Halloween Blog Hop!

Trick or Treat, teacher peeps! If it's your first time here at The Primary Patch, welcome. My name is Bryn and I am so excited to be a part of this amazing Halloween Blog Hop.

Thank you to Heidi over at Secondgradealicious for hosting and to all of my TPT friends that are participating. Not only do you all get treats for your classrooms from this Halloween Hop, but you also get lots of chances to win some serious TPT loot in the form of gift certificates (zero calories too, I might add, unlike the hundreds handful of mini kit kat bars I'll eat this month).

Ohhhhhh, Halloween. I have loved you ever since I was a little girl back at Ecole St Noël Chabanel. The thought of going door to door trick or treating was almost too much for me to handle as a child. That said, it should come as no surprise that I hope all of my students fall in love with Halloween too.

But I'm not talking the scary Halloween. No way! I'm talking about sharing the magical feeling I get when I see pumpkins, costumes and a full moon this time of year. And a cute little lion all ready to trick or treat.

Every year since I started teaching, I carve pumpkins with my students. We vote on the eyes, nose and mouth and then we all help to scoop out the seeds and I take pictures and send them to parents. That will change this year! Mark my words, parents will be emailed pictures. Pinky promise.

There are always a few students that have never carved a pumpkin and it's such a special experience to be there when they get to feel the slimy texture of the insides. So...Much..Fun!

Speaking of fun, I highly recommend you read the amazing picture book, Room on a Broom, and then get your students to create magical math potions using a Halloween Math Craftivity: Mix A Money Potion

Or read The Hallo-Wiener and practice non-standard measurement

Or, try out some addition pages using Batty About Addition: A Halloween Math Freebie

Have a safe and happy Halloween, friends! I don't get to blog as much as I'd like too but I am on Instagram daily. I'd love it if you'd follow me there.

All the best,
Bryn

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Back to School...Back to Reality

Ahhhh, September and October. I love teaching and getting back into a daily routine. Don't get me wrong, my routine over summer (having no plans) was amazing too but I'm not meant to sit around for that long. Two months is too long in my opinion. I wish we could have week long breaks during the year like they do in France. By the way, parents have them too...not just teachers and students. Just saying! Vacation Time=Quality of Life.

My new batch of Grade 2 students are simply adorable. I have taught a lot of their older siblings and love their parents. I know it's going to be an amazing year! That said, they have forgotten a lot over the summer so I've been really going back to the basics with Number Sense.

I found this great idea from Mrs. T's First Grade Class on Pinterest.

I changed it ever so slightly and my students loved making the strips with the poem prompts on the other side.



On my commute home the other day, I was trying to come up with a game to use the strips again. It didn't take me too long to come up with something that uses dice and

...unifix cubes

Basically my students had to roll each double's answer within 4 rolls. If they rolled a 2 on their first try then they covered the "2" answer with a unifix cube. Then their partner went. If they rolled a 3 on the first roll they wrote it down and then rolled again to try and get an answer from the doubles row. Does that make sense? Probably not but trust me, it was fantastic!

All the best,
Bryn