5 Easter Freebies!!!

Easter is just a few days away!!! I don't get to do much Easter in my classroom because we are always on Spring Break the week before! But if you're in school all week, I have several Easter freebies in my store that you're students will love!! 

EGG HUNT

Students solve these rhymes by reading the riddle on each egg!

RHYMING BUNNIES

Students make new words to rhyme.

EASTER EGG RECORDING SHEET

Use this open-ended recording sheet for your students to record all of their plastic egg activities! 

SINK OR FLOAT?

Place different objects in plastic eggs and see if they sink or float. 

JUGGLING JELLYBEANS

Students just learning to count objects can practice their counting skills by counting jellybeans and matching them to the correct number. 

These are all FREE! Click on each picture to download each freebie! 

My students also love building sentences with my Scrambled Sentences resources! Here is the Easter Edition my students just did!

Each set includes 4, 5, and 6 word sentences for easy differentiation! The cards are also color and pattern coded for easy organization. 

Click here for a closer look! 

Sending bunches of Easter wishes your way, 

APRIL in a Click with 5 Easter Freebies

A little later than normal, but here's your April in a Click, packed with 5 Easter freebies! 

Download "April in a Click" {here} and all of the images you see above will be clickable. Just click on each picture to be taken to the freebie or the activity link. I have 5 freebies for you this month, so be sure to snag those up even if for next year. 

Follow my Easter Pinterest Board here for more April ideas!

Follow Traci's board Easter on Pinterest.

Loving Spring Break this week!
Anyone else on Spring Break?

Five for Friday With 3 Science Experiments & A Freebie!

It's official!!!! I'm on spring break and I'm starting my first day out with my first ever link up with "Doodle Bugs Teaching" for her "Five for Friday" linky party! I've always wanted to join this fun party, but I don't usually blog on Fridays because it's my shopping night! I always do my grocery shopping on Friday nights after school, so that I can enjoy my Saturdays and Sundays. It really makes for a much longer weekend! Although it's much dreaded every Friday, it feels so good to get up every Saturday morning knowing it's DONE!!

So here's my Five for Friday on Saturday!!!

 Do you have trouble managing ipads and what apps students go on in your classroom? I did and it was driving me crazy! So in an attempt to solve this problem, I organized all of the apps on all the ipads into categories, took screen shots of each and made this schedule chart. We started it on Monday and it worked great! Now when students go to the ipad center, they check to see what category their group has been assigned and then they can choose any app from that category! If students are caught out of that category, the ipad is taken and they have to go do seatwork. That generally only happens once! 

In a previous post {here} I wrote about "guided access" and how you can use it to lock a student within an app, but it can often be challenging for me to free myself from my other groups to place every student into guided access.

Our favorite part of the day......Science Time!!!

Students got to see how the molecules of the water adhere to the piece of string without spilling!!

We made homemade playdough....and then......

 ..........used it to see our pulse!!!

This is a very cool experiment! When placed correctly over the pulse, the toothpicks rapidly vibrates and moves!

We studied ants all week, but had to say goodbye to our ants and set them free before leaving yesterday as we are on Spring Break now! Woohoo!

I just love this photo!

A closer look!

 The kids loved making ants on a log!!!

And to end the day before break yesterday....we colored Easter eggs! I am convinced that some of my students have never colored Easter eggs, so I am very happy I was able to provide them with this memorable childhood experience!

And I'd like to leave you with a couple of freebies from my "All About Ants" unit. 

Three Easter Freebies, More/Less

I'm on a roll.....must be the SPRING FEVER!! Four more days and I'll be on spring break! All of sudden, my minds rolling and I've created three Easter freebies for you, plus finished my more/less flashcards that have been on my to-do list!! I think just the thought of a soon to come vacation has transformed me. 

Since I'll be on spring break next week, we are doing our Easter activities this week! I just LOVE the centers and activities that you can do with simple plastic Easter eggs! Here are some of the activities I'm doing this week. 

I teach multiple levels, so I'm doing beginning sounds, counting, and number order with my younger students, rhyming and basic addition with my middle students, and contractions with my more advanced students. The possibilities of these little guys are just endless!!!

But I found myself with so many levels of students, trying to create a different recording sheet for each activity....when I realized I could create one simple recording sheet that would work with every activity my students are doing!!!

 You can snag it up free {here} to use with your egg activities!

My class is soooo into Science these days!! We are literally doing a hands-on Science experiment every day, I just don't have time to blog about them all......this summer look for my "Year of Science" pack that I've been working on all year!!! It's gonna be Super Awesome!!! 

While we are doing an egg experiment everyday this week, I'd like to share our "Easter Egg Sink or Float" freebie with you! 

You can download it {here}. 

My other freebie is my "Rhyming Bunnies" freebie. It is an exclusive on Educents.com. You can grab it from Educents {here}.

I also just posted my "More/Less Flashcards." Many of my students are struggling with this concept and I'm sick of running around grabbing objects and items in the classroom to show them more and less, so I made these flashcards. They are available {here}.

Woohoo! Four more days!! Have you had your spring break yet?? 

SPRING BINS, TIE-DYE EGGS, & "BACK to TOP"

Hi guys! I'm a little late on my "Bloomin' Blogger Sundays" post because we've been in Vegas for two days. The Eagles concert was a-w-e-s-o-m-e!!!! We had such a great time! I keep thinking I'm back to work tomorrow, but wait.....I'm on spring break all next week! Yay! 

I got a little head start on my spring cleaning last week in my classroom. I don't know what it is about spring, but when it arrives, I really do seem to get that spring cleaning fever!!! Last week I decided to finally tackle cleaning out my file cabinets and organizing my materials by monthly themes. I have four file cabinets in my room and over half of these cabinets contained junk materials from before I even took over the classroom! Every day last week I loaded up my teachers rolling tote and brought home this:

Every night I ended up with a trash pile that looked like this:

And now......I have monthly themed bins that look like this:

Since I don't have a whole lot of stuff yet in just my 5 years of teaching, I organized mine using one bin for every 3 months and skipped June, July, and August. We get out of school the first week of June and start the last couple days of August, so I don't have a need for organizing a bin for those months. And they fit in the bottom of my cabinet perfectly. 

I forgot to take a photo of the inside....but inside I have folders for reading, writing, and math that are color-coded for that month. So in other words, each bin has three colors of folders in it. I love these bins because they fit and hang file folders perfectly (they're old Saxon math containers), so I put hanging folders inside where I placed the centers, books, stickers, etc. themed for each month.

I used sticker paper that I bought at Office Max to print my labels. 

You can get the labels for free at my "Teacher's Notebook" shop. 

Now I have one less file cabinet and three CLEAN file cabinets with space to fill with better and newer creations. 

And now for those of you in school next week and looking for an easy and fun Easter craft.....this is it! My class made these Friday and they turned out fabulous!

Tie-dyed Easter Eggs

1) I used my own egg pattern that I already had and printed on white construction paper. If you don't have a pattern, you could search google images for one or make a solid white one. It doesn't have to have any designs on it. 

2) Let the students choose 2-3 colors of food coloring & have them squeeze 5-6 drops of each color. 

3) Using a spray bottle of water, spray it. The colors will blend and give you the tie-dye look.

4) Hold up and let the excess water run off and lay on wax paper to dry. 

5) The picture doesn't show this, but I also punched a hole in the top of each one and looped a ribbon through it for hanging. 

You can also have your students draw designs or write on the egg first using a white crayon, which is what my student did on the egg on the right.

You can check out my EASTER Pinterest board, to see where I originally got this idea and for more Easter ideas!!

Okay, now for the reason I began this post in the first place.......oh, yea....."Bloomin' Blogger Sunday."  

Put the "Back to Top" arrow on your blog. 

You can try mine out now to see if you'd like to have it on your blog. Just click on the pink up arrow in the bottom right corner. I find it very useful on blogs I visit because rather than having to scroll all the way back up to the top of their blog to find something, I can simply click the arrow and I'm there!

Since this is already such a long post, I'm going to cheat a little and send you directly to where I learned how to do this on my blog. Plus, no need to always reinvent the wheel, right?? 

Click on the button and you will go directly to this tutorial. You will need to scroll down about 3/4's down to the Aug. 20th post. On your scroll down, you're most likely to find some other great tutorials of interest.   

As always, if you need any assistance or have suggestions for future tutorials or tips, please let me know! Happy Sunday!