Five for Friday 2/13/15

It's Friday the 13th, Valentine's Day (early/at school), and I'm exhausted from this week. Thank you, Kacey, from Doodle Bugs Teaching for creating your Five for Friday linky!!

Here's what my past week looked like. (Really, I need a Fifty for Friday to cover it all, it's been that busy!)

We are reading Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli, and I'm REALLY focusing on the theme of kindness. It's nice that we're reading this during Valentine's week, but we will continue with kindness activities, discussions, and acts after this week. 

We created "Be Kind Mobiles," thanks to More than Elementary. You can find those here for free! I will keep these up until we finish reading Stargirl, but they are a great (in your face, in a good way) reminder to be kind to one another all the time!

I am working on a great big Summarizing Activity pack. This is the skill I have been working on with my students for the past few weeks. Plus, this is something we're really focusing on with Stargirl!

Be on the lookout for my new activity pack. I will announce on Facebook before next Friday about a giveaway. You could win that pack for free! :)

This is a picture of some of our Stargirl chapter summaries!

I am also working on a new math product for TPT. It's a first for me. I don't teach math every day, but I am tutoring a student in math right now. We use Saxon textbooks and materials here at our school. Our students need a fundamental introduction to many skills in math, so this program is an incremental approach, but sometimes these kids just need a bit lot more practice on certain skills. I am making a multiplication word problem packet. But it is different. I wanted this student to know that we're working on multiplication (and X word problems), but I wanted to challenge him to think further and to see that there are different ways to get one answer. (He really struggles with that.) That is what my product will be. They are some fun task cards, if I may say so myself. He's having fun with them during our tutoring times! :)

I will also be giving some of these away next week. Be sure to check my Facebook page for more info!

My technology students have been working on hieroglyphic alphabets and secret messages these past few weeks. This week, they wrote a Valentine's message. We used Microsoft Word - we are working on multiple skills with this project: typing skills, cutting, pasting, columns, and formatting pictures. We used Computer Teacher Solutions' "Creating Hieroglyphic Alphabets--MS Word Activity for Grades 4-8." My students have LOVED working on these. They took a while, but they were really focused on them. They made the projects truly their own! Notice that some of them used cars while others used current pop culture icons! I didn't take a picture of all of them, but some used superheroes, some used animals, and some used candy! Each one was totally unique. 

I know the pictures are not the best quality. Sorry! :(

Last but not least, it's (pretty much) Valentine's Day at school. I don't have a homeroom, so I wanted to do something with my literacy class, but they are all 7th graders and older kids don't really want to have a Valentine's party. Soooo, I found some fun Valentine's Minute to Win It games on Pinterest this week. 

On Fridays, we buddy read with one of the 1st and 2nd grade classes. So we just played the games with them. I partnered up my big kids with one or two of the little kids and they were a team competing in the MTWI games. I found the games we played on "Featuring Your Sassy Sites." We played the Heart a Stack game, where you stack the conversation hearts, the Candy Corn Stick Up" game where you bite off the ends of the candy corns and stack them around a plate, and the Marshmallow Toss. They loved it! It was a simple Valentine's celebration!

That's all that I will report on for now! Happy Valentine's Day everyone! :) Have a great weekend!