Friday Journals

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Reader's Notebooks

This post has been moved to my new blog, The Colorful Apple.  Check it out here!

Popcorn Letters!

I've been working with some of my students on letter recognition and letter sounds.  I decided to make it a little more fun and interesting.  I found this cool popcorn container at Target (hellooo Dollar Spot!). I created some letters on pieces of popcorn and put them in the container.  The students pull out a card and tell me the letter/sound.  I even through in some blank ones and if they pulled that one, they got to skip a turn (woohoo!).

Here they are:

Check it out!

You can pick up your copy in either of my stores:

{TpT}

{TN}

Santa Clause Came!

Ok, he didn't.  It's October.  But my kids were convinced.  Everything was about Santa today for some reason.  I didn't want to tell them that they still had over 2 months until he made an appearance.

We received our pen pal letters today.  I have an aunt who teaches second grade in California and we decided a few years back to have our classes be pen pals throughout the year.  It's so awesome and the kids love it.

We got our first set today and I hadn't mentioned it to my student at all.  So I showed them the package that it came in (which my aunt always decorates and I forgot to take a picture of!) and asked them what they thought was in it.

"Letters from Santa Claus!"

Um.  Nope.  Sorry kid.
And since when does Santa write letter to children?  I thought it was the other way around?

Anyway, we moved on and started writing our letters.

I created this poster to help my students understand how to set up a letter:

Get it here for free!

While we were writing our pen pal letters, a large box was delivered to my classroom:

This box with such a pretty bow, prompted students to shout, you guessed it, "Santa Clause came!"

Nope.  Sorry kids.  That's a birthday present for Mrs. S.  

This is what the inside of the box looked like:

Yummy cupcakes!  My brother dropped off 6 of my favorite flavor for me and my friends.  He is a pastry chef and he works for a company called Sweet Indulgence.  Yeah, he makes cupcakes and candy for a living, how awesome is that??  Check them out - they make ahh-maazing stuff!  My IPhone photo does not do it justice!

Sooo, 2 Santa Clause shout-outs in one day?  It's going to be a long two months till Christmas!

And now I have blog news.  Every once in a while I check my blog stats.  I am always curious which posts get the most attention and where my readers are coming from.  This helps me become a better blogger!

More often than not, my readers come from Pinterest.  Today, however, a lot were coming from this site:

I had never heard of it before, so I checked it out.  I then realized that they did a whole blog post on one of the posts I had written - so cool!  Check it out here.  It is my most popular post and it is about using dancing to teach subtraction.