Winter Center Winner

It’s Friday, so you know what that means.  It’s FINALLY time to announce the winner of our Winter Center Giveaway.  Thank you so much to everyone who entered.

Congratulations to . . .

If you didn’t win, but would still like to have all three sets of our winter centers, then head on over to our TpT store.  Every item is on sale today through January 1st.

And . . . be sure to check back with us on January 1st because we have a BIG giveaway in store for you that we know you will not want to miss out on.  

Winter Center Giveaway

We’ve got lots of exciting giveaways in store for you in the the upcoming weeks.

The first is a complete set of all our winter themed centers.

You can check out everything that is included in this giveaway by clicking on these links . . .

Smitten with Mittens Math & Literacy Centers

Freezin’ Season Math & Literacy Centers

Penguins on Parade Math & Literacy Centers

Here’s what you need to do to win this complete set of winter centers . . .

Make sure you are one of our blog followers AND post a comment.

For additional entries you can:

1.  Blog about this giveaway and then post an additional comment with a link to your blog

2.  Become a follower of our Made For 1st Grade store on TpT.

3. You can also become a fan of us on Facebook and then post a comment.

Best of luck to all of you.  We will announce our winner on Friday.

Winter Words & Product Update

We have just finished up our {new} set of Winter Word of the Day worksheets and posters.  We tried to include a variety of words that could be used throughout the month of January.  If you have any specific word suggestions we would L-O-V-E to hear from you.

  

Product Update

For those of you that have purchased our Penguins on Parade Math & Literacy Centers we have found a slight formatting issue with the 4 in a Row Punctuation activity.  The file has been updated on TpT so head on over and make sure you download the revised copy.

For your convenience here are the 4 cards that we reformatted.

click {here} to download the corrections

Happy Holidays

We would like to send some fun holiday wishes your way.  What better way to do it than with a Jib Jab song and dance.  So, to all of our new friends in blogland . . . this ones for you!!!

click {here} for a special Christmas wish from us

In all seriousness, we really do wish we could send every single one of you a special Christmas greeting.  You continue to amaze us with your feedback and online purchases.  We feel truly blessed to be part of such a positive online community.  We are inspired each day by the creativity and dedication to the profession of all the other teachers out there who create and share their resources.

So from our families to yours . . . Merry Christmas!!! 

As a little thank you for all of your support this year . . . we would love to share a Christmas and winter themed print with you that we created.  You can save them as pictures to your own computer and upload them to your local photo printing shop.

They look really cute if you print them as an 8x10 and display them in a black frame.

    

Super Saturday {and Sunday} Sale

We made it!!!  After an exhausting three full weeks of  Christmas themed fun we spent the last few minutes of the day yesterday getting our classrooms cleaned up {thanks to a few containers of Clorox wipes and 22 sets of little hands} and our kiddos safely loaded on the buses to begin 18 days of Winter Break!!!  It almost seems to good to be true!!!

In honor of Super Saturday . . . we wanted to pass along some savings to you.  We will be running a sale in our TpT store through the end of the day tomorrow.  Every item has been discounted 20%. 

Grinch Day

Tomorrow we will be seeing {and wearing} green!  We’ve got lots of fun activities planned for our kiddos that all center around the book How the Grinch Stole Christmas by Dr. Seuss.

For those of you that have a Grinch day planned, too . . . here are few freebies just for you.

The first one is a problem solving book.  Students will cut out the Grinch themed word problems and glue them in their booklet.  Then they will draw a picture and write either an addition or subtraction number sentence to solve each problem.  click {here} to download a copy

We also have a very simple 11x17 writing page that you can have your students use to write complete sentences about what the Grinch was like at the beginning of the story and at the end of the story. 

        

click {here} to download a copy

We will be using it as a follow up writing activity after we brainstorm a list of describing words that tell about the Grinch.  This is a little {sneak} peek at the ones we created last year.  We will encourage students to incorporate these words into their super sentences.

Penguins On Parade

We really hope you are all surviving these last few CRAZY days with your kiddos before Christmas break officially begins.  We’ve got two more fun filled days left . . . not that we’re counting or anything!!! 

This has been a very busy week for us so far.  We spent Monday & Tuesday doing lots of fun reindeer themed activities.  Not only did we talk about Santa’s magical reindeer, but we also learned lots of interesting facts about real reindeer.

Here’s a little peek at jut a few of the things we did . . .

Then today we did lots of Santa themed activities.  Our favorite, of course, was making the adorable New and Improved Santa art projects again this year.  The kids had so much fun being creative with all of our Christmas scrapbook paper.  Thanks Cara Carroll for coming up with such a cute activity last year!!!  We absolutely LOVE it!!!

Tomorrow we will all be dressing in our pj’s and taking a ride on the Polar Express.  Then we will end the week with a fun filled day of Grinch activities.  We promise to post a few pictures and some freebies later this week.

Now onto some January news . . .

We’ve been hard at work getting everything ready for when we return from Christmas break.  So for all of you teachers that like to stay ahead of the game like us, here’s your first look at our newest set of centers called Penguins on Parade.

Here’s a little {sneak} peek at everything that is included in this new set of centers . . .

Don’t Miss Out

 

Long Vowel FUN

When we return from Christmas break our kiddos will finally launch into decoding and reading words with long vowels.  To supplement our reading curriculum we have created a series of activities called Long Vowel FUN that we can use each week as we introduce a new long vowel sound. 

This 95 page unit includes (8) cut and paste real/nonsense word sorts, (8) cut and paste sentence scrambles with missing punctuation and capitalization to make the kids think, (8) rhyming word production worksheets and (8) decodable word games that can be played in small groups. 

It is the companion to our Short Vowel FUN and Short Vowel FUN {set #2} units that many of you have been using along with us this year.

Freezin’ Season Math & Literacy Activities

Our new set of Freezin’ Season Math and Literacy Activities are now available in our TpT store.

Here’s a little {sneak} peek at all of the activities that are included . . .

We have received lots of requests for a thematic January calendar.  Here’s a look ahead at what we have planned for our own kiddos . . . hoping there might be a snow day in there somewhere too!!!

As you can see we have one more set of winter themed centers to finish up {Penguins on Parade}.  We hope to have them ready for you VERY soon!!! 

Then for all of you Kansas teachers who are following along we will share a few of our favorite Kansas themed activities.  It’s going to end up being a short week for us because we have parent/teacher conferences on February 1st and 2nd . . . hard to believe, right???

Smitten with Mittens Giveaway

Thank you so much to everyone who entered in our latest {Smitten with Mittens} giveaway. 

We are happy to announce that the winner is . . .

Smitten with Mittens

Tonight we are completely smitten with mittens {and our fuzzy blankets, pj’s and slippers} . . . maybe it’s because the temperature has dropped here in Kansas and we can hear the wind howling outside our windows.  May be a bad day for recess duty tomorrow!!!

Last night we finally put the finishing touches on our newest set of math and literacy centers and got them posted in our TpT store.  We are planning to use them when we return from Christmas break to go along with all of the Jan Brett literature that we always love to read.

Here’s a little {sneak} peek at all the math and literacy centers that are included in this set.

Smitten with Mitten Math & Literacy Centers

We are BIG believers in choosing a few skills to teach at a time . . . and teaching them well.  This is reflected in each set of our centers.  We use them as building blocks each week.  The consistency in format also makes things run smoothly with our kiddos. 

At this point in the year {January} we expect our students to be able to . . .consistently spell short vowel words with blends and digraphs, begin sorting long vowel (with sneaky e) and short vowel words, put words in ABC order, arrange words to form a complete sentence and be able to write the sentence applying proper capitalization and punctuation, sort real and nonsense words, write and solve addition and subtraction math problems up to sums of 18, identify odd and even numbers, order numbers to 90 and count sets of tens and ones.

Bundle up everyone and stay warm!!!

We would also like to invite you to leave us a comment about something you are {smitten} with right now and we will enter your name in a giveaway for a free set of these new math and literacy centers.