A+ Images

Have you heard of A+ images? They are a great company specializing in education shirts! What teacher isn't proud of their school and students? These shirts/apparel are a great way to show off you grade level or even your class like with the classroom faces shirts:

They do custom shirts as well that are super easy to design! Here is me with my custom shirt below.  I love the amount of font choices and the wide color selection as well.  

This teal/turquoise color is my absolute FAV!

You can even upload pics like my blog logo to put on your shirt all in one easy process. 

]Came home to happy mail! My new @aplusimages shirt came in and I love how it looks! #shorthairdontcare #newhaircut #bts15 #teacherblogger #ihateselfies

A photo posted by Amber Nicole (@sssteaching) on Aug 8, 2015 at 2:04pm PDT

Another great part of the process was their customer service.  Doug and others emailed me back quickly about any questions I had and were extremely friendly and helpful, a must in online business. 

Here are some other designs I love as well: 

With their great service and easy to design tools A+ designs is a great place to get those custom teacher shirts we all love! 

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Easiest Review Ever!

Super quick easy idea!

Grab these hexagon shapes from The Science Penguin on TPT for FREE, use them for vocab or concepts in ANY subject.  

Have the students create them.  We put them together throughout the chapter or at the end for review.  I use a beanbag or snowball (crumpled paper) and they have to toss and say the definition or answer a question about what they landed on  - fun right?!

Literally no prep and can be used throughout a chapter - I usually display the honeycomb while we are working on it :) 

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Nonfiction Text Features

We've been diving in our first genre of Information Text and all its characteristics.  The first topic we study is text features and how they help us - directly related to Common Core!

I'm making it a huge deal this year to put the standard front and center and refer to it often!


This is our anchor chart we use to study text features.  We make it together and talk specifically about how they HELP us! I don't remember where I got the pictures to add but you could easily add pictures from a science or social studies book.

We then practiced finding all these features in our science books with partners and how they HELP us understand what we are reading.

Next, as a class we put up a part of a Scholastic News couple page spread and found some text features all together.  We divided up into 2 teams and went back and forth until we couldn't find anymore. 

This was such a great way to get everyone up and moving.  We connected it to what we already knew about text features to build upon our learning.

For an exit slip they had to explain how their text feature - the one they put up - helps them understand the text.  It was great and an easy way to see who "got" it.

We used the FREE text features flip book below to in our notebooks to really reinforce the features. 

We did an assessment via iPad where they can label a picture and record why it helps then add them to our Seesaw portfolios.

I LOVE Book Creator  - it s a FREE app and was the simpliest and most fun assessment I've ever had to grade!  We just identified text features and then said that students could add text or write or ADD SOUND why and how that text feature helps you read nonfiction!

I love that sound option because I get to listen to them explain!  Some, especially at the beginning of the year are still working on that writing piece but this was fantastic.

All they did was Airdop their books to me and I graded - I plan to sent a rubric home to parents.  The only thing I didn't like was that the books are not able to be uploaded to our website or anywhere because of file type because I'd love to share them.  That said, I could easily email or text parents this file that have a "reader" device like iPad, kindle, etc... and they can be opened in their "Books" app.

The kids love that they can "read" each others books on our class iPad and it makes it easy to Airplay and show examples to the class as well.

What do you do to study text features?

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Figurative Language Robots - FREE

I can't believe I haven't blogged about these robots!   We study figurative language in December with poetry BUT since we don't test until late April I want to make sure my kids get a review in (along with many other times!)  so we made these figurative language robots!

They were a hit with my class.  It did challenge them to think outside of the box to design.  We used this video below to create our robots.  You could also challenge them by just giving clues such as "start with a large rectangle - add 2 rectangle legs, etc..." then everyone's looks a little more different.  I absolutely LOVE Art for Kids Hub - the website and videos! They are fantastic even for 4th grade and have TONS of even cartoon characters.  It is always in my back pocket for indoor recess and projects.

We watched a video on how to draw a girl for our Mother's Day project  (if that tells you anything about my art skills!)  I love that I can incorporate art into the curriculum in a fun and engaging way.

After that we completed this half sheet on our robots and attached to make a display!  Easy peasy!

Just click the picture to grab a copy.

For some sad reason I knew I had pictures of this saved but cannot locate them.... here's the one I created.  Hope your students enjoy this activity!

If you love this idea I have a figurative language flip book that is superhero themed in my store.  My students love this as well and it dives deep into all aspects of figurative language.  Or my Poetry Portfolio also includes finding examples in figurative language. 

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