Mahalo and Sensational Students

Aloha friends!  How is everyone feeling after the Cyber Shopping frenzy!!  I love shopping and when there are no crowds, it's even better!!  I bought some fabulous items on TpT that I can't wait to use in my classroom.  I plan to post all the fabulous goodies as soon as I get to use them!!

I just want to give a big Mahalo to all of you who purchased any of my items!  I am so appreciative of all of your support and the wonderful feedback that many of you left. I am truly honored that you chose my items and I love that teachers far and wide are using them in their classrooms!

I also wanted to thank all of you for the wonderful math ideas.  I was amazed by all of your responses and  ideas.  I am planning on implementing a Math Workshop next semester.  That will give me time to study up a bit more and read more blogs/books about it.  For now, I picked up some great supplemental items in the TpT sale to help me with my little math whiz!

I  wanted to share a little activity with you that I did this week in my class.  We have been working on parts of speech and the kids have nouns down pretty well, but adjectives are still giving them some trouble.

I decided to use our Writer's Workshop time to write some Acrostic Poems.  I started out simple and just decided to use our names.

We pulled out the Thesauruses  and Dictionaries and I let the kids get to work.

They loved looking through these and coming up with new words.

Many of my higher students found some great words and were so helpful to some that were

having a harder time finding words.

For those who were having trouble or writing words that didn't make sense I kept using this sentence

"Child's name" is so _____________.

So when they wrote down a word like "fire", I would say " Oh, Jeff you are so fire."

Of course they all giggle and then Jeff would go back and find a better describing word.

I was really happy with how well their poems came out!

I was so excited to get them all hung up and they were just as excited to share what they had written.

I honestly helped only a few students who were struggling with this activity.  The rest was all on their own, with the help of the dictionary or thesaurus.

I created the templates that they wrote their final copies on. There are 3 different templates.  If you would like them you can grab them in Google Docs.

I can't believe we only have 2 weeks left until our Winter Break!!  I need to get crackin' on our holiday gifts!!  What are you planning for gifts this year?  I would love to somehow incorporate these poems, but I haven't quite made up my mind!  Ideas are always welcome:)