Five for Friday

Welcome back for another Five for Friday! I'm linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching!

Last Friday was Earth Day and we discussed the lifecycle of plants briefly and did some planting of our own. I'm a hippie at heart so I shared with my class how I save egg shells and started seeds in those. Next year I'll eat a couple dozen eggs and have it be a class project! We have our aqaponics garden though which is a system that recycles water from a fishtank to water plants above in grow trays. The fish waste is actually converted by good bacteria and made into plant food! The plants then suck up those nitrates which cleans the water as it returns to the fish tank. Pretty cool! This is an "EcoLife" system and it fits on a 20 gallon tank. We planted lettuce and pepper.

#kindercameron

The school I worked at previously, but is still near and dear to my heart, posted a challenge on Twitter to be kinder! Hey, I think we can manage that :) I told my class about it and posted everyones name on a sticky note on the board. They then came up to grab someone's sticky and wrote an anonymous note to them to lift them up! I had to snap some of the specific notes because it makes my heart so happy to see what these sweet children write. This was a great class building activity but also met the challenge of #kindercameron. Have your class join the hashtag challenge! Kiddos in Cameron, NC would be so pumped to see it spread!!

I LOVE lularoe and they make for some awesome and comfy teacher outfits! I blogged about this yesterday on this post, Lularoe in the classroom. Check it out if you're looking to spice up your teacher wardrobe!

I seriously may print this out and keep it by my desk! Pretty sure I can be back to my high school weight in a week with this :)

Farm Update!

The hippie in me is a little sad to see the trees go.. but do you know how much they pay for trees?? It might single handily build our barn, and we can't put our house in a forest so bye bye pines! They're leaving all the hardwoods which I'm pretty excited about and also a patch of thick bamboo- we're talking almost the width of my body! I need to get a good picture of that! I plan on putting a hammock in the middle of it :)

That's been my week! Now I'm off to a teacher workday of test training. WOOHOO!

Rock on,

Diana

Lularoe in the classroom!

Anyone who knows me, knows I'm obsessed with Lularoe.. like.. my husband had to have an intervention with me and I'm now on Lularoe lockdown until we do some budgeting haha! It's just so hard not to become obsessed with super comfy clothing that can work for the classroom and for the select few times I make an appearance in public!

If you're not sure what Lularoe is, you can try by doing a quick search on facebook for groups that sell it. It works a lot like Mary Kay or Pampered Chef where you have a consultant that sells the clothes, yet its done mostly online rather than parties. There are some pop up parties that happen, and if you get a chance to attend one I highly recommend it! It's a great way to find your perfect fit and usually things are on sale! A pop up party is how my addiction started.. so be careful!

To show how much I love Lularoe, I challenged myself to wear it everyday for a week at school. This wasn't difficult.. but it also made me realize I could probably replace my wardrobe completely with these clothes and get away with it :)

I shared my lularoe week challenge on instagram- if you have an account follow me @ the_rockin_rowlands or click on this link!

1. Monday

On Monday I wore an Amelia dress. Now, the price of these are pretty steep.. $65. That's why I only have one but I plan on wearing it every chance I get! This dress has a zippered back and it has slight pleating. It also has POCKETS! Yep, favorite part. I was so comfortable all day and I usually don't say that when I'm wearing a dress. 

2. Tuesday

On Tuesday I wore the Cassie skirt and a regular top that I had. The Cassie skirt is a pencil skirt that you can have at knee length or roll up to make it shorter. At school I doubt you want it any shorter than your knees but if you're heading somewhere after school and want it to look a little more flirty go for it! Not for me, I'll stick to my knee length :) Another super comfy skirt. You'll notice I'll say comfy a lot.. This one runs $35.

3. Wednesday

For the middle of the week I was ready to break out the leggings! I'm wearing solid black leggings and an Irma top. The leggings are $25 which is more than I've ever spent on leggings before.. but let me tell you I now have 5 pairs of leggings and I always go for my lularoes before any other brand! They seriously feel like you're wearing nothing... no joke I almost had a heart attack at the Food Lion one day while wearing these because for a split second I thought I wasn't wearing pants! They are pretty amazing besides that scare. The Irma tops go so well with them because they're longer in the back. No teacher can have their butt out.. so Irmas are the way to go! The tops are usually $35, and come in lots of prints or solids.

4. Thursday

On Thursday I was doing an experiment and knew I'd have to move around a lot, so I chose to wear the Maxi skirt this day. I LOVE THE MAXI SKIRTS! They are my favorite piece so far. They have lots of prints and they are very flowy! The skirts are around $42, more expensive than I usually spend but I wear these around the house, to the store, obvi to school, and nights out!

5. Friday

Fridays are usually jeans day at our school, which I have always been a big fan of. However, when I was introduced to Lularoe leggings I couldn't help but use my wild prints as my "Casual Friday" pass! I like to wear solid Irmas with the wild print leggings, because honestly I'm not great with pattern matching. Also, for the warmer weather, the leggings can be folded up to make capris! 

If you think you'd like to try Lularoe I'm going to link to some of my favorite pages to buy from!

Jennifer Watkins is in PA, she's always posting a lot of new inventory!

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1522771548037957/

Jennifer Snyder is who I got my Amelia dress from, she ships things out speedy fast!

https://www.facebook.com/groups/LuLaRoeByJenniferSnyder/

Court Taylor is a parent at my school, and she set up a sale for us to raise money for the playground!! She's all about supporting the schools so I love to support her!

https://www.facebook.com/groups/shopsandhillslularoe/

I hope you check out lularoe, or share some pictures of how you roe!!

Rock on,

Diana

Five for Friday

I'm back with another Five for Friday post, sharing some of the highlights from this week! Link up with Doodle Bugs Teaching to share your week and join in the fun :)

This week we started playing Prodigy for math practice. My students are HOOKED! So many of them are playing at home too- you know that's a sign you've found a good game. A 5th grade teacher at my school told me about it, prodigygame.com and I'm so glad she did! The game is set up like like a video game, where you have characters that do battles and you can buy pets and outfits. It reminds me of Zelda meshed with Neopets from back in my day :) You can assign standards or just set the grade level and they work on what they need. I highly suggest you check it out for your students!

Did you know that if you mix cornstarch with shaving cream you get fluffy playdough??? Well I didn't until about 5 days ago and I saw it on Pinterest. We just finished our unit on Landforms with this fun activity that was a little messy.. I suggest doing it outside if you can :)

The wait is finally over! I've mentioned in a few posts that we ordered giant blue blocks and they took about a month to come in. In the meantime we enjoyed medium blocks that we recieved free through Imagination Playground's referral program! The look on the kids faces were priceless!

We just took the last test of 3rd grade!!!! Well.. except the main test... the dreaded EOG haha. So we finished up with graphing and from now till May 22nd we'll review.

Our farm update is that we're kickin' it up a notch with our soap sales! I started up an Etsy show this week to showcase our soap at https://www.etsy.com/in-en/shop/RandRFarm

I may enlist the help of the photography class to get some fancier pictures of our products, but still exciting to get it up and running and spread the word on our goat milk soap!

I hope everyone had a great week, and enjoys the weekend! I'm looking forward to netflix binging :)

Rock on,

Diana

Five for Friday

It's finally Friday! Whew what a week it's been and I could definitely go for a nap but I'm just glad I made it :)

I'm linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching to share my highlights from the week and I hope you join in the fun too and link up, or share a highlight in the comments!

I've posted about our medium blocks before, but the uses for them just keep coming, that I can't stop sharing them! We recently raised money for a set of Big Blue Blocks from Imagination playground and for referring our school we received a set of medium blocks free! I've shared a few pictures of what the kiddos created in other posts, but this week we made land forms with the blocks to review our science unit. They really had to think about the shapes and important attributes of the land forms to recreate them, so it was an exciting activity to see the learning going on!

We've also been having some fun with vocabulary and we made some games this week to go over the land form vocabulary but also vocab for volume and mass measurements. In this 2 week unit there were 15 totally new vocabulary words! So yeah.. we had to get interactive with those words and we played some taboo and charades! I go into more detail on this blog post from yesterday about our fun vocab games!

We had an art party this week and it was a blast! My students earn points for finishing assignments and at the end of the week they get a paycheck. They're paid $5 a point, so they're usually looking at $100 a week. Well, they can buy a class party for $2,000 and would you know these smarty pants pooled all of their money together and bought one! They voted on an art party and we had fun painting, using pastels, making bead crafts, and origami!

I have a Lularoe addiction and I have no intention of seeking help for this problem. I should be getting this totally adorable Amelia dress in the mail next week. IT HAS POCKETS!!!

I like to make #5 a farm update because my babies are a big part of my life! I was totally cracking up at our fainting goat, Brooks, because he likes to stick his entire head in the hay bin when he eats.

Hope your week wasn't like Brooks!

Rock on,

Diana

Vocabulary on the Fly

I'm a big fan of working smarter, not harder, so as I was planning my unit for volume and mass I knew it was jam packed with vocabulary that we'd need to get a handle on. I wanted to find some interactive games and activities that didn't take me hours to prepare. So here we are, vocabulary on the fly!

Clump & Dump

We played clump and dump this week and it only took me about 10 minutes to write the words on cards. I took some index cards and cut them up (I'm running low on supplies!) and had 15 cards for each of my table groups. On those cards I wrote their vocabulary words related to our math topic of volume and mass. I gave them their "dumpster" of words, now we need to "clump" them into categories. At first I let them choose their own categories, to see how they found them to relate to each other. This was really neat to see the connections they made!

After they worked with their group to clump their words, I asked them to now clump them differently. This time I wanted them to have a "volume" category and a "mass" category. This sort allowed me to do a quick check of understanding. I could have started with this, but I was curious to see what they wanted to categorize them on their own. I heard lots of great conversations of why certain words should go with certain categories. They're talking about the vocabulary words and their meanings! You can't beat it!

Charades & Taboo

Charades and Taboo are already such fun games, adding your own vocabulary words to them makes these games easy to explain, play, enjoy, and learn! For charades all you have to do is have your vocabulary words written on slips of paper. A student will then pick a piece of paper and they must act out that vocabulary word without saying anything! I like to have my students in the audience write their guesses on white boards, so they're practicing the spelling of the vocab and it keeps it from getting a little too crazy.

For taboo, you have the vocabulary word at the top of the card and have 3-4 words of phrases below it that cannot be used to describe it. You could spend some time making your own cards, or better yet, let your students make the cards! They have to come up with the top 3-4 words that describe that vocabulary word. I loved seeing the connections they made to words, like for mountain one student wrote avelanch! I wouldn't think of that one right away, but makes sense! The actual game of taboo is exciting as well because you see students really thinking about the vocab and describing it in different ways than the typical definition. 

Graphic Organizers & Frayer Model

Before you really get into the games, I like to do graphic organizers or the frayer model with my students so they can look at each word a little more in depth. My students know the drill when it comes to the frayer model and draw their own box divided into fourths. The first box is the definition, then an example, then the vocabulary word used in a sentence, and finally a picture. To spice it up from the typical frayer boxes I sometimes let my students create their own graphic organizers. No need to run copies when students create their own sort of map with squiggly clouds, bubbles, or geometric shapes. They enjoy making it their own, but by having it split up into sections they can use each section for a purpose such as the definition, examples, synonyms, non-examples, etc. These activities are very meaningful to organize their thoughts and explore the words in more ways than one. It also doesn't take a lot of time, so you can make graphic organizers on the fly!

If you are fortunate enough to have ipads in your classroom I really recommend the app "popplet". Popplet allows you to make virtual bubble maps where you can type text, make pictures with a draw feature, upload photos from the camera roll or web, and embed links or videos from the web. It's fairly easy to do, so after a quick tutorial your kiddos can be independent and make bubble maps in minutes!

Mini Books

Last but not least, I suggest having a place where your students can keep all of their vocabulary. I wish I had room for a word wall in my classroom but space is tight, so all of my students have their own personal "word wall" or mini vocabulary booklet. In the past I've spent hours assembling booklets with borders, clipart, and fun font. I've also spent 5 minutes getting out paper and told my students to make their own- guess what they liked better? They LOVE to personalize their own booklet, and the fact that it's mini makes it even niftier! They can be made with just paper folded in half or if you can get your hands on some paper bags those can be used for the cover. Those take a little longer to assemble, but the kiddos love the crinkly vintage look they have.

I hope you enjoy these little fun ways to bring vocabulary into your lesson plans! I think the most meaningful games are ones the children help create. It saves you time, but most importantly it brings some higher order thinking to those kiddos by creating it themselves!

Rock on,

Diana