Penguin Cam!!!

So it is super late and I should be going to sleep... but I promised myself that I could blog if I finished submitting all of my projects for my ESL class!! 3 classes down, 3 to go! Next is multicultural children's lit. I literally can not tell you how SUPER EXCITED I am. I will be sure to share any books with all my blogging friends!!

Anyway, back to the subject of this post...

Today I was looking at facebook before school started, and I saw that my boyfriend had written about the live penguin cam from SeaWorld San Diego. Have you seen this??

Amazing. I used it as a reward for my class today after they worked on their persuasive paragraphs. They loved it! I actually find it amazing that 2000 people were watching at noon and still at 12:30 in the morning there are 1300 people watching it! They are adorable.

Speaking of persuasive paragraphs, today when I launched this little genre, I started by reading this fabulous book:

It was PERFECT to introduce opinions and reasons! We are writing our persuasive paragraphs on healthy choices, so each kid picked a specific healthy thing to do and they are persuading someone to do it! I didn't think they'd be super interested in the topic, but they are loving it. Today I learned that we should get more sleep because if you're mad about something and you go to sleep, you "kind of forget about it." Haha! So there are your wise words from a second grader today.

Side note - still watching the penguin cam... so cute!!!

And lastly, I wanted to leave you with this Hey Girl. I have not left you one in a while because none of them have really grabbed me I guess! And I am only posting this one because it has Jude Law and I want to MARRY HIM even though he cheated on his fiance......... Jude, Jude, Jude. Shame on you! I don't know what wraparound services are but I hope if you do, that you love this one.

V-Day Partay!

Happy Valentine's Day!!!

We had a lovely day today in first and second grades. Let me give you an idea of how it went down and the bloggers who helped us get there!

We made Valentine's mini-books which I got from Michelle at Fabulous in First. I used these for our morning work and then they worked on them when they were finished with things throughout the day. They loved these!

I loved this boy's answers, especially that he loves "apple gose" because he can "suck on the gose."

Then in Writing, we finished up our paragraph Valentines. I loved the ASL Valentines I saw on Pinterest, so they chose a scrapbook paper piece and I traced their hand onto it! Super cute and easy.

Unrelated to Valentine's Day... I busted out the "library books" that come with my reading program for the second graders. We started with a Mercy Watson book - have any of you read those? My kids LOVED IT. Two of them finished it in one day but a few are still working on it, so I read with them today. Three of my second graders are SUPER readers, way way above grade level. These two friends are right on level so I read with them today and they did great!

This is what I gave the kids for Valentine's Day. Thanks, The Teacher Wife! The kids also were obsessed with these and they were so cheap and easy! Best idea ever.

For Math, we did Cara Carroll's candy heart probability. I'm not really sure that they grasped the concept but it was fun regardless. :)

Then we had our party! My room mom planned this activity, which she found here. Super cute! It went along well with our love monsters!!

We played HEART Bingo, which I made here!

And the kids graphed candy hearts, obvi. I got the sheets for that activity at Teacher Bits and Bobs!

At the end, we got our pouches and ate candy! We totally ran out of time to eat our all-red fruit snack!! So we saved it for tomorrow. We'll be eating watermelon, raspberries, and strawberries for a few days I think. :) Fine with me!!!

I also wanted to share what my BTF next door did! She found this cute bookmark idea on Pinterest. All it took was some paint samples and a little heart punch that I found on clearance at Michael's for $2!

 She also made little lovebugs! It was in a little craft kit, also from Michael's!

It was a great day. No behavior problems, although one boy went into the girl's bathroom. Siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh.

Looooove Monsters and a Freebie!!

Hola friends!

How was your Monday? Mine was great, considering it was a Monday. My class is really excited about Valentine's Day but they weren't being too overly crazy today so hooray for that!

Today we prepped our Valentine holders for tomorrow. I got this idea (and the templates) from Amber at Adventures of a Third Grade Teacher. I just found her through Chrissy's linky party and I was instantly loving the love monsters. My class died of happiness when I showed them my sample.

She spent a lot of time on hers! It had hair and also nail polish, which you can't see in this picture.

Last week, we made hearts for our wire thing! I got the template from Mrs. Bainbridge. They loved these even though no one understood how to weave them and basically one of the second graders and I did everyone's hearts for them. Whatev.

Tomorrow I have a pretty fun day planned, I think. For writing, we have been working on 5-sentence paragraphs, so today we started working on a Valentine which will incorporate paragraph writing! They had to write it to someone in their family about why they were the best sister ever, or brother, or mom, whatever. They needed a topic sentence, three body sentences, and a closing sentence. We wrote our sloppy copies today and I was so very proud of them! A few friends think that "bald and cool" is a sentence, so we're not quiiiiiiiiiiiiiiite there yet, but I'd say 80% of them can easily write a 5-sentence paragraph with no prompting from me!

I'll show you the finished product tomorrow, but for now, I want to share a little freebie for ya. For this writing project tomorrow, I needed heart writing paper and I couldn't find anything that I liked. So I made my own. It is nothing special but the lines are big enough that my kids can write on them and can fit their whole paragraph on there!

Just click on the little preview to go there! I'd be super happy if you left me a comment if you're able to use it!

I am excited for Valentine's Day tomorrow! Are you? We get a non-uniform day so that makes the day 100% more awesome.