Did You Get All The FREEBIES? plus... Dollar Tree Finds & Journal Writing.

You Still Have Time

If you haven't hopped over to all of the blogs to grab your FREEBIES, there is still time.

All of the amazing bloggers from last weekend's Bloggers' Bash in Pasadena have offered some really great FREEBIES.  You can grab yours by clicking right HERE.

At the bottom of each page it will say, "click here for your freebie" so that's all you have to do to get some amazing new "stuff" (I just love that word) for your classroom!  If you like what you see, please follow the blogs.  

One more give-away is coming soon:

You will want to be sure to visit my blog on Wednesday, March 12 for a really cool give-away.  

Many of the bloggers have gotten together to give away a pretty new product that has endless possibilities for use in your classroom.  Once you get your hands on these little gems you won't stop thinking of ways to use them.  I can't tell what it is, but here is an itty-bitty sneak peak:

This is my itty-bitty
sneak peak.

Each blogger will show one or two ways they use this product in their classroom.  I had so many ideas about how I plan to use these little beauties that I had trouble limiting my ideas to only two.  Just wait until you see the bright colors, the shapes, and the great ideas we will be sharing with your all on Wed.  

Here is my Dollar Tree Find of the week:

I spent $3.00 and got one package of 3 Fun Foam crown wands, one package of Fun Foam crowns, and one package of colored plastic jewels so I could bling them all.  The wands came in all kinds of shapes like stars and circles too.

My students are going to LOVE these!
Crowns for our kings and queens are perfect because we just spent 2 weeks focusing on Kk and Qq.

This is what I plan to do with them:

I will glue a label onto each wand and give one each to the first three students who copy their journal sentence correctly.  One label will say, "Captain Capital" and the first student who copies his/her journal sentence correctly will get to be "Captain Capital" and will check to see that each child started their journal sentence with a capital letter.

Here are three I made with star pointers.

One label will say, "Space Cadet" and the second student to finish will check to see that each child is using spaces between their words.

One label will say, "Punctuation Pointer" and the third student to finish will check to see that each child ended their sentence with a period.

This insures that most of the children will bring you a journal sentence that is written correctly. 

Then, when the children bring me their journal, I mark the stars that they earned on their journal page and they color in the stars before they start their table work.  

You can find a great template for our 4-star journal pages by clicking HERE or on the images below.  

I staple 10-20 pages of blank line journal templates inside of a construction paper folder.  

We compiled an entire set of templates.  Click the image to see the download.  

This template has large blank lines.

This template has a sentence starter build in and large lines.

This template has a starter and smaller lines.  It is more suitable for first grade.

There is also a page with blank, small lines.  The best part is that you get all four templates + more.  I love using these journals for copying sentences on Monday-Thursday.  

I plan to use the larger blinged crowns for math.  I'll blog about that later this weekend.  I've gotta get some sleep.

See you all tomorrow.

Now, go get your FREEBIES.  :)

Palma