Manic Monday Hooked on Freebies!

Happy Monday!

I hope you had a wonderful weekend :)

It was beautiful and busy here. The Blue Angels were in town and literally did fly-bys over my house - super-exciting and very, very LOUD. They had a show both Saturday and Sunday to help Baltimore celebrate their Star-Spangled Celebration.
We had prime seats right at the end of our street:

 It was a picture-perfect Sunday!

I also accomplished quite a bit to prepare for the week!
I'll be posting pictures soon on Instagram and Facebook of all the fun seasonal loot I picked up at Target and Michael's. I think I'm more excited than my students for autumn!

Sensory materials remain at the top of my list for this caseload. Have you seen these?

Michael's had them for $0.29! Scents include pepperoni pizza, toasted marshmallow, and buttered popcorn. Needless to say, I bought all of them. Scentos have magical powers of my firsties (♥), but they also show through on our thin copy paper. These Crayolas will be a nice way to mix it up :)

I also picked up 10 boxes of pasta for $10 to create this:

It's SUCH an easy and inexpensive way to add visual and texture variety to a sensory bin. I posted about our first bin last week. It was literacy themed with onset/rime cubes, word families, and more:

I provided my students with a clipboard and paper to record all the words they could build. My students kinda lost their minds over this (in a good way), so I decided to keep it permanent and purchased an additional box to use for our weekly rotating themes.

I just created an autumn, Halloween, and farm theme for upcoming weeks - stay tuned!

 I'm so humbled and overwhelmed by the generosity of donors who contributed to my Donors Choose project:

My students received an iPad!!!

Can you believe it? I'm SO thrilled for them! I'm working with several students who have a diagnosis of autism. They are very technology-savvy, yet still building their stamina to participate in the first grade classroom setting. In kindergarten, they were slowly increasing their time on task (up to 5 minutes) with technology breaks. They probably weren't too thrilled to begin working with me - technology-barren! But no longer... I'll be introducing the iPad to them this week and I already posted a new project for additional iPads so all of my students will eventually be able to use one. I feel this is important because they are all at different levels and I'll be able to differentiate to meet their needs. 

In the meantime, I created a reader response packet to accompany the Hooked on Phonics app! I downloaded the app for free on Teacher Appreciation Day last year. It's A-M-A-Z-I-N-G!
You can try out the first lesson for free - I downloaded it from iTunes. And here's a 5-page freebie for Unit One:

I'm almost finished with the entire packet - it will be 50+ pages and include mini-Grit Trackers! Stay tuned!

This post is linked with:

Woohoo! It's back!
Thanks Charity :)

A quick note: We just wrapped up testing last week! Now that I know my students' current scores/RIT bands, I'll be introducing the NWEA practice cards this week. I'll be posting more soon on how I use them, plus I'm adding NEW cards to my packet! I'm also working on the math set :)

Have a fabulous Monday!