I am very late on my posts!

Ugh there is not enough time in the day to do all I need or want to do!  I need to post more and now that I am done with my reading classes I hope to do that!  One of my professional resolutions for 2014 is to post more on my blog, create more products, and to be more organized!

So let me go back....here are pictures from our Holidays Around the World event! We had a blast!

The students rotated tables during their travels and put a stamp into their passports

We then got to sample food from some of the countries.  One of my students is from Greece and her mother cooked so many treats for us to try! There were delish!!

We then traveled to Israel and played the dreidel game with marshmallows and M & M's

To end the week, I used this GREAT product from Happily Ever After Education-they are foldable characters and I had the class make a list of what they wanted for Christmas in Spanish.  We practiced  using Spanish vocabulary and writing lists

Excuse the craziness of the Enoboard.....it looked much better before I left for vacation!

Here is the link to Happily Ever After Education's product-she has great stuff:

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/FREE-Fabulous-Foldables-HolidayWinter-Characters-1010651

I also used her Gingerbread around the world unit that is a FREEBIE as my bulletin board display for the month of December. The kids loved it!  It comes with a parent letter as well with websites to use!  

So when we return, we are working on Bossy R and visualization! I have two great products for Bossy R-

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Arrgh-Shiver-me-timbers-All-about-the-AR-708363

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Bossy-R-Bump-Games-955268

I love treaching about r--controlled vowels and there are sone GREAT YouTube videos-I put those on as the students transition from centers to reading or even during snack!  

For visualization, I have been searching for good read alouds or shared reading stories to use with the class.  My fellow teachers found this great book called If and we used it last year! it was a hit with the classes.  We read a page and did not show the pictures.  The students then had to pick one of the pages to illustrate and they created an illustration of what they thought the sentence would show.  After they created their picture, we showed them the real one-they did very well with this activity!

This year, I went around Pinterest, other teacher blogs, and Google and found more poems and read alouds to use, such as Where the Wild Things Are, A Bad Case of Stripes, Piggie Pie, The Gruffalo, Imagine a Day, and Catallina Magdelena (Tedd Arnold).  I only have the first 2 books so I have to either go to the library to borrow them or purchase them STAT!

I also found a poem that is great for visualization-My Neighbor's Dog is Purple by Jack Prelutsky...I translated it into Spanish to use with the class on our Spanish days!

I go back to school on Thursday but they are calling for some nasty weather on Friday so I am kind of hoping for a snow day..I could totally use the day, seeing as how many of the surrounding districts don't go back until the 6th - I still have a lot of work to do in my house!!! 

I created a New Year's Pack with 3 different activities-visit my TpT store and check it out!

Happy New Year!

Alyson Hennessy