February Freebie Linky Party and New Lesson Plans

The wonderful blog Teaching First is having a February Freebie Linky Party. I have linked up with this party and I am offering my new Valentine's Day ABC order center. Click the link below and go check out all the wonderful bloggers who have already linked up and maybe even link up yourself. There are lots of freebies up for grabs.
                             http://www.teachingfirst-abc.blogspot.com/

Here is what my Freebie looks like. I hope you enjoy this great center.
      
This freebie includes the directions page, 12 cards that need to be placed in ABC order and a Recoding sheet. I would laminate this center so that it last longer.

As I have been getting back into the swing of things now that I am in my 3rd trimester and have been feeling great for several weeks now, I have caught up on some blog reading and have gotten back into creating for my classroom and my TPT and TN stores. I came across on blog post about Visual Lesson Plans. I am not over clear on what they are but by the looks of the plans I have seen it involves placing pictures and visual cues into your lesson plans.

If you are curious what they look like jump on over to Fabulous Firsties. I know she created hers based off of a different blogger. Here is the other blogger who has talked about these visual lesson plans Erica Bohrer's First Grade.  I am so in love with these plans. I have purchased the template that Erica uses for her plans. I am going to give it a shot for this up coming week. I will post how it goes after I create them.

I can't believe today is the last day in January. Where has the time gone. Only 2 short months until I get to welcome my daughter Lily into the world!!!!

New Items and a Giveaway

I have just added my newest items to TN and TPT in a long time. I am very excited about these products. In our district we have started using Common Core Standards and with these new standards comes new writing genres. To help myself and my fellow 2nd grade teachers teach the Informative/Explanatory genre I created a writing pack. The pack includes different planning sheets and final draft paper. Also I found non-fiction articles on the Read Works website to go with the sheets that I created.

After finishing the pack I showed it to a friend of mine who is our curriculum coach at our school. She loved it and suggested that I make a pack for first and third grade as well. Each pack has the same sheets type of sheets but each one is tailored to fit the needs of that grade level. I was super nervous about making something for other grade levels so I bugged the teachers at school to look sheets over before I finalized each pack.

Lets talk about a giveaway!!!! I thought I would give away one copy of each pack. The person from each grade level to leave me a comment and follow my blog. Will get the pack that matches their grade level. Make sure to leave your email address in the comment. I have packs for First, Second and Third.

Hope on over to my TPT or TN store to check out the packs! I hope you like them.