It's the first day of my summer break and I'm celebrating by getting my new planner all up to date for next year. Total teacher brain still in high gear over here. I wanted to share my new planner with all of you. I am in love with this gorgeous personal planner from April at A Modern Teacher!

It's just so beautiful and functional! I can not wait to use this next year.
 I love the little sayings throughout the planner!
 There's a two page monthly calendar that is perfect for scheduling important dates and events. Each  month has a tab that makes it super easy to find what you are looking for.

I  also love that larger planning calendar pages are included. I do most of my planning day to day online but these long term/overview pages make it so easy to jot down topics and big ideas for the whole month.

 In the back of the planner you can record important information. Contacts, birthdays, and I especially love these note taking pages. I've always used a binder but it was big and clunky to carry around and I never ended up taking it to meetings because of that. I am super excited to be able to grab this and go to our meetings this year and have all my notes in one place!

Of course a new planner calls for new pens! I love these bright colored Flair Pens from Paper Mate. They make writing in my planner so much more fun!

If you are in the market for a new planner I think you'd love this one! Go on over to April's blog for a better look at just what you get! They sold out fast but will be available again on July 17th, make sure you sign up for April's Newsletter to get all the details right in your inbox. In the meantime you could win one right here. Enter using the rafflecopter below.

a Rafflecopter giveaway Thanks for stopping by! Hope you all have a wonderful weekend.


We love our moms! They are amazing and we wanted to celebrate them so we had a fun little celebration for them yesterday. Our classroom looked so good with bright colored table cloths and some flowers to brighten it up.




We made them necklaces.I took a picture of each student with a sign that said I love you mom, printed it 1" by 1". I used modge podge to adhere it to the back of these glass tiles. I added a bail using E6000 craft glue and we put them on ball chain. I got a spool of chain from Michaels and we cut it into 20" pieces. This made 15 necklaces and we had a lot left over. They turned out so cute and our mom's loved them!

We also made cards. Again I took pictures of the kids holding a sign that said "I love you because..." we put these on the front of the card. Inside it says "Top Ten Reasons I Love You" and they each wrote ten things about their moms. Adorable! They are all so unique and I love the things they came up with. We wrapped the necklaces in these little favor boxes I got at Dollar Tree, they were in the wedding stuff. They were just plain white so the kids decorated them.


Finally we made a video. I recorded each of them saying what they loved most about their mom and clip them all together in imovie on the ipad. It was the sweetest thing. The moms loved it.

It was fun to watch them interact with their mothers! We had a great time. I am so glad I took the time to make this day special for all of them.How do you celebrate Mother's day with your class? I'd love to read your ideas!
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I can't believe we are already working our way through May! We only have 13 days of school left in this school year, time has flown! It's been a busy couple of months. We've published books, completed a unit all about animals, taken a field trip, and celebrated Mother's day! To much to share in one post so let me just show you what we've done with our animal unit! It's been great!

I am using Hope King's Animal Safari Unit as a basis for our study. It is Amazing!! You should check it out!

We started off by getting our animal expert badges!


Each group was given an animal classification group to study and report on. They worked together reading books and using the ipad to find information about their class. They created posters that we displayed around the room, one person from each group stayed with their poster to be the reporter while the others traveled around to learn about the other classes. The person with the poster was the teacher. They did such a great job. We then of course traded places so everyone got a turn learning about each class of animal. They loved becoming experts and teaching others!



Once we were experts on animal classes we studied biomes animals live in. Hope's unit has a GREAT biome flip book activity which we did. It turned out so well. I really was excited to send them home with the kids because I knew they were excited to share them with their families, and they had learned SO MUCH by making these!


Each student picked a biome and created a biome box as an at home project to share with the class. Again they turned out amazing. I was impressed with all the work they put into these.





We also took a look at animal life cycles and enjoyed watching caterpillars transform into butterflies! It was amazing to watch the process and again kept the kids so engaged, they came in every morning excited to learn more and see if anything had changed for our "pets". They even named them! Of course we don't whose who but they think they do!


I ordered our Butterfly Garden from Insectlore. It was a great buy, very easy to use, and great online resources including emails to keep us updated on what we should be expecting along the way.


Finally we wrapped up our unit with a fun field trip to a local park where the Naturalists taught us about Mammals, reptiles, and amphibians that are native to our area. We got to see some animals up close, and take a hike through the woods to find them in their natural environment. It was a beautiful day, and such a great end to an exciting unit.

I have so much more to share with you! I promise it won't take me as long to do it this time! We are celebrating Mother's Day tomorrow. I hope to share our day with you sometime this week, along with end of the year projects and other fun things we've done along the way.

Thanks for reading! I hope you all have a wonderful week!
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