Tracking Back In

Doodlebugs Teaching Blog Linky Party

Hello Everyone!  

On Monday, our students track back in to begin the second quarter of the 16-17 school year.  Teachers went back this past Wednesday for an off-calendar (paid) collaborative planning day then 2 regular word days on Thursday and Friday.  Our team really got a lot done on our planning day!  We planned out 2 math units and 1 reading unit to get us started.  For my daily math lesson plans, I visited

The Owl Teacher's TPT store 

and purchased her Multiplication and Division Math Workshop unit.  This product is amazing with its scripted lesson plans and engaging activities.  I'm new to teaching 3rd grade and this is the first time I've ever taught multiplication from the beginning.  The lessons in this unit are organized and easy to understand.  Multiplication is taught by using different strategies and the lessons are set up to teach and explore a strategy per day in the beginning.

I like using interactive notebooks in my class and needed things to go along with the math unit.  I don't have the time right now to be thinking up everything myself, and anyway, why re-create the wheel?  I found an excellent companion to the multiplication and division math workshop unit at the

 Not So Wimpy Teacher's TPT store.  

I was able to marry interactive notebook elements with the lessons to make a perfect combination for teaching.

Once I have taught the multiplication strategies, I want my students to have opportunities to practice memorizing their facts.  I developed several games and activities to put in my "Fact Fluency" math station.  You can find these activities at my

Full Moons & Friday Afternoons TPT store. 

"Multiply Your Fortune!" is a set of "fortune tellers" or "cootie catchers" for each set of facts.  This type of activity was such a big hit with my students for learning geometry terms, I thought I'd give it a shot for multiplication facts.

Click HERE to get to the SALE!

Our school had professional development this morning on Project Based Learning. 

 PBL

I would love to get feedback from anyone who has developed and/or taught any  PBL units at the elementary level.  What do you like about it? What do you dislike about it?  What is the most challenging part about PBL?  Please leave feedback in my comments.

Until next time,
Happy Teaching!

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Post Hurricane Matthew

Doodlebugs TeachingFfive-forFfridayLlinky-Party-October-14th.html

Hi-dee-ho everyone!  

1 ) It has been a long trying week in eastern North Carolina dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Matthew which brought record breaking flood levels.  The schools in the county where I live (Johnston) will be out of school for 6 days.  Many people are still without electricity. Many areas have a boil water alert due to so much untreated waste water dumped into the rivers and tributaries.  Many roads have been washed over and even collapsed.  New bus routes are being drawn to work around the collapsed roads.  The Neuse River in Kinston is predicted to crest tomorrow and much of the town is already under water.  

2) Look at how fast the water is moving in the creek behind our house.

The link above links to my FB page, so I'm not sure if you'll be able to see it, so here are some photos:

 3) My family was without electricity from Saturday until Tuesday. We lost two refrigerators and two freezers full of food. The creek water behind our house rose to the back yard, but fortunately did not cause any property damage.  We are some of the fortunate ones.  My family is usually prepared for the once or twice a year ice storms so we pulled out the propane gas powered camp stove, the candles, and the flashlights.  Fortunately for us, a cool front moved in behind Matthew making it comfortable to open the doors and windows in the house and not have to run the air or the heat. My husband cooks most of the meals and he won't let something like no electricity stand in his way.  We had spaghetti and homemade sauce for our first hurricane picnic supper.

4)  After power was restored we had to look for food.  Friends on FB had been posting which stores had newly stocked cold foods or didn't.  My daughter works for a grocery store and it was still closed after three days.  On Wednesday we ventured out to our super Wal-Mart to see what we could find.  There was one tub of our preferred brand of pimiento cheese and one bottle of our preferred coffee creamer so we grabbed those.  The rest of the dairy, meat, and frozen foods areas were pretty well barren.  While we were at the store, a dairy and frozen food truck came in and an announcement was made for all available employees to help unload it.  Here is just one of the freezer cases. Keep in mind this is 4 days after the storm had passed and power had been restored just the day before.

5)  On the up side, I had enough battery power left on my lap top on Saturday and Sunday to make some fun stuff for my students.  On Monday and Tuesday we found an open Sheetz station and charged all of our devices and my daughter did her chemistry homework.  There I finished the second activity.  Get more information about these and other activities at my Full Moons and Friday Afternoons TPT Store which is mostly about third grade.  Visit my Primary Mathemagic TPT Store for grades K-2 math activities.

Please keep the victims of Hurricane Matthew in your thoughts.  There are so many who have lost everything and this nightmare is not over for them.

Happy Teaching!
~Gwen

Multiplication Puzzles
What does one do when one cannot sleep?  Why, create, of course! I'm declaring FREEBIE FRIDAY and here is a  FREEBIE for you.  It is a set of puzzles like the ones pictured below that include all of the doubles multiplication facts through 12 and the twos multiplication facts through 12.

This activity includes a variety of representations including equations, arrays, groups, and repeated addition. This activity would be great to use in a teacher directed small group of students.

Make the puzzles self checking by writing the equation on the backs of all of the puzzle pieces and then place in your math center or station. I hope your students enjoy these puzzles!

Visit my Full-Moons-And-Friday-Afternoons TPT store for more!

Happy Teaching!

~Gwen

October 4, 2016 "Fortune Tellers and Cootie Catchers"
The first quarter has come to an end for Track 4.  We are on a year round schedule and right now I am loving being off work for almost 3 weeks in October.  Our last math unit before track-out was geometry.  In third grade, much of geometry is learning vocabulary.  I first introduced a TIP chart which would serve as an anchor chart.  TIP stands for Term, Information, Picture.  After a whole group session, students began working on vocabulary pages for their math interactive notebooks.  It wasn't the best design, so I will be working on that later this week.

Rather than handing out worksheet after worksheet for vocabulary practice, I thought about making fortune tellers.  The kids love them and are always making them on their own for things such as predicting who Janie will marry or how many children Rhea will have.  I searched online for a template as it had been about forty years since I had made one of these things and luckily found Lou's designs here "Cootie Catchers" templates.  Her editable template was easy to customize for my geometry vocabulary activity.  I must say it was a hit with the kids.  I have never seen kids "study" so much.  They would get their fortune tellers out for morning work, after finishing classwork, even instead of doing Daily 5 (oops, I had to stop that,).  I even "caught" some of them sneaking a peek inside their desks when they should have been working on something else or reading to self.  WOW!  I've never seen such engagement!

Click the activity's cover page below to get your FREE "Geometry Terms Fortune Tellers" activity.

I'd love to hear how the fortune teller activities worked out with your students.  If you love them, then check out  my TPT store for multiplication facts fortune tellers called "Multiply Your Fortune!"

Until next time,

Happy Teaching!

~Gwen

September 25, 2016
The week before last we had a full moon.  It showed all around the school.  I was so ready for the weekend.  This past Friday afternoon at 2:45 our kindergartners had their annual Teddy Bear Parade. At 9:15 AM the assistant principal announced during the morning announcements that the parade would be at 2:45.  My students went berserk with excitement. Only, they misunderstood and thought the assistant principal had said 10:45 AM.  So, at 10:45, several students interrupted class to announce that it was 10:45 and that we all needed to go sit in the hallway for the parade. How much learning do you think really took place from 9:15 to 10:45 in anticipation of this event?  Hmm.  I had to break it to them that the parade would be at 2:45. Disappointed, they went back to work.

At 2:45, our class has specials.  We were on the way when we heard clapping in the near distance.  Here comes the parade, the little cherubs pulling their sweet little stuffed animals in or on adorable homemade parade floats.  They parade up and down each hall in the building.  Precious.  Absolutely precious.  All of the other kids sat lined along the walls in the halls and clapped in admiration as the little tykes showed off their toys. Thankfully, I wasn't one of the teachers who had to teach for that last 45 minutes of the day.  Thankfully, it was my planning time-2:45 on Friday afternoon.

I made the 3rd vocabulary development activity using prefixes.  This time the prefix is "a-" with three different meanings.

Click here to buy this activity. I included a page of the words and the headings for a word sort, but I think I'm not going to use the sorting activity this time.  The sort is typically by the different prefixes.  This time there is only one prefix and the sort is by meaning.  The kids would not be able to do the sort unless there is a direct instruction lesson or they know the meanings of the words already.  This time, I'm going to have the kids do the puzzles first and concurrently fill out the word chart with the word, the prefix and its meaning, the base word, and the definition.  After that, they can use their word charts with definitions to help them complete the fill-in-the-blank sentences activity. It is my hope that between the definitions on the chart and the context clues in the sentences, students will be successful with this activity.

You can try a similar prefix activity for free by clicking here.  Try it out and let me know what you think.

Happy Teaching!
~Gwen

9-17-16
Teachers Pay Teacher Store Opening!

I am excited to share that I have opened my TPT store for Full Moons and Friday Afternoons. Click here: Full Moons and Friday Afternoons TPT Store .  The first activity I posted is a sample pack for 3rd grade morphology, prefixes il, im, in, and ir. Check it out for free!

Before beginning my mini-lesson, I prepared a chart with words that I planned to use to introduce these prefixes.  As we discussed each prefix, I added the appropriate prefixes, in a different color, to the words, discussing the chameleon prefixes im, il, and ir.  I wanted the children to see the distinction of the prefixes and the words.  So many times when they are reading and come to an unfamiliar long word, they try to guess the word rather than chunking it up. This is the reason I included the activity in which the students have to break apart the prefix from the word.

Chart for Mini-Lesson

After the mini-lesson, students worked in groups to assemble the words on a puzzle mat.

Assembling the Word  Puzzle

The first trial of this activity did not include the fill in the blank sentences or the "definition in your own words" section on the chart.  It was "Back to School" night and I didn't have any student work posted on the hall wall.  Quickly I pulled out some construction paper and drew grids with the following headings:  "word, prefix, base word, definition, definition in my own words".  As students entered the classroom that morning, I put them in groups of fours, gave them a word puzzle, and had them work on completing their chart.  The result is the work that went on the hallway wall. From that experience, I developed the chart to be a component in their interactive notebooks.

Making Morphology Chart

I actually thought about the "definition in your own words" first, but then realized that without context, students wouldn't know how to construct their own meaning.  Even if we used the words in sentences orally, there would be some with whom the meaning would not stick.  Out of this realization was born the idea of the fill in the blank sentences with context clues.  Students have to underline clue words in the sentences that help them decide which affixed word to use to complete the sentences.

In the regular sized packs, there are 24 words for each lesson.  Depending on your students, you may want to spread the lesson over 2 or 3 weeks instead of doing everything in one week. Available now:  Prefix Puzzlers il, im, in, ir and Prefix Puzzlers non, dis, un.  Stop on by my TPT store to check them out!

Happy Teaching!
~Gwen

Welcome!

Welcome to Full Moons and Friday Afternoons, an account of the goings-on in my third grade classroom-the good, the bad, the ugly-well, maybe not so much the ugly.  I've been teaching since 1988, but this is the first year I've taught third grade. There will be learning moments, trials, triumphs, and disappointments. 

We teachers do what we do because we love what we do. Three days of chaos, then it hits us.  How could we not have realized it sooner?  We know, without a calendar, when the full moon is nigh. Yet amid the monthly ritual of craziness, we persevere in our quest to nurture and educate.  I want to share my journey through third grade through "Full Moons and Friday Afternoons" in hopes that you will be entertained and maybe even be inspired.  

Being new to a grade level means I don't have lots of "stuff", you know, center activities, anchor charts, words for a 3rd grade word wall, etc.... I have been perusing Teachers Pay Teachers and have found some wonderful things to get me started.  I, too, like creating fun things for my students and as we begin new units of study, I will be sharing.  

In the meantime, if you have needs for K-2 math activities, hop on over to my Primary Mathemagic TPT store and check it out. Happy Teaching!

~Gwen