The Pencil War

Last year my very expensive electric pencil sharpener died. It wasn't old age or a terminal illness. My sharpener was a victim of involuntary manslaughter. One of my lovelies thought it would be good to sharpen the eraser end of a pencil. Hmm... that didn't quite work out.

So, this year I decided no more sharpening for the kids. I would handle it myself. Well, you probably know how that has turned out. I never realized how often these children break their pencils. You just don't know until it's brought to your attention every single time it happens. And then there's the issue of losing them, leaving them all over the room during centers, chewing the erasers off, smashing the metal end into a deadly weapon. Pencils are a real problem! {I'm not dramatic, am I?} There has got to be a solution to this.

Enter the best idea for teachers EVER...

 

First of all, it's FREE, so keep reading. Mrs. Hazelton of The Wise Owl came up with this idea and it's brilliant. The idea is that you give each student 8 sharpened pencils and an eraser on Monday and they have to be responsible for them all week. There's more to it than that, of course, but it's pretty simple to implement and it works. I started using it right after Christmas and I have not heard one peep, not one, about someone's pencil in over a month! 

Now I don't know Mrs. Hazelton. This is not a biased review or recommendation. It's something I found, tried, and love. So, go check out this freebie for yourself. I'd love to hear if it works for you too.

A Tale of Two Tattlers

Once upon a time, in a quiet second grade class, there was a little girl and a little boy who just couldn’t get along. The little boy liked to annoy the little girl by making faces and in return, the little girl called him names. 

For six long months, these little children carried on making faces and calling each other names. And in between, they filled their teacher’s ears with the most incredible amount of tattling anyone has ever heard. In fact, had there been an award for World’s Most Prolific Tattlers, these two certainly would have won.  Nothing, not even the dreaded turning of cards, could stop them.

Then finally, on a bright winter day in February, something happened… something went horribly wrong.  The little boy and the little girl, engaged in their usual battle of faces and words, tattled one time too many. As the words, “Teeeeaaaaacher, Joey stuck out his tongue at meeeeee!” came rolling towards the teacher’s ears, smoke began to rise from her hair.  Her eyes bugged out of her head. Her face turned a strange shade of purplish-red…

Ok, so that last paragraph hasn’t actually happened yet. It could though, it really, really could. Have you ever had such a bad case of whining and tattling in your classroom that you thought you might not survive the rest of the year? Well I found this poster online and am going straight to the laminating machine tomorrow morning. This great poster is going to hang right smack in the middle of my chalkboard. Please, oh please, let it work!

Sunday Super Sale

If you're looking for some fresh ideas or new products to use with your class, be sure to visit TpT's Sunday Super Sale this weekend!  You can get up to 28% off of everything. I can't wait! I've already filled up my wishlist with things I want to get.

Here are a couple of items I'm planning to buy...

 

And one of my own that I'm hoping to sell...

What items do you have your eye on?

February Fun Linky

I really like teaching during the month of February because there are a lot of fun seasonal activities you can incorporate into the curriculum. On February 1, we have an in-school field trip to learn about Native American life. I'll tell more about that later when I have some pictures to share. Of course there's Valentine's Day and Groundhog Day and the Superbowl that add some excitement to your lessons. If you have something fun you like to do with your class in February, link up at the bottom of this post!

Here are a few things I like to do...

This is a fun math activity to introduce the idea of area and perimeter. We don't really teach area in second grade, but I like them to understand what it is because it will be a skill in third grade. This activity using candy hearts (or any other small candy) is a good introduction using non-standard units.

 

Here's another math activity using candy hearts. Students arrange them in an array. This is where I introduce the idea of multiplication. I have them write down how many hearts are in each row. Then, they do repeated addition to find the total. I have them hide their answers and let them take turns telling me how many rows and how many columns they have. They are always amazed that I can immediately tell them how many hearts they have. It's gets them excited to learn multiplication.

I also do Valentine heart graphing, addition, and estimation activities, Valentine's Day letter writing, abc order, and a fun word search. All of those activities can be found in my Valentine's Day Mini Pack:

Super Teacher Giveaways!

Well it's back to work on Monday and I have to say, I don't really want to go. I have thoroughly enjoyed two weeks of sleeping in. I don't think I'll have any trouble retiring when the time comes (but that's a loooooong way off). So, as I was looking around for some school inspiration, I found this fantastic giveaway by Hilary at Rockin' Teacher Materials. She's giving away an entire flash drive full of resources! She doing a giveaway for every grade level, K through 5th. So hurry on over and enter. I won a blog giveaway just last month and what fun it is to get free stuff!



And while we're at it (I'm just in a winning kind of mood), I just discovered that Teacher's Notebook is giving away a tablet (your choice of mini I-Pad, Kindle Fire, or Nook). You can enter every single day. How awesome is that? 



Good Luck!!