VEGAS!

Wow, where to begin this post...

I have been back in Texas for two days now, after a fabulous trip to Vegas for the first ever Teachers Pay Teachers Supercharge Sellers Success Conference!!  I am definitely so thankful that I was able to attend and so excited about all of the connections I made and new friends that I met!

I arrived on Wednesday afternoon after some flight delays in Austin.  I went straight to the hotel to meet my new roommates!  Did I mention that none of us had ever met in real life before Wednesday??  We all knew of each other's stores and blogs and are members of some collaborative Facebook groups together, so it was fun to meet in real life!  And as it turned out, 4 of us were from Texas!  We were running around too much and I think this is the only roomie picture we got-

That's Cheryl from Crayons and Curls, Farrah from Mrs. Shipley's Classroom, me, Natalie from Teachery Tidbits and Chrissy from Buzzing with Ms. B!  All such sweet, sweet ladies!!

The first event on Wednesday night was a huge teacher/blogger meet-up put on by the two ladies of What The Teacher Wants.  It was crazy and loud and so much fun!  We definitely need a larger room next year!!  I was overwhelmed by it all but still managed to grab pictures with some great teacher friends!!

Tanya from Journey of a Substitute Teacher, Amy and Lisa from All Y'all Need, Deanna Jump from Mrs. Jump's Class and Grace from First Grade's a Hoot.

Jenny from Luckeyfrog's Lilypad, Rachelle from What The Teacher Wants, Cara from The First Grade Parade and Erica from Erica's Ed-Ventures.

On Thursday I woke up early to check out the gym at the Venetian (gotta keep up with my #jigglefreejuly friends!).  It was awesome!  Totally like a real gym, not just some dinky room with some treadmills!  I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, everything in the Venetian (and Vegas) is over the top!

We spent Thursday roaming around, checking in for the conference, picking up some show tickets and getting lost in the hotel.  Who am I kidding- the getting lost part happened every day!  That place is huge!  We had to take two different elevators to and from our room and I'm still loopy from it all!

On Thursday night we went to the Beatles Love show at The Mirage.  It was awesome!  It was my first Cirque de Soleil experience so I was just trying to soak it all in.  There was soooo much to look at, though!

Friday was the TPT conference.  It was a great experience just to be in the same room with so many like-minded teachers and bloggers!!  We had some amazing Keynote speeches from TPT's founder Paul Edelman and our most famous seller, Deanna Jump.  Both brought tears to my eyes, and just about everyone else's as well!

The sessions were great, some more basic than the others, but I learned A LOT!

Oh!  And I met Kristen from A Teeny Tiny Teacher!!  I was so excited!!!  I love her!  Here she is with me and Chrissy.  And yes, she really is teeny tiny- she's standing on her tiptoes in this picture!

selfie with Paul!

with Vera from The Tutu Teacher, she used to live in Austin and it turns out that we had our weddings at the same place!

Since this was the first conference and the first time we've really met everyone, Rachel from Minds in Bloom and Michelle from The 3AM Teacher organized and created a fabulous gift for Paul, Amy and all the other staff members of TPT.  Michelle created beautiful collages of many seller logos and they turned out so great!!  Rachel presented them on Friday and it was so amazing to be a part of that moment.

It's been fun reliving the week all over again!  If you want to read more about it from other fabulous bloggers, click the button below to hop over to A Burst of First.  There are a ton of great stories over there!  And you know, as they say, What Happens in Vegas...

Second day at the conference- what I learned from Rachelle Smith!

Happy Friday y'all!

We had a SNOW DAY today (with very little actual snow!) and I only changed out of my pajamas to go to lunch!  We came home and I'm back in my pjs as we speak!

 
Yes, our poor cactus plants are now dead.  This has been a colder than normal winter in Austin, and these guys just couldn't handle it!  They really were big and green and beautiful once!  On the plus side, today has given me time to finish my post with more details on everything else I learned at the SDE First Grade Teacher Conference last week!  It really was a lot of fun!

If you missed my post about our blogger meet-up, be sure to click here to read it!  I also posted about the amazing Reagan Tunstall right here!  She gave an amazing presentation about math centers and she blogged about it on her fabulous blog.

On the second day of the conference, I attended 3 sessions given by the awesome Rachelle Smith from What the Teacher Wants!

 

Rachelle teaches first grade and had tons of great ideas to share with us!  Her first session was about Guided Reading.  She shared this awesome resource for organizing her kiddos into their Guided Reading groups.  I love how easy it is to move students from group to group as the year progresses.

She also has a great resource for ideas about what to do with students at each level and she shares it for free on her blog!  Click here to check out her post about Guided Reading and to grab that freebie.

She shared this adorable picture of her in first grade- look at that bow!  So cute!  :)

Her second session was about Behavior Management.  Rachelle talked about 3 important aspect for great management- Routine, Procedures and Expectations.  One routine she had was for her Fast Finishers.  You know, those kiddos who always finish everything right away and look to you for something else to do?  She uses picture clues on her white board for her Fast Finishers, so it saves her the heartache of saying over and over "Go read a book" or "Go do a puzzle".  The kids are trained to look at the fast finisher spot on the board when they are done and the picture is right there!  Some of the choices she uses are-

   read a book

   marker boards

   ABC games

   math games

   puzzles

   fast finisher folder

   file folder games

She posted about it on her blog here.  I really liked the idea of the fast finisher folder and I made some of my own pages for my students to use!  I'm going to laminate them and have them available for each student to write on with a dry erase marker.  Just click on the picture below if you'd like to download the pages for free!

I also loved an idea Rachelle suggested for organizing math materials.  She creates a math tub for each student that contains 10 cubes, number cards, beans, number line...anything math related that they might need to use during centers or math time.  She assembled a kit for each student inside a plastic tupperware container.  That way, each student has their own inside their desk and they're not having to get up and walk all over the classroom to get what they need.

This idea was easy for me to put into my classroom right away!  I didn't go out an buy 22 plastic containers just yet, but I did already have enough baskets to make a set for each table.  I put 4 number lines and 4 sets of cubes along with some dry erase markers and literacy resources that I want my kids to have easy access to.  It's great! 

One last management tool I loved was her great ideas for lining up.  Cleaning up from centers and transitioning to lunch or Specials can sometimes be a little hectic and those are two things that we do not want to be late to!!  :)

Rachelle showed us some adorable videos from her classroom of different types of "walks" she does with her class as they line up.  Sometimes they do a "syllable walk" and she calls out words as they walk/stomp our the syllables.  Other times they do a "soldier walk" and they count by tens.  We walked our spelling words yesterday and my kids loved it!  I just called out a spelling word and they walked the sounds in each word on the way to their spot in line.  Super fun and it keeps them engaged while they are transitioning.  She also uses some goodbye rhymes with them once they are already in line.  Here's a post about them on her blog and another from Cara over at The First Grade Parade.  You gotta make every minute count!

Before I get to her last session, here's a picture of me with Rachelle and Katie from Following My Heart to First Grade!  Both of them are super sweet 1st grade teachers!!  It was so fun to meet them in person!  Katie and her team came up from a town not to far from Austin and they were all such nice people!

Last up on my stalker tour of all 3 of Rachelle's sessions was Journal Writing!  She shared the way she does journal writing in her classroom and gave a lot of tips for creating stronger writers!

She uses journal writing for her "bell work" each day.  The students get started on their journal when they come in.  At this point in the year, the journals consists of writing paper with blank lines.  Each student has their own journal, but the size and number of lines is differentiated for each kiddo.  They are allowed to write about whatever they want.  When she introduces her journals at the beginning of the year, she gives her class a different sentence stem for the first 9 days.   The stems are usually get-to-know-you sentences, based on favorites, "My favorite movie is..." "My favorite drink is..." "I am afraid of...", things like that.  After that, she lets them write about their own topics, but has established lots of expectations for how journal time will work.  (write independently, sound out words, use writing tools, capitals, punctuation, finger spaces, etc)  There is a space for an illustration on each journal page, but that space gets smaller as they number of lines increase throughout the year.

Once they get the hang of the journal writing, she does daily conferences with them.  Her kiddos bring their journal over when they are done and they read her their post for the day.  She always starts off with a compliment about their work.  Then they quickly identify together any errors or things that could be better and the student goes back to fix them.  Once they are all done, they read it to her again and are able to do a fast finisher choice once they are finished.  She also does weekly conferences that are more in depth, but I definitely like the idea of a quick daily check in about everybody's writing!  Rachelle also makes time for 4 students to share their journal entry each day.

Our school is making a big push for writing practice/stamina this year, so I might start doing daily journal writing after Spring Break.  My kids write every day in our writing center, but I like the freedom of doing daily journals where they can pick their own topics.  Rachelle has her year-round journal in her TPT shop and it's next on my list to purchase!

I learned so much during the conference and am so glad that I went!  I've been teaching for 8 years now, but still love finding new ideas to put into place!!  If you ever have a chance to see Deanna, Reagan or Rachelle speak at a teacher conference, I highly recommend that you go!

Now I'm off to enjoy the rest of my 3 day weekend!  :)  Did you have a snow/ice day today?

Second day at the conference- what I learned from Reagan Tunstall!!

Hello Again Friends,

{So I started this post on Tuesday night right after the conference and then this thing called SCHOOL happened and I haven't been able to sit with my computer since then!  Now that it's Friday, I can finish all my random thoughts about what all I learned!}

I just finished up the last day of the conference and wow, did I learn a lot!!  I attended 4 sessions today by 2 great presenters and I can't wait to implement some new things in my classroom!  I really am excited and hope that I can keep my enthusiasm going for the last months of school!

I started the day with a math center session given by Reagan Tunstall.  If you don't know Reagan's blog, you MUST visit it today!  She always has the greatest math ideas!  Definitely a must-read!

   

One idea she shared I would totally use for counting on and making addition sentences.  You take a pipe cleaner and wrap an address label around it.  On that label, you can write any number you'd like.  Then you have task cards that say "Add 3" or "+5" and the students add that number of beads onto the pipe cleaner to get the sum.  So if they take the pipe cleaner that is labeled with a 6 and then pull the card that says "Add 3", then they put on the beads to get 6+3=9.  Throw in a recording sheet and you've got your self a math center!  She also has this great post about using pipe cleaners to make number bracelets. 

She went through the organization of her math time and, even though I do mine a little differently, I still really liked seeing hers! You should definitely check out this post about the way she does Guided Math in her classroom.

 She had a great game idea for these cute little rubber duckies, where the kids pull two, read the facts and see if they have matching sums.  So cute and I know my kiddos would LOVE it!

Another great idea was to take large foam dice and cover them with whatever concept you are learning at that time.  I can think of lots of ways to use these in a center- students could roll one cube with the regular dots and then roll another one with +2 or +3 or +6 and write addition sentences...they could roll a cube with shapes on it and graph the number of times they rolled each shape...they could roll the digital times and then make those on an analog clock...the list goes on and on!!

She had so many great ideas and has so many on her blog (including this post about her Math Sticks) and her presentation was just awesome!

The rest of my day was spent stalking listening to Rachelle Smith and I came away with even more awesome ideas!  I went to three of her sessions (Guided Reading, Classroom Management and Journal Writing) so I think I'm just going to have to dedicate a whole 'nother blog post to everything I learned!

Happy Friday!