Monday Madness Sale! and Freebie!

Hello,
   I am throwing a sale on my Theatrical Thanksgiving Experience product from tonight until Thursday. 20% off! I also want to spread the love to my readers, so here is the deal:
    This product is really geared more toward third grade, but it works AMAZINGLY with collaboration. So, if you can collaborate into getting a third (or up) teacher to comment and mention YOU in the comment, I'll give you BOTH the product for FREE!! So get collaboratin'! First 2 to comment win. Remember, the comment has to be written by a third or older teacher, but make sure they mention you, too!
   Have fun!!
Here's the link so you can check it out! Theatrical Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving Experience

Hello,

    I feel like this year is flying by! Two weeks until Thanksgiving… What?!?!?I will need to do a mass update soon! This year has been so amazing. My kids are just the sweetest, and they are catching on so well to everything we do. Is the fourth year the year you hit your stride? I just feel really good about it.

I’m loving Common Core, and especially the Curriculum Maps made by our county. Everything is focused on what they students should be able to know, understand, and do at the end of a unit.

Writer’s Workshop is going well, too. I have some great writers! We are studying Day of the Week books to move them away from simple sentences to stories. So far our mentor texts have been The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Mrs. Sato’s Hens, Cookie’s Week, Seven Blind Mice, Lola Loves Stories, and Today is Monday. The kids are noticing what they author does, and emulating their own stories. Next week we’ll start publishing them!!

I have been working on something for a few weeks that I wanted to share. I had the idea a long time ago in college when I took a children’s theatre class. We wrote diary entries and acted out the Oregon Trail. This summer at the ISI, we looked at using diaries to integrate writing into Social Studies. That sparked the idea to make an interactive Thanksgiving Experience. For the past two years I’ve done a “crossing over on the Mayflower” experience that includes cramped spaces, loud storm noises, and squirting children with water!! So I took that lesson and expanded it. Now it’s a whole week’s worth of videos, drama, and writing. I am very proud of it, and I can’t wait to collaborate with another class and share it with my students! It works better for the firsties if we collaborate with an upper grade.

Each child gets a historical character who was really on the Mayflower (I learned so much doing research for this project!) and they follow them from the journey over to the first Thanksgiving. There are also videos to watch each day to inspire and inform. Hopefully, the kids will get really into their characters and absorb tons of facts along the way, too. If they can imagine it, they can learn it!!

Here’s the link to my Teacher’s Pay Teacher’s store where you can purchase the Experience. Pass it on to your upper level social studies teachers!!

Now I think it’s time to break out the peppermint ice cream… Hooray!!

And here is a freebie I made a while ago about apples. Late, I know, but never to late to save for next year!