Awards and Daily 5 and Homework freebies!

Thank you to all the teachers who signed up to be part of the Alphabet Letter Exchange. You'll get an email from me next week. I know my class will have so much fun with this!

Thanks so much also to Gayla from Teach On for awarding me the Versatile Blogger and the One Lovely Blog Award. It brought a smile to my face! It's amazing to me how supportive and wonderful you all are. I just love it and appreciate you all!

Today I started thinking that I want some new Daily 5 posters for next year. So I found cute clip art and used Angelia's tutorial on how to change a border into a frame. This is what I came up with.

Designing things like this is new to me but it's really fun! My district has had so much curriculum and put so much pressure on us to have tight schedules that I didn't feel I had room for much else. But as I've gone along and thanks to all of you teacher bloggers out there, I have found ways and reasons to create slightly different ways of working with the curriculum. And I discovered Daily 5 and Math Work Stations to add to what I've been doing. I'll tell you, I'm envious of those of you who still have music and art at your schools. And to have a PE teacher- Wow! That would be a first for me. In our district they've told us the amounts of time we should be teaching language arts, math, and PE, lang. arts intervention, math intervention, and ELD and once it's added up I think we have about 15 minutes left. Keep in mind, that's 15 minutes for students to come in and out from recess, lunch, the start and end of the day, music, art, social studies, and science, not to mention just talking to the kids. Whew! I'm tired just typing that! And a bit aggravated too.
Luckily I discovered blogs and creative ways to teach the curriculum and have been re-energized. I love creating things like these posters and other activities. And sharing them with you!
I also made some homework folder covers to go with my jungle/animal print theme for next year. The pink border will be for the girls and the blue for the boys. You're welcome to them if you can use them.

I'm off to find something to fix for dinner!