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Double Feature Teacher

Life has been crazy for me but I want to give these two ladies the time they deserve for Featured Teacher. 
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Our First Featured Teacher this week is Melanie Ebersole from Momma with a Teaching Mission!
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Melanie Ebersole is a 1st Grade departmentalized Literacy Teacher. She is also the Mom to 4 young children, 2 boys (ages 10 and 6) and 2 girls (ages 7 and 1).
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Melanie is currently in her 3rd year of teaching. She teaches at a school with approximately 700 students in Maryland. She worked in Human Resources for 5 years before finishing her teaching degree and pursuing her dream of teaching. Melanie always wanted to be a teacher, but with life happening, wasn’t able to pursue completing her degree until after having 3 children. You can read more about her journey HERE.
Melanie has a passion for departmentalization. She did a guest blog on Rachel Lynette’s Minds in Bloom, you can read HERE! She also wrote another guest blog post on a blog she collaborates on Who’s Who and New, you can read about Why Teaching in a Departmentalized Classroom Rocks HERE. You can also read more about departmentalization within the primary classroom on her own blog HERE.

Besides running her blog, Melanie is also a TpT author! You can find her store at Momma with a Teaching Mission.

Some of her newest products include…
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Miss Independent CVC No Prep Printables. These are perfect for building your students independence stamina when working with CVC words.

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This bundle pack is perfect if you are teaching the common core. So many different options for games, homework, formative assessments, or warm-ups.

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This is the 2nd edition in homework packs’ that Melanie has created for her own classroom, that turned into a TpT project! You can find the 1st edition here! Her students love this daily homework pack, and it is simply a review of 1st grade material. Homework can be a hot topic, but these no prep pages take students only a few minutes a night!

You can follow check out Melanie’s social media accounts here--



Our Second featured teacher is Ashley, 1st grade teacher and blogger over at The Blessed OCDiva. The name pretty much speaks for itself! She has a passion for sharing God’s word, sharing goodies for teachers, and providing a fix for anyone else just a tad OCD!
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She is married to her other half and they are doggy parents to Groot (yes like Guardians of the Galaxy Groot) and Maximus(yes like Gladiator Maximus Aurelius).
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Ashley has been teaching for 7 ½ years and 6 of those have been in first grade. Along with teaching she also is the lead mentor for her campus and has been a team leader for 5 years. She loves being able to help lead other teachers and ignite their passion for learning and teaching; ultimately hoping to be able to turn that into a path for her career.

In 2014, she was Teacher of the year for her campus. What an honor and blessing this was!! All possible through God’s never ending love and direction.
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Since starting her blog, The Blessed OCDiva, she also opened up her TPT store as well and has worked at building it to offer resources for other teachers that span across the curriculum.      Some of her products include: (click to check them out)

This little packet is an integration of social studies, writing, reading, and math!!!
It focuses on 6 main landforms: hills, mountains, valley, canyon, cliff, and island.
I have included the following types of activities to help you teach:
-anchor charts
-writing definitions/characteristics of each
-matching the name to picture
-identifying the type of landform and labeling
-Count, Tally and graph
-Writing response with question stems
-landforms book with fill in the blanks (answer key included)
-Guessing game

I have also included a page of suggestions to help with understanding how it is intended to be used. However, feel free to use it according to your kids needs!
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Do you like to challenge your kids during reading workshop? Do you want them to be able to have accountable talk and written response with their text? If you do, these cards are for you!!

These can be used very easily within the workshop time frame of read to self, read with a buddy and even small groups. The teacher will want to model A LOT! But it is intended for slow release until independence!!

-2 formats for teacher’s preference of printing
-mini anchor charts for reference or can also be easily inserted into the kids card bundle
-color coded for ease of use
- table of contents for teacher and student use

Click here to see how I use them!

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Here is a bundle pack of all things geometry! 108 pages of fun! I made it as versatile as possible so it can reach anyone with many objectives!
I have included the following items in each section.

2-D shapes:
-anchor charts for each shape (square,circle, rectangle, triangle, rhombus,trapezoid, pentagon, hexagon,octagon)
-Memory match
-Book of shapes (this also integrates some fractions)
-Matching shapes
-Identifying sides/vertices
-Assessment/independent practice
-Find,Tally,Graph
-Roll and Cover
-Connect 4 spin and cover

3-D shapes:
-anchor charts for each shape (sphere, cube, triangular prism, rectangular prism, pyramid,cone,cylinder)
-Memory Match
-Find, Tally, Graph
-Name match
-Assessment/independent practice
-Sorting 3-D
-Attributes charts
-Roll, Slide, Stack chart
-Connect 4 spin and cover

Fractions:
-anchor charts (whole,half, thirds, fourths)
-Memory Match
- Bingo
-Equal/Unequal activities
-Spin and Cover
-Roll and Cover
-Assessment/independent practice
-Color fractions
-Spin and Color
-Find, Tally, Graph

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Snag some freebies while you are checking out the resources above!

This one has had over 17,000 downloads!





Be sure to keep up to date with all of the OCDiva action!
Facebook ( I update this weekly)
Twitter: The Blessed OCDiva

Have a BLESSED week!
“Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.
Hebrews 4:16


I hope that you will head over and check these amazing ladies out.

Place Value Boot Camp Fun

Hey everyone! I am so excited to come to you and tell you about the fun I had in my classroom introducing Place Value to my firsties. Let's just say there was a lot of laughs, yelling, and whistle blowing. 



Let me tell you how I came up with this plan for the day. Like any reasonable person, I went to pinterest and typed in Place Value. LOL! There is a lot of ideas for stations but nothing seem to jump out to me. I decided to type in place value into google and found some blogs that really got the Boot Camp idea going. 

Now when I say I read blogs, I mean I read blog after blog after blog. One website that got em excited was from Teacher Tipster. If you have not seen his videos then you really should check him out. He is so funny!!!! 

He had a video about Place Value and I loved it! Watch the video below.

Did you watch it? Wasn't he funny and great! I made a poster with the song on it and used that day. 


My student teacher Brittany and I getting ready for the day.

Now I started reading some blogs about place value as well. One of the first blogs was Thank God It's First Grade.  Susan discussed doing a Bootcamp. I thought that was a cute idea. She had a Freebie and I jumped on it and grabbed it. Just click HERE to get it for yourself.

The next blog that I read was from The Brown Bag Teacher. She had lots of station ideas. She had created a log sheet that would work for her students. I printed that but realized there was some letters missing so I recreated a similar one and you can click HERE to grab that freebie.

So the day started like normal except for me yelling and blowing a whistle like a crazy person. LOL! The kids came in the room and I started yelling "MOVE IT! MOVE IT! YOU PRIVATES ARE MOVING TO SLOW!" Now as you can image the giggles that were happening at this point. I moved quickly to one of my students and yelled, "What are you laughing at son? Do you need to drop and give me ten?" Let me just say as a teacher, I had to really control my own laughter because this student's face was so funny. He looked at me like "OH, crap she is mad and I don't know what to do." He just shook his head no.

I began discussing the objective for the unit and how we would be learning place value. I told them that numbers have a home and in those homes are rooms. Each room can only hold so many family members. We chanted and did some whole brain teaching modeling. They really started getting into the boot camp.

Next, I started by discussing the song and the names for the Talls and Smalls. We repeated over and over what they were valued in numbers.



I brought some students up to the front of the room and we made our talls and smalls. We discussed the value and practiced counting. If someone counted wrong (kept counting by 10) then we would stop and do push ups.





We repeated this process several times. Then I put a Tens, Ones, and Expanded for chart up on the board. The students REALLY liked this because I let them use dry erase markers on the tables.



I used the SPLAT board to pick our numbers. We would write each digit in its correct place value and then they would write the expanded form. Some children would build their number on ten frames.


There were moments I felt like Ron Clark. I was climbing on chairs to jazz them up. (I hope to go to RCA someday.)


The students had a lot of fun learning about place value. We will spend the rest of the unit reviewing everything we have learned thus far and adding to our learning. I am currently working on stations to add to the math stations they are working on. I will keep you posted as to how they are doing.

I would love to hear what you do to teach Place Value to your students. This is a skill we can all learn from each other.

Thanks for stopping by and for the support. Be on the look out for a giveaway I will be having on FB and IG.