Monday Made It!: Guest Blogger Guidelines, Birthday Flowers and more Shelves

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Painting the small shelves in my classroom lead to my next project.  I took one look at the larger shelves and decided they needed painting. In my hurry to get done I forgot to take pictures of the before look, but trust me when I finish the last bit on the back of one they will and do look a tone better.

My second project involves my class blog. I really wanted each of my students to have their own blog, but our district isn't ready to undertake this. My solution is to have my students take turns being guest bloggers on our classroom blog.  I created guidelines for them to follow and example posts for them to look at.  Click on the picture below to get the guest blogger guidelines. Check out my class blog (Happenings in 4S) the week of August 19th to few sample posts.

My last project is that I created the birthday flowers that I will give to my students. I bought the foam flowers at our local Alco store. I would guess you might find them in the dollar bins at Target. I write the students name and birthdate on them with sharpies and tape them to fun pencils!

Monday Made It: Shelves, I Charts, Tag Team Revising, and Math by Myself

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The first project I completed this week, looked like this in the beginning:

With some elbow grease, patience, and help from my beautiful daughter it looked like this in the middle:

And here is the final product:

I am implementing Daily5 in my classroom this year, so I decided to put together I Charts for each of the rotations. Click on the image below to download them:

I have been reading up on teaching writing and looking forward to making some changes in how I teach writing. I found a cool idea for peer revising in an old issue of Bookbag Magazine, tweaked it to fit my needs and here it is:

I created several activities to be used during the Math by Myself rotation. The set includes some addition, place value, and multiplication. They would work great with strong second grade math students, at the end of the year for third grade and as review at the beginning of fourth grade. Click on the image below to check them out:

Have a great Monday! Enjoy what's left of your summer!

August Currently!

I can't believe it is time to link up at

 for the August currently.  Here goes:

Listening: Yes, I am a crazy cat lady! My husband and children gave this to me for Christmas and I love it. It is so quiet in my house this morning that it is the only thing I here. I am loving it!

Loving: I love having things planned and ready to go!

Thinking: I have been on this computer too long to day.

Wanting: We are going on a short vacation the weekend before I go back to work and my oldest heads of to college (for the first time, sniff!). I am so ready to go but don't want to time to go by!

Needing: If I don't get my classroom put together I am afraid I want enjoy our vacation.

1st Day: I am ready and exciting, yet I am not ready!

Don't forget to link up. For a refresher on how to create your own Currently and the three rules check out the post at Oh Boy Fourth Grade!

Jazzier Version of Word Work Activities and New TPT Store

I put together a jazzier version of the word work activities that I shared for Monday Made It this week and created a Teachers Pay Teachers store.  Check them both out at by clicking on the image below:

Techie Tuesday: Technology Tip for the Newbie Blogger

Hello, all! I am linking up at Technology Tailgate for

Yesterday I wanted to link up with Monday Made It hosted by 4th Grade Frolics. I had tweaked some word work games and created some homework menus and wanted to share them. I inserted the links for all of my shared google documents and thought-Wow that looks blah! I decided it would look better with pictures of my documents but wasn't sure how to do that. I new they need to be jpg format to insert them to my post, but wasn't sure how to do that. After a bit of searching I discovered how to convert PDFs to JPGs.  Here are the steps:

1. Download your google document as a pdf. Go to File: Download as: PDF

2. Find an online PDF converter.  I used pdf2jpg.net.

3. Click on Choose a PDF file and find the file you wish to convert. Open the file and then click the Convert PDF to JPG button. 

3. Click download and then proceed to insert your newly created JPG document.  

I also learned as I was putting together this post that hitting command+shift+3 will take a screenshot! You learn something new everyday! Have a great Tuesday!

Monday Made It: Word Work Ideas and Homework Menus

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I was surfing Pinterest looking for ideas to use with my fourth graders during word work time.  I stumbled upon these two ideas from the Monday Made It! host 4th Grade Frolics.  One is Word Work Scrabble and one is Word Work Word's Worth.  I tweaked them a bit and made one of each for spelling and vocabulary. Click on the picture to get a copy.  Enjoy!

I also created vocabulary and spelling homework menus which include the above activities.  Click on the pictures to grab a copy. Enjoy!

Check out my Word Work board on pinterest to see where I got many of the activities I included on these.

http://www.pinterest.com/dsunderman/word-work/

Structure of a Writing Conference

This summer I read "How's it Going? A Practical Guide to Conferring with Student Writers" by Carl Anderson. If you have not read this and need guidance on conferring, I highly recommend it.

One thing I found very helpful in this book was his explanation about how to structure a writing conference.  I took his structure and created a cheat sheet that I placed in my literacy conferring notebook, so that I can refer to it as needed.  Here is the link to it, feel free to use it, share it, or tweak it to fit your needs:

http://goo.gl/jhQRL1