I Hab a Code

Summer cold, oh how I hate you. Why do you ignore me all summer, when I can sleep and rest and lounge? Why, oh why, do you come to stay the two weeks before school starts?

Stuffy, sleepy, congested, miserable.

To make matters THE WORST, I took Nyquil last night to see if it would clear my sinuses. M.i.s.t.a.k.e.

Silver lining: better today than two weeks from today.

The Novice Blogger #3 - time delayed posting

Staci (a.k.a. Miss Squirrels) from over at Going Nutty in First Grade tipped me off to this super cool option in Blogger.

(this is how I picture her at Christmastime)

You can time delay a post to publish later, automatically.

Think of the ramifications. The time saved, the panic averted.

I'm not even writing this up on the day I am going to post it. Sneaky shenanigans!

This is how it works.
See the list of options under post settings?

Click on Schedule. Select "set date and time". Choose the day and time you want your post to publish!

Want to know a secret? I think this is how the Super Bloggers roll. My suspicion is that they write up a bunch of posts, polish them, and then set them to publish during a time when they know they will be too busy to write. You, too, can roll like the big dogs!

Monday Made It

Oooooh, my favorite time of the week! A big shout out to Tara at 4th Grade Frolics her

marvelous Monday Made It linky!

There is a reason everybody is doing them.....

I couldn't resist making birthday pencil toppers. 

Here is what I needed:

• bin ($2.50 Target Dollar Aisle)
• florist foam ($2 Dollar Tree)
• Pencils ($2 Dollar Tree)
• Mod Modge
• tape
• printed and laminated pencil toppers
• printed bin label

Total Cost: $6

1. I Mod Podged the bin label to the front of the bin

2. I glued the florist foam into the bottom of the bin

3. I taped the pencil toppers to the pencils (on the back!)

4. Then I stuck the pencils into the foam, like a bouquet

Voila!

Now I know you are dying with curiosity about the mustache in the frame. It's a singing mustache card. We had given one to my Olivia for her birthday, but she wouldn't give it up to me. I bought my own at Target for a whopping $7. $7 for a card?! Only for a singing mustache would I pay that kind of money. 

I tore the back off the card. Then I put some 'stache scrapping paper in the frame without the glass. A few dabs of glue later and THIS is what my kids will get to play on their birthday (no regular old "happy birthdays" in my room, no sir).

Because I am a happy mustachio I am throwing this out there for free for all my mustachio-ed friends. 

Because, really, who doesn't want to have a Magical Mustache Day?

The Novice Blogger #2 - comments and links

This one took me for-EVAH to figure out. I actually went out and scoured the web looking for the answer.
(yes, like I put on my coat and grabbed an umbrella and went out to scour the web. The internet has obviously become a very real for me.)

How does one get their blog link to  show up in as a signature in comments?

See how below my name it says the name of my blog? That's a hyperlink to my blog. Just in case someone wants to come visit me, see who this weirdo commenter is.

I thought for sure there was some setting, but I could never find anything. Since signatures happen to be such an important thing for us bloggies, you would just think that Blogger would have some built-in widget that makes it all super easy. Not so much.

But it really isn't hard. Here's what you do.

When you are finished writing your comment and have signed your name, you copy and paste this into the comment:

<a href="http://peacocksandpenguins.blogspot.com/">Peacocks & Penguins</a>

But....don't leave it like that. Unless you want everyone to think my blog is yours. To fix that, you change peacocksandpenguins to your blog name. It breaks down like this:

<a href="http://peacocksandpenguins.blogspot.com/">Peacocks & Penguins</a>

The part in red should be your blog address. The part in blue is what you want the text to say.
And that is how you get a hyperlink to your blog in your signature in comments.

I keep the tag on a post-it on my desktop. That way I always have it available to copy and paste.

Just double check your work when you are done, so that if you ever need to go back and take a screen capture of one of your own comments for a blog post, you don't get something like this:

Ta-da!!

B.Y.O.O. #2 - B.ring Y.our O.wn O.rganization

Now if only my laundry could organize itself.

Curriculum and Cupboards

Let's start with some perspective. This was my counter last year. Look at how gross it looks. 

I showed you my ugliness in hopes that my swan-ness while shine ever brighter when you see my pics below (No! Don't Peek! Shenangins!)

It's not so bad, right? Except that those bottles of green juice had been sitting there 2 weeks. 2 WEEKS! And that stack of paper? Like, months. 

How many times have you had to dig through cupboard after cupboard, swearing under your breath that "I know I put it in here!", while a colleague stood by and waited for you to find what she needed to borrow?

That is the story of my life. 

Before brand-new-chances, that is.

When I inherited my brand-new-chances classroom it was delightfully empty. In this photo you can see the few things that are in the room, and they are actually mine. 

But look closer. Look in the bottom right hand corner. Those are boxes of curriculum. From storage. They were all brought down for me. All? "But," you say, "there are only 7." well, the boxes were like an iceberg. You can only see a small portion. The rest is hiding off camera, waiting to take me down. Like the Titanic.

There were 20-some boxes in all. Just curriculum. Boy, 4th grade sure does teach a lot of stuff!. It needed a home.

Goal: To have things *findable* in my classroom. No Map Required. No digging necessary.

Objective: Teaching materials have a home

• I started by checking the cupboards to make sure any last little thing had been taken out.
• Next I opened boxes and made piles. Math over here, writing here, social studies there.
• I threw out the stuff that looked like junk. (This later was cause for dumpster diving.)
• I looked at my piles, and then at my open cupboards. Piles, cupboards. Piles, cupboards. It was like a tennis match.
• When I knew where I thought things should go, I marked each door with the subject. There would be no mistaking where things were going to live, and I wouldn't accidentally put math where writing should be.

It was easy to stick things in the right cupboards. But what about the right shelves?

I labeled those, too.

(I am almost vibrating with glee just looking at these pictures!)

Everything was put away. I wanted anyone who came into my room to be able to find what they needed. I made labels for the cabinets, and then for the shelves.

Boy, looking at these makes me feel all tightened up like a squirrel. I've never been so organized EVER. '

This may seem like a little thing, and it is. But little things eventually add up to big things.

Soooo.......FREEBIES for you!! 
Ahem..let me clear my throat and put on my best Vidal Sassoon voice.

"Don't hate me because I'm beautiful. These too can be yours, dahlings."

Teachers Pay Teachers is an excellent avenue for sharing the items we all create. I love that I have a website store that was so simple to set up, and is straightforward and easy to post items.  Interested in sharing or selling your own items on Teachers Pay Teachers? I'd love to see you there! Please use my referral code if you decide to check it out! https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Signup/referral:bhmathews

Here's a plug for the newest blog I'm following. 

Think for a moment.....how nice would it be to be able to laminate at home? Seriously. Raise your hand if your school laminator is a dinosaur. Raise your other hand if it requires all kinds of begging, pleading, petting, complimenting, pulling, pushing, and swearing. 

Problem SOLVED. Check out Sara from Swimming in Second. She is doing a {drum roll, please} LAMINATOR give-away! Now rush on over and get yourself entered!

The Novice Blogger #1

A-hem.*cough* ((((blush))))

Hello, my name is Heather and I am a novice blogger.  ("Hello, Heather....")

It looks so easy, right? Right. I read through tons of blogs, and it looks so simple. All these gadgets and tricks, am I right? Buttons and links and signatures.

Shhhhhh, lean in close. I'm going to tell you a secret.
It really is kinda hard.

But I'm here to help. The blind leading the blind.

Check out what I learned today?
And this is with a big shout out to Amanda and Jenny. Make sure you run along after reading this post and say "thanks!" to them for enlightening me and in turn you.

No-Reply Blogger.

That's what they called me. As in, "shhhh, I think she might be a no-reply blogger."

How would I know? Well, it's easy to tell once you know what to look for. When you leave a comment on someone's blog they might reply back. It's a friendly and polite thing to do. But will you ever know that they replied back? If you are a No-Reply Blogger, then you might never know. How awful! All those sad, lonely words, floating about in cyberland with no way to find their intended.

Want to know if you are a No-Reply Blogger? Really, it's better to know since you can fix it.
It's like having head lice. It's embarrassing when you find out, but everything is a-ok when it's gone. So head over to Teaching With Love and read this very enlightening and problem solving post.

Really, it's like one of those electric combs. Just turn it on and your problems are solved.

Math Centers and Intervention

The Common Core has got us all thinking through smaller lenses in math; we aren't used to thinking in strands and breaking them down into manageable elements. I am so excited as states start to roll out expectations for the Common Core in math. Here it is, the expectations spelled out for us in detail.

We use Everyday Math; the newest version is aligned to the common core, so we are lucky in our district. As a math committee, we have been breaking down the units and lessons - "unpacking" they call it. It's been like seeing this overwhelming picture broken into puzzle pieces. We can see and appreciate each small piece as it fits into the whole.

Give me a "heck YEAH!" Let's saddle up those ponies and race out into the frontier. We have a map now to help us see where we are going.

There was so much good information and inspiration at the RtI conference I attended last week in Lake Geneva. One of the biggest "a-ha"s I had was the need for students to have a deep and foundational understanding of the numbers 1-10 (let's just let zero rest for a minute). In order to do higher level operations, kids need to have  good fact fluency. One of the ways to strengthen the relational understanding of numbers (and in turn fire up that fluency) is to play with them, and play with them hard. Take those numbers out and explore them with activities, games and videos. Before asking kids to memorize what 8+8 is, make sure they know what numbers add up to 10 (I call this "making 10"). If they know that 8 + 2 = 10, they can jump to the idea that 2 needs 6 more to make 8, so if they add 6 to 10 they have 16.

It's an amazing thing to watch kids do this. Check out this video of kids doing mental math from Singapore math. Think it's impossible? I've seen kids do it here, too. How do we get them to this level? A deep understanding of making tens and place value.


I just love this. It makes me all tingly inside.

A little extra time each day devoted to making 10 can make an enormous difference.  This is a great opportunity to hit it hard with math centers; the learning is purposeful and goes deep.

I created this math kit with that spirit in mind.

There are activities with ten-frames...

Math stories....

Counting-on games...

and Flip cards...

To reinforce each of these activities is a short and fun video. There are a total of 4; to sneak a peek visit my facebook page. I have a little giveaway going with comments for the video.

Here's the snag in this item: because the files were just over the maximum file size I had to split the kit into 2 parts. I halfed the cost for each part of the it, so you are paying the correct whole amount when you purchase both halfs.  Go here for part 1, and here for part 2

What are you doing this year to strengthen math fact fluency? I want to hear about it!