~TpT BTS13~

In 29 minutes I will have finished my first ever sale on TeachersPayTeachers. Back to School 2013! Woo hoo! Not that I did much (any) work for it, but I did sell one product today. =) And I reached an exciting personal milestone: I have earned enough money from TpT and had it in my PayPal account to pay for Gingerbread Man centers I really wanted to buy for this fall! I still haven't earned enough to buy even a good lunch, but who needs to eat when you have cute centers?

If you missed out on the sale (and you read this), check out my still-low-priced (I think?) alphabet charts and number lines in English, Spanish, and both! More products to come this fall!

Blogging from Paradise

My laptop's view of the ocean on Ka'anapali Beach

I am blogging today from MAUI! We've been here a little over 24 hours but this is my first chance to just really sit down and put my feet up with my laptop. I saw yet another reminder on fb to migrate your Google Reader info to Feedly, so I finally took the time (30 seconds!) to do that. Which brought up all my fun blogs that I've been putting off (so many unread archived emails!) this week because I had a million things to do before we left. Tonight I actually read through several posts uninterrupted and even had time to comment on one or two. It was wonderful!

I'm really looking forward to some leisure time this summer to really join the conversations going on in the blogosphere and thoughtfully consider how that might impact and improve my classroom teaching. I'm also definitely going to order The Next Step in Guided Reading by Jan Richardson to join up with the book study by the gals at Freebielicious. I've enjoyed the book so much already, and I haven't even read it yet! I just saw that the Kindle edition is cheaper than the paperback with no waiting for shipping... I don't have any room on my bookshelf in my shared classroom anyway, so maybe this will be an iPad read!

The view from our cabana if you actually stand up

On that note, do you like reading on eReaders? I generally do, but sometimes I get lost without the physical book, if that makes sense. You know the feeling when you have 11 tabs and 3 programs open on your computer and you minimize one and then can't remember where you were going and what to do next? I don't get that from real books. But I do LOVE the search feature, and I'm not really a take-notes-in-the-margin-and-read-them-later person. I'm more of an underline-it-to-make-it-pretty-and-then-misquote-it-later kind of reader. "Well, Katy Wood Rays says that... Or it was something like... Well, I'm not really sure but I remember thinking that... Or maybe it was Reggie..."

I think I'll sleep on it and maybe buy it tomorrow! Maybe then I could actually be caught up by the time I get home. Off to bed in paradise!

Butterfly Math and MY NEW STORE!

Each year I tend to focus on growing as a professional and improving one area of my kindergarten curriculum. This year it's reading. Last year, math and writing. The year before, ELD. The trouble is, with only 3 hours a day with my kiddos (not to mention only 24 hours for myself) I've struggled this year to keep up with the improvements from previous years as I focus on reading this year.

Long story short, we're behind in math. Like a lot. So now it's April and I'm just now introducing addition (although if Monday's lesson was any indication, most of my students already have a pretty good idea of what they're doing without me!). We've been adding butterflies on the SMART board and using toys, so I created a cut-and-paste word problem activity for my substitute to do with my students today. It's not anything particularly unique or original (or even very challenging...) but it was faster for me to create my own than find the right one online, and it was a good introductory assessment to get started with. We'll see how they did when I get back on Monday! 

In addition to being a convenient sub activity, this worksheet was the perfect thing for my very first TeachersPayTeachers freebie! I got home early tonight and set up my TpT seller account and posted my first product! Hopefully this is the first of many. As a bilingual teacher I often feel like an island, working on my own and having to come up with almost everything we do from scratch (or at least taking everything my English kinder team has found or purchased and reproducing it in Spanish). I want to be a part of the growing community of bilingual teachers who are sharing quality, engaging, relevant materials online for other kinder teachers! 

So here it is--my very first freebie! Butterfly Addition Cut-and-Paste Word Problem in English AND Spanish! Click the image to go to my (new!) TpT store. If you download my product, please leave feedback so that I can build my rating. Thanks so much for your support!