Cyber Sale on TpT!

Hey y'all! Can you believe Thanksgiving is already over?! My sister and I both live in Austin, and we went to North Carolina to visit our mom. The three of us always have such a great time together. My mom and sister are two of the most understanding, generous, and thoughtful people I know, and my heart is full after getting to spend a week with them. We did a little shopping, spent some time with my grandmother (she moved into an assisted living facility in February), and did a little wine tasting.

My sister, mom, and me.

My mom also pulled out a bunch of old cards and school + artwork that my sister and I had sent our grandparents over the years. My sister discovered this spelling test I took in the second grade:

She and my mom just about died laughing at the irony of how I got a 100 on a spelling test, but spelled the word 'spelling' wrong. Glad I've since learned how to spell that word right now that I'm a teacher! :)

On Thursday, we went to Charlotte to have Thanksgiving dinner with the rest of my mom's family. My cousin John got married in March, and his wife Sarah's parents also came down for Thanksgiving. On my mom's side, there are only four grandchildren, and we're all close in age, so we always have a blast playing games and catching up whenever we're all together.

My lovely family!

I didn't get back to Austin until late Friday, so I've been working like crazy to get things done before the weekend is over. I've gotten a lot of work done at home, but I'll be heading up to my school this afternoon to get a few things ready for tomorrow. I've also been preparing for TpT's giant Cyber Monday + Tuesday sale! Starting tomorrow, you can take 10% off your purchases from TpT if you use the code cmt12 at checkout. I'm joining in with a bunch of other bloggers and TpT sellers to offer an additional 20% off everything in my TpT store. (PS - I decided to start my sale early, so everything in my store is already discounted!) I just uploaded another new font (this one's called Bita, named after my crazy kitten), so be sure to check it out as well as all my other fonts + products before this awesome sale ends on Tuesday!

I've got a bunch of awesome products on my wishlist, so now I've just got to fill up my cart so I can jump straight to the checkout line tomorrow on TpT!

Have a great afternoon, and don't forget to support your fellow teachers by cyber shopping on TpT tomorrow and Tuesday! (Many thanks to Ashley for the cute button!)

Turkey Time

Hey friends! Before Thanksgiving comes and goes, I wanted to share a few of the things my kids have been working on this week. We just began learning about author's purpose, and to help the kids learn more about what it means to persuade, I read I Wanna Iguana to the class. We talked about how persuading someone means you are trying to convince them to do, think, or feel what you want them to do, think, or feel! Then I told my kids that they were going to have to convince me that I shouldn't eat them for Thanksgiving, because they were going to pretend they were turkeys! They had to write a persuasive story from the turkey's point of view to convince me, the reader (and the eater!) that eating them for Thanksgiving isn't such a great idea. Some kids suggested I eat something else as my meat (like chicken), some tried to convince me that they were small, so they wouldn't be as delicious as a bigger, fatter turkey, and one student even told me he thought turkeys evolved from humans, so eating a turkey would basically be like eating a human! I love it!



One student's final draft. So cute!

We've also just started a unit on money, so I wanted to find a way to incorporate finding the total value of a collection of coins with Thanksgiving. I found inspiration from this pin, and my kids created turkeys using pattern blocks. Each pattern block had a coin value, and the kids had to calculate how much their turkey's tail feathers were worth. Their creations turned out so cute!

 

 

 

 

This was my example. Below is the record sheet I used to calculate the total value of my turkey's tail feathers.

 

My students had so much fun with this, so I thought I'd share the record sheet with y'all in case any of you want to create these with your class! You can pick up a copy of the record sheet for free here in my TpT store. If you grab a copy, please let me know!

 

Only two more days until we have a week off! I can't wait - I'm going to North Carolina with my sister to see my mom and her side of the family, and I'm looking forward to having a little down time before I come back to school. I can't believe it's almost December already - how has the year gone by this fast?! At least that means the Holly Bloggy Christmas Exchange is coming soon! I loved participating last year, and am looking forward to doing it again this year! Have you signed up? If you don't know what I'm talking about, click here to read more about it and sign up!

 

Have a great day, friends!