Linky Party!

Here's to our first Linky Party to debut our blog! Tunstall's Teaching Tidbits is hosting this Linky Party and the cold weather and mid year hump has us ready for a Hall Pass, too!!

P - Right now, our favorite product is our St. Patricks Day Missing Factors Multiplication FREEBIE!!! Since implementing the Common Core, the importance of having a true understanding of numbers is super important.  Plus, we love to plan ahead so having a St. Patrick's Day activity makes it even more fun to do!!

A - My favorite area in my room has to be my "Achieve" sign above my Book Nook (of course I edited the Book Nook because it is rather messy right now!!) It is my favorite because I point to it consistently and remind students how important it is to do their personal best.  We set personal goals and celebrate when we ACHIEVE our personal goals! I have to share - we are setting a personal goal of gaining followers on our blog! We hope to achieve it soon :-)

S - Our school wide signal for transitioning is "Give Me 5!"  Eyes on the speaker, Ears are listening, Mouths are closed, Hands & Feet still, focus on the directions.  We do differentiate and modify in our school for our younger friends with Give me 3.  This works so well when we have assemblies and our principal raises her hand to show her 5; students follow and raise their 5 and act accordingly!

S - We all have our ways to keep sane in school!! Lots of coffee and energy drinks are very helpful! But the biggest sanity for us is creating and improving our lessons.  And by improving, we mean: Making it Cuter!!  Luckily, we all work together and having friends at work certainly helps us maintain our sanity!!

~July

Visualizing Fun!

Our strategy lesson we were working on this week is VISUALIZING! The kids always enjoy this because they like to draw pictures :) We started off our lesson by discussing that visualizing was like making a movie in your head when your book does not have pictures. We read the book Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs (love that book!) and at certain pages, I just read the story, and the kids had to draw what they visualized the picture to be. They loved doing this, then comparing it to what the actual picture looked like. (They especially love the page where the giant pancake covers the school, and syrup flooded the town, they had great pictures for these!) 

We also practiced visualizing with our current novel we are reading... How To Eat Fried Worms :) We also made a visualizing bulletin board. (Scroll down to see the picture of the board!) I took a picture of each student with their current free reading book, then let them draw a picture of something they visualized while reading it. I love reading strategy bulletin boards because they have a daily reminder of the skill every day when they look at it! Click here to download the visualizing bubble if you would like to make your own! 

Since we are just starting out our blog, I am also going to link to a visualizing worksheet and poster you see on the bulletin board here for you for free! This is a part of a set of Reading Strategy Posters and Graphic Organizers  in our TPT store! 

Download Free Visualizing Poster and Worksheet!  (Click on the blue box that says "Click here to start download")

And now I need to do some shout outs for things I used on that freebie set (and so many of our other products!) These sites are great! Check them out My Cute Graphics From The Pond Sweet Berry Patch


<3 Kristen 

Hello Everyone!

Hi everyone and welcome to our blog! Bear with us, as this blogging stuff is brand new to us! There are so many great, creative blogs out there, hopefully we will work up to that point! To introduce ourselves, we are KNJ Kreations (Kristen, Natalie, and July). We all work at the same elementary school and are also great friends. Kristen is a 3rd grade teacher and Natalie and July are 4th grade teachers. On here we will be posting things from our classroom and other exciting things! Our Teachers Pay Teachers Store is KNJ Kreations - feel free to check it out. Thanks for stopping by :) 


Kristen, Natalie, and July