Today's the Day for Our Giveaway! & The Hamster Saga Continues . . .

GIVEAWAY! YEAH!:

Are you ready for this?? Well, GET ready!! Today is the kick-off for my giveaway with Krista from The Second Grade Superkids because we have 100+ followers!!!!!!!!!! (Honestly there was a time when I thought that I would NEVER get here!) 

You will need to go to Krista's blog to enter! Go check it out, there are some AWESOME prizes to be had!!  I am not going to toot my own horn but I have seen Krista's green units and can SO see how I am going to use them in my classroom! (She made this really cute sign too!)

Once again please go over to The Second Grade Super Kids to enter. She teachers a bilingual class and is amazing for other reasons too and you could win some awesome stuff.

Hamster Saga: 

So if you haven't been following very long then you may want to read how I once had 10 animals living in my bathtub and then 14 animals living in my bathtub, most of these were hamsters after my male hamsters reproduced . . . yes I keep saying this but this is what happened.

Well I was in our PLT meeting this morning when Mrs. B comes in and says that they saw a mouse running down the hallway. We then hear screaming and realize someone else has probably seen it so Mrs. B goes down to check on her. We laugh and move on until I hear someone yell CASEY!!! from down the hallway. Another teacher Mrs. C then flies in the classroom and ask me "Do you still have your hamsters?" I say, "No, Mrs. Q has one of them living in her room . . why?" 

Well . . . as it turns out she was holding the door so that a custodian and a maintenance man could sweep the mouse out with a broom when she realizes that it is not a mouse IT IS A HAMSTER!!! 

I ran outside to help her look for him (I mean he couldn't have gotten far) and we can't find him. I then run up to Mrs. Q's room to make sure that Humphrey is in fact missing and he was. My ENTIRE team then comes outside to help me find him. At this point I am hysterically crying. I was very upset. I was imagining all the things that could happen to a small hamster in the big world. In fact, I cried through most of math and was upset so much throughout the morning that my kids were speculating about all of the people in my life that may have died. I finally did clue them in because I wasn't keeping it together very well. 

I mean, three people kicked my former PET out of the school and now he is gone FOREVER! I am sad. But I am okay. I was even going to sleep outside at school tonight because hamsters are nocturnal and see if he went to the seed that my pal had so lovingly set out for him to make me feel better about him not starving to death. My roommate even volunteered to go and stake out the playground tonight with me. 

I have decided that I just have to let it go. If he was going to be found it would have already happened when 600+ kids played on the playground today or when I looked for him this morning. 

So . . . I am SUPER excited about this giveaway . . .  . but a lot sad about the loss of my friend, Humphrey. . . . 

If you are looking for a way to cheer me up GO ENTER OUR GIVEAWAY! ;)

Hamsters, Remediation Group, Number Sense FREEBIES

Okay, so I am sorry if you expected to hear about how my hamsters are in a remediation group involving number sense but that is just not the case. 

I wanted to give you an update after my previous post 10 Animals in My Bath Tub that I now have at least 11 hamsters living in my bathtub (as of Sunday night)! That's right, Mama hamster (who's name is LUCKY, HA YEAH RIGHT!) has given birth to another 4 hamsters. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!

Now that I have gotten that out of my system I wanted to tell you about how much I LOVE MY SECOND GRADE TEAM! They are AWESOME! We decided about a month ago that some of our little crab cakes could really use some math remediation. So we have all given up either ourselves or our TA's in the afternoons on a rotating schedule to make sure that our students get what they need. We have been trying to work on things like renaming numbers and subtraction with regrouping but they are really missing basic number sense. I am hoping that Common Core next year will give us the freedom to SLOW THE HECK DOWN! I feel like we have to cover so much material that we are not given a lot of freedom to adjust pacing. 

All of this (minus the hamsters) inspired me to look for some number sense resources because that is what our friends really need and I am in charge of planning for our group this week. I feel like I can squeeze some number sense into subtraction with regrouping right? 

1. This site is called Free Training Tutorial and their motto is "Free Education for All," so you can't go wrong here. Click on the image to find TONS of games to practice place value for all ability levels.

2. The second site is called www.math-drills.com. I am sure that you have used this site at some point but until I typed Number Sense into my search bar I never realized how much they have for this including comparing numbers, number lines, hundreds, charts, and rounding numbers worksheets.

3. I also wanted to share TWO FREEBIES. One is from one of my favorite bloggers The Teacher Wife. Lindsey posted her number sense freebie on her Teachers Pay Teachers store a while back. Most of you probably have it because it has like over 14,000 downloads. I love it. My only issue was that we use numbers far greater than the chart would allow us to use in second grade, so I made my own freebie! Check out both freebies by clicking on the images! :)