Day of the Dead Art Lesson Available

If you enjoy introducing your students to holidays and celebrations from around the world or celebrating the heritage of some of your students, this art lesson is a great way to incorporate the Day of the Dead holiday into your classroom.

The Day of the Dead, or Dia de los Muertos, is celebrated between November 1st and 2nd in Mexican and many Southern and Latin American cultures. Instead of a gloomy holiday, it is a way of remembering loved ones that have passed on. Skulls traditionally are used as decorations during the holiday.

In this art lesson, students will create a skull in the style of the Day of the Dead. This is a lesson I have used many times in my own classroom with great success. Students love drawing skulls and are excited by this lesson.

Included in this lesson are a detailed lesson plan with written and illustrated instructions, student examples, a short reading and question answer sheet, and four point rubric.

Please check out this product and download the preview to see more!

Fabulous Friday Freebies! Birthday Celebration Freebies

An important part of building community is making each student feel important.  What better way to do this than by remembering their birthday.  Below are some great freebies to help your students' special day.

This is a birthday book that you can download and copy for free.  The birthday kid fills out part of it and their classmates fill out part.  It becomes a massive birthday card/memory book.

 Instead of bringing treats, give the birthday kids a fun pen or pencil.  Download these free, cute Happy Birthday badges to attach to the gift.

  Create a birthday board. Download free materials and directions in seconds to create the board in minutes!  (Okay, maybe several minutes if you want it to look good!)

 Have a bilingual classroom?  Teaching Spanish?  Download free birthday cards in Spanish.  Celebrate birthdays throughout the year and reinforce the vocabulary for dates.

My Favorite Pinterest Finds!

Like many other teachers out there, Pinterest has been a new and fun way I have found many interesting lesson and teaching ideas on the internet. While I started using Pinterest for other reasons, lesson planning has become one of my primary focuses. Today I am sharing some of my favorite lessons and teaching ideas I have found on Pinterest. You can also check out more of my favorite ideas & lessons on my Pinterest page.

This collection of over 100 free graphic organizers is one of my favorite Pinterest finds. I love graphic organizers since they organize information easily for our students and they are a perfect visual aid. They also can easily be used in many different subject areas. This collection is free and can be used by just about any grade level.

I love using cross-curricular lessons in class and this list of 100 experiments has some great ideas on ways to let kids play and construct while learning engineering skills. I also think some of these ideas could be incorporated into a math or art lesson as well.

This Guess Who? game changing idea is a creative way to take an ordinary game and adapt it to your subject area. I like the idea of changing out the photos of the game to fit the subject you are studying. Instead of photos you could also use other types of images or vocabulary words as well. 

This conversation Jenga game is another great way of adapting an existing game into something more specific for your classroom. Write a question that students must answer every time they pull a piece. You could even have your students write their own questions as well.

This lesson using an orange is such an imaginative and creative lesson! It teaches students not only about the earth's shape but the peel can also flatten to show how regular maps are drawn.

Those are some of my favorite Pinterest finds! To see more things I have pinned on Pinterest, visit my Pinterest page. Please share your favorite Pinterest finds below.

Teaching Imagery...Writing Common Core Standard #3

One of the 5th grade descriptors under the 3rd Common Core Standard for writing reads as follows, "Use concrete words and phrases and sensory details to convey experiences and events precisely."

If you are looking for an engaging way to teach that, check out my lesson on imagery.    For just $1, you can have a lesson with over a dozen amazing pictures for students of all ages to write about as they practice how to incorporate imagery in their writing.  

It's a great bargain, but don't take my word for it.  Here a review from one of my buyers...

I appreciate the ready made prompts and the great idea as it is one I can easily duplicate in the classroom with other pictures I have. I am also thankful that you chose to keep the price reasonable. If there was a Value button I would give you an A for that also.

Fabulous Friday Freebies: Free Fall Themed Lessons

Fall is the theme of this week's Fabulous Friday Freebies! Below are some fabulous fall freebies for a wide variety of ages and grade levels. If you have a fabulous fall freebie that you would like to share, please let us know in the comments below.

This Twenty Poems and Songs for September is a cute collection of fall themed poems/songs perfect for grades pre-K through 3rd. They would be perfect to use as either examples for poetry writing or for use in a literacy lesson. You could also use it for buddy or shared reading activities.

If you are teaching or reviewing compound words in your classroom, this cute Pumpkin Patch Compound Match center is filled with fall themed compound words. There are also blank pumpkins included so you can add your own words.

Education World has a variety of teaching ideas of how to use leaves in your classroom. Ideas include teaching about photosynthesis, graphing leaves around the school, spelling, and more!

Lastly, as school starts back in the fall Tracee Orman has a fun Back to School Top 10 Lists writing activity which is perfect for a wide variety of ages. There are also suggestions of ways to make this activity useful in other subject areas besides language arts as well.

Island Survival Money Game on Sale

If you are teaching money addition skills to your students, my Island Survival Money Game is a fun way to help reinforce those skills. Students earn survival items for their island depending on the total each card adds up to. Your students can also have fun possibly stealing an island survival item from another player.

The game uses the front of backs of bills and coins to help students learn to quickly identify each monetary amount. I'm putting my Island Survival Money Game on sale now through 9/21!

Contest Congratulations!

Congratulations goes to  Diving Into Learning.  She has won our 100+ Follower Free Lesson Giveaway Contest! Diving Into Learning, we have emailed you to arrange for delivery of 2 products of your choosing.  Please contact us by September 22nd to claim your prize. To all of our followers, thanks for your support and interest.