Friday and Saturdays are some of my favorite days!

It's that time of the week to link up with: http://www.doodlebugsteaching.blogspot.com/

1. The most exciting news of all is that my older son, Derek, who graduated from college last May, got a JOB! He has been working so hard to find a job, and his diligence finally paid off. He'll be working for a congressman from Massachusetts as a constituent service representative. Any way, Derek is delighted because he wants to work for the government, and this is a great entry-level job. Here's my dog, Gabi, congratulating Derek on getting his first job:

2. We did math centers this week, and the kids loved them! We had four centers:

*graphing *equation station *roll the highest number *race to 100

Equation station is like a word search with numbers - the kids need to find all the equations in the number puzzle. I bought this product on TPT. If you want to check it out, here's the link:

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Equation-Station-Boggle-for-Math-Set-1-630428

The graphing activity I won in a raffle, but you can check it out on TPT:
http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Back-To-School-Line-Plot-and-Pictograph-Activity-764634

It's easy enough to set up Race to 100. You need a hundred chart and 2 dice for each pair of students who roll the dice, add them up, color in the sum, and keep adding until someone reaches 100.

For Roll the Highest Number, you need one die for each student and a chart divided into 3 or 4 columns. The columns are labeled Hundreds, Tens, Ones. When you roll the die, you write the number in pen or marker under the correct column to make the highest number.

3. We worked on our four types of sentences Powerpoints. Here are the directions as well as some work samples:

On the first day, I have the kids make a title page and save that in the U-drive so that they can access their presentation the next time we go to the Computer Lab.

When the presentations are all edited and complete, the kids share them on the big screen in the classroom. It's a really fun and engaging project that gives us purpose in the Computer Lab.

4. On the first day of school, I asked each student to bring in a baby picture so we could do a project. However, the baby pictures are still hanging up because the kids LOVE to look at the pictures, and so do I. Here's what they look like:

5. Here's a picture of the first bulletin board of the year because I'll be taking it down on Monday. It has our pencil and apple books which are quick, easy and ready to put up for Back to School night: