesday: Wear anything with Buttons!  (For Pete the Cat and My Four Groovy Buttons)
Thursday:  Wear white, blue, brown, or red socks! (This was for I Love My White Shoes, but instead of shoes we decided it would be easier to do socks)
Friday:  Wear red, green, or white (For Pete the Cat Saves Christmas)

My friend Karen dressed in the same outfit EVERYDAY, just changed something little to see if our firsties could figure out the "differences" in her each day.  She is so smart! I know what you're thinking, GROSS, BUT she swore she washed it everyday!  (well... her hubby washed it everyday because I think he was a little grossed out perplexed by what she was teaching.  He teaches 8th grade :)  ) I wish I had her picture everyday. I think Em took her picture each day.

I totally forgot to take pictures everyday.  :( 

Can you guess which "groovy" shoes are ours?  Actually... the guys in the last picture have the key to my heart.  Black/brown shoes... GENIUS!  :) 

My friend Em made us SUPER cute Pete the Cat pins that we wore everyday and someone had to pin on me because of my freakishly-weird not being able to touch felt phobia. 

We wrote I'm ____________ in my _____________ shoes.  The kids did such a good job!

I'm doing the monkey bars in my new shoes.  So precious!  And then I'm dancing in my sparkly shoes.  LOVE!

These two are so cute too! I can't figure out how to turn them, so just turn your head! :) 

I LOVE this one too, I'm running in my old shoes!    The second one is I'm going to the mall in my froggy shoes.  I absolutely LOVE her picture.  I need to save some of her work because she will be a famous artist one day.  I need to make some money off her work encourage her to continue to reach for the stars!

Here's the graph our WHOLE building made!  My friend Em took pictures of all our students with a cute paper plate with the center cut out Pete she made.  The kids were so adorable. We actually printed out two sets and gave one to our parents in a frame we made out of popsicle sticks.  So cute!

For community writing, we wrote "Pete the Cat Saves Sharpsburg" (the name of our school) stories complete with a Groovy Song that each class made up.  Then, my high group partnered up and wrote another story.  I can't wait to type them out!  :)  What a GREAT week this was!!!!!  :)

A few pics from our Christmas.... We have an Elf that the girls have been writing to for two years now. His name is Elfalicious (we were in love with Pink, Purple, Gold, and Silverlicious last year, still are).  Anyway... we have a mailbox that I found at Big Lots and the girls put letters in it and in the morning, he has written them back.  L.O.V.E. IT!  The girls get sooooooooooooo excited.  Anyway... he felt bad because he couldn't always be watching this year because he was so busy so he sent an Elf on the Shelf.  My middle promptly named him Louis.  My oldest named him Christmas.  So Louis Christmas was born.  :)  He was sneaky but so much fun to find everyday.  He even snuck into our stuff and traveled with us!  :) Here he is the day before we left. 

Oh Louis!

 

This picture makes me laugh!  We did get a Baby Alive and my youngest climbed in the box.  Thank goodness my camera was close. :)

 

Sprinkling reindeer food on Christmas Eve.... *Disclaimer*  I do not pick out clothes for my girls.  They do this fancy dressing on their own!  :)



I hope you and yours had an AMAZING Christmas!  We were blessed with many things, but the best blessing was being with each other. 

A Tough Monday

Today was hard.  H.A.R.D.  Hard. Hard to let my babies go to school, even though I know they are safe.  Hard to not be nervous about what the day may bring.  Hard to talk about the events from Friday as more details unfold with our colleagues.  Just hard.  NOTHING compared to what others are going through.
It is so hard to even feel like posting anything today and I'm sure you feel the same way.  I started out my night watching The Voice and their opening brought me to tears.  Many. many. tears. 


I just wanted to share quickly a few great things that have been happening.  First, Em started last Tuesday with these GREAT wreaths for Karen and Natalie as their Christmas gifts.  :)  You'll never believe how thoughtful she is.... she's giving us a BLOG DESIGN!!!!  :)  Am I ok with this free one.... yes, but my eyes go wide with the polka dot blogs out there, so some day in the future we will have a new blog design!  :)  We all LOVED our gifts from that sweet Em. 
Karen and Natalie also surprised with GREAT gifts that were so.very.thoughtful.  I'm the slacker and my girls will get their gifts when I'm not cleaning up throw up, changing a diaper, or sending someone to time out for biting/hitting/saying"NO"/being "mean" teaching my three favorite ladies how to treat each other appropriately because we are a family and families love each other. 

This week is our Pete the Cat week in honor of this great book.    We have some super fun activities planned for this week. 

                                          CLICK HERE for your copy!
The background paper is from Tessa over at Tales from Outside the Classroom.  The fonts are from daFont.  :)  Finally I'll leave you with a pic from our Monday.  We'll be back with more fun Pete stuff later this week! 

Curious Firstie Teachers

 

 

Hug your family.  Hug your little ones tight.  Hug your colleagues.  Hug your friends. 

Sending HUGE hugs to Sandy Hook and the city of Newtown. 

Silence......

 

 

 

12 in '12

My curious friend Em posted her 12 in '12 HERE. yesterday.  It's funny when you have a blog with several different authors because you can be typing a blog post at the exact same time and not really know it until you post.  :)  So here is my 12 in'12!

 

Here we go.... This is Maria's 12 in '12

12.  Favorite movie you watched:

I watched this with my girls and we laughed and were a wee bit scared.  But all-n-all, we LOVED it!

11.  Favorite TV Series:

 

 

One of my FAVORITES!!!!  I secretly wish I was Piper in this show.  

Oh to be a spy and in the CIA.  :)

 

10.  Favorite Restaurant:

 

hmm.... so hard!  Mr. E. and I try to get out at least once a month.  Sometimes it happens and often it doesn't.  We've been to Bravo a few times and it's YUMMY!  :)  But I am loving Red Robin's Ceasar Chicken Wrap and they don't care that my girlies are loud!  :)

 

9.  Favorite new thing you tried:

 

This summer my friend Erin talked me into taking a class at the gym.  We've belonged there for four years and I had taken 0 classes.  :)  Well.... I loved it!  It was called BARBELL and I felt SUPERMAN strong lifting my total of 5 lbs. on my bar.  :)

 

8.  Favorite gift you got:

 

I feel like I'm given a gift each morning when I wake up. 

 So... thank you Lord for the gift of opening my eyes each morning to see the beauty of the world you created around me.

 

7.  Favorite thing you pinned:

 



 

6.  Favorite blog post:

 

There are too many great posts out there to choose from.  I've LOVED blogstalking and have learned so many great things.  This is one thing I'm proud of.  It's the first thing I actually made that was more than one page.  :)

 



 

5.  Best Accomplishment:

 

Starting to blog has been a big accomplishment for me.

 

4.  Favorite Picture:

 

I love these super cute girls!  I love their innocence and happiness with life.

 

3.  Favorite Memory:

 

Being in the World Choir Games this summer and earning a Silver Diploma.

 

 

2.  Goal for 2013:

To do something special with/for Mr. E. a few times a month leading up to our 10 year anniversary.

 

1.  One Little Word:

Patience

Busy Bees and FREEBIE

Oh my!  I have not posted in what feels like a very long time.  What a busy time of year!  Shopping, planning, shopping, crafting...it is hard to keep up!

Here's what we did last week!

We follow the Reading Street stories and last week was Honey Bees.

With the help of some google searching, pinterest looking, and blog postings, we came up with some great activities to really hit home how important bees are to our environment.

I found a great book called Bee and Me.  I had never read it before but...oh...my...it fit what we were trying to teach the firsties perfectly!  And they loved it because it had the moving pictures in it.

Then we showed about 2-3 minutes of clips from The Bee Movie.  There is one scene that illustrates pollination and the bees explain why it is so important.  THEN it shows what the world would look like without pollination.  It was perfect!

I saw on a few different blogs that using Cheetos could really illustrate how pollination occurs.  So we gave it a try.  And of course it was a hit!

Here are my cute little flowers and with their pollen.

They had to touch each new flower they visited.

Some of them started to really rub the pollen on!

To assess the students, we created the following form below.  We used the common core and our science standards to help us.  Pictured below is just the first page of the assessment.  The second and third page are a picture sort of things that bees do and do not impact.  If you click on the caption, you can download it!

Click HERE to download this assessment

 Our lucky green chimps also used a bee to help them practice their spelling words (along with the powerpoint).  They were super excited to write their words on the bee and they look super cute hanging in the hall (inside their hive).

And of course my good friend Natalie supported all of this great bee learning in math.  Thanks!

We really enjoyed our bee week!  But next up...Pete the Cat Saves Christmas!  Our entire building is going to go Pete crazy the week before winter break.  We could not be more excited.  Can't wait to show you all that we do!

On a final note...
Hope everyone is enjoying this great season.  We are having extremely warm weather for December and it is really throwing me off this year.  But I am trying to take advantage of it.  We went to the zoo last week (when it was 70 degree out) to soak up all their Christmas lights.  It was great, as always!

Next up on the holiday to-do list...buckeyes!  YUM!

Em