Monday, February 18, 2013

Valentine's Day

    When I was going through one of my boxes of teacher treasures, I came across some Valentine's Day activities that I had and I figured I would do them with Lily before I tossed them out.

                                               SWEETHEART SIZE SORT



I had found these activities on the blog http://www.2teachingmommies.com/ and I had been saving it .  Today was the day to break it out.  The object was for Lily to sort the hearts into columns that were labeled "small", "medium", and "big."  I cut up the hearts and Lily then sorted and glued them to the appropriate column.


SWEETHEARTS OBSERVATION




Next was another activity from the 2 Teaching Mommies website.  This was a lot of fun and one that I had done before in my Kindergarten class.  We dumped a box of Sweethearts on the table and Lily went through the Sweethearts Observation sheet and did her first "Scientific Observation."  She used her five senses to observe the candy hearts. For sight, she colored in the hearts the same colors as the ones she saw from the box and she observed if they were big or small. For hearing, she listened to see if the candy hearts made a sound.  For smell, she discovered that candy hearts smell good not bad.  For touch, she told me that candy hearts were hard not soft. And finally for the sense of taste, Lily decided candy hearts were sweet not sour or salty.  After, she finished the observation activity, she graphed the hearts according to color and discovered which color heart had the most in her box, which colors tied, and which colors were the least represented in the box.





                                   MESSAGE FROM THE HEART GLYPH

                        Our next activity came from the Scholastic book, Great Glyphs: Holidays & Seasons.
                                                     

Lily loved this activity because she loves for someone else to make her decisions. If you were to ask her which heart she would want to color , she would typically say you decide mom.  This way I asked her if Valentine's Day was her favorite holiday and her answer determined which heart she would color.  She said Valentine's Day was her favorite holiday, so Lily colored the heart with the squares and triangles border.

By looking at her glyph and looking at the key, you can see how she answered the questions.
Valentine's Day is her favorite holiday (square and triangles border around heart). She gave 20 cards out on VDay(her valentine was colored pink). Lily would rather give someone "hugs" ( something else) on Valentine's Day( the color of the eyes was brown).  She likes to wear red on Valentine's Day( closed mouth smile) and she enjoys delivering cards on Valentine's Day( she had more than 5 , but fewer than 10 letters in her mesage). If she was older I might have made her write her answers into a paragraph.



I did a glyph with Lily as well.  Valentine's Day is not my favorite holiday ( circles and diamonds border).  I gave fewer than 10 cards (purple valentine).  I like to give flowers on Valentine's Day (green eyes).  I don't wear red on VDay (open mouth), I wear pink.


We will see what other fun treasures I find during the purging of my treasures.

Saturday, February 2, 2013

An introduction

    Let me start by introducing myself.  My name is Jody and I am a Stay at Home Mom with two little girls, ages 4  and 1 1/2 years-old.  Before I was a stay at home mom, I was a Kindergarten and First grade teacher for 10 years.  The idea for this blog came about a few weeks ago, when my husband and I felt that it was time to clean out our storage facility and put the $200 a month, we were paying to store our stuff, into savings for something of more value.  When we went to the unit, we realized half of the storage unit was filled with my treasures that I collected or should I say hoarded over the ten years that I had been teaching.  Since I have no idea when or if I will go back to teaching, my husband felt that we needed to get rid of my "teaching crap" because it was costing us more money to hold on to it then it was actually worth.  It wasn't like we were storing actual valuable items in that unit.  That unit would have been a big dissappointment to someone bidding on it on an episode of "Storage Wars."
     The definition of a hoarder is someone who has persistent difficulty discarding or parting with possessions, regardless of the value others may attribute to these possessions.  I have hoarded cookbooks, Parenting magazines (thinking one day there might be an article I might need to read), and even my pins on Pinterest seem to be excessive. I can always justify why I need to keep these things. I even thought that if I didn't go back to teaching , I could use my teaching resources to help my children when they were in Kindergarten and First grade.  But of course, my oldest would rather play Barbies with me or dress up her Build-a-Bears, rather than practice writing her numbers and letters.  So I have decided to combat this hoarding and started by getting rid of my Parenting magazines and now I need to tackle this project. I think one of the reasons it is hard to get rid of it is because I feel guilty about how much money I had spent over the years on these items.
     So, I felt as I delve through the boxes and donate my teaching supplies to either the library or any schools that would profit from my resources, I would take one last fun project from each to try and attempt with my girls. It might sound silly to some , but I thought that it might help letting my "stuff" go a little bit easier.  My husband says just "take a picture" of things you want to give away, that way you can still hold on to the memory and not the item.  That's what I figured I will do here.  If I find something in these boxes that are "worthy" of documenting in photos, I will do so on this blog.