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I used random.org to generate a random number from 1 to 22 (excluding my two replies to the comments)... and the winner is Jillian at Just Tinkering Around ! Jillian, I'll be sending you all 4 of the Uno Sight words games for free... Primer, 1st Grade, 2nd Grade, and 3rd Grade! Congratuations!  For anyone else who is interested, you can find these games on my TPT store below! For today only, all of the Uno games will be 20% off, so pick up your copies today!

I can't believe I haven't posted since Monday... I just don't know where time went!  I really, honestly, don't know how it's Friday already!  It's getting close to my April break, so expect to see some new things after Easter!  But of course, this weekend I have to work on our fourth report card, so I'll likely do some procrastinating and post on the blog instead! In the meantime, some thank yous are in order!  First off, I want to thank Victoria at "The Best of Teachers Pay Teachers" for featuring my Egged Game on her blog!  Click the picture to see the game! Ironically, I actually made a slight change to this game this morning, adding a "Super Egg" card at the request of my students... they truly are the best!  I just updated the game on TPT, so head on over there to re-download it! Also, thank you to Tammy at 1, 2, 3, Teach With Me... I won her big 100 follower giveaway!  So exciting!  Click the picture below to visit her blog!

I didn't really go to college. I mean, I kinda did. We have a community college in town, and the first time I went for a semester, I took like 9 or 12 credits or something, and I only went to one class or maybe I didn't go to any of them. I don't remember any more, but the good news is that I finally paid off my student loan for that. The second time I went to college I was much more committed. But I was working two jobs, working around 60-70 hours a week, and I tried to take a full course load on top of that. I went to all my classes for the first two months, but by month three, I was too burnt out and only went to my English class. And thus ended my college experience. Well, sorta. I had a couple friends who were in college, and I used to write papers for them all the time. I don't know why exactly. My friends aren't idiots and could probably write great papers themselves. They didn't pay me for them or anything either. I just liked doing the paper to see what

Do you know those ideas that evolve from a passing thought? This is one of them! My principal got us us poly spots to do some exercise and movement in the classroom, and I used them occasionally, but not too often. One day at a staff meeting, my principal asked how we could use poly spots to teach across the curriculum. This picture links you to Amazon if you want to buy some poly spots or read more about them... they're $15 for 6 of them (yikes)! Off the top of my head, I could think of a few ideas for math but ELA?!  It took a bit of thinking but here's what I came up with! I print our current sight words on index cards in all different colors, and I print enough so that each child has five cards.  It ends up for a lot of cards!  I only print one set for each month so I'm not printing them too often! When I do the lesson, I give each student a poly spot and five cards (the cards are stored with 5 cards together of the same color together for time/organization purposes).

It's supposed to storm today, which greatly excites me. I have been craving a storm for weeks. Not anything too major, because I don't want people or property to get hurt, but I do like thunder and rain and all that. Anyway, I got the edits back on Lullaby , the second book in the Watersong series, from editor Rose, and I'm pretty excited to dive into them. I love doing edits. I don't know why. Maybe I'm a freak that way. Plus, I want to get started on Tidal , the third book in the series, and I didn't want to do that until I started the edits. It's only a month until Ascend , the final book in the Trylle Trilogy, comes out. I'm really excited about it. So many more people have discovered the Trylle books since they've hit stores, and I'm really, really anxious to see what you all think about the last book. The book blogger at Paranormal Indulgence declared Loki her Book Boyfriend for March , and wrote this great blog about him and the Trylle bo

The day has arrived: 25 followers! As promised, I have an exciting freebie for you: a Dolch Pre-Primer Sight Word Uno game!  It is amazing where good ideas stem from... I was having a parent-teacher conference and I told one of the parents to incorporate sight words at home in whatever way she can.  She mentioned that her son loved Uno, and the idea was born!  I've been playing this with my kids for a week and they love it! The game has a full color version, and a version that uses less color ink!  Click any of the pictures to take you to my TPT store to download it. I also created other versions with the Primer Dolch Words, and the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grade Dolch words, also available at my TPT store for $2 each... but I'm going to host a little giveaway for those versions as well!  You will be awarded three entries: 1. Follow my blog! 2. Give a rating to the Pre-Primer freebie! 3. Follow my TPT store ! Comment on this post with separate comments to enter the contest!  I'll

How convenient is it to have blogs organized by grade level?  Head on over to the blog hop at Math Coach's Corner to add your blog!  It's so exciting to have 19 followers!  Yes, compared to so many blogs it's a minor accomplishment, but I'm excited for it nonetheless.  When I get to 25, I have a special freebie that I'll be posting! :)  Stay tuned to see it!

I put together this quick freebie as a three step writing piece for my class!  Tomorrow we'll be using it to write about a rainy day that we experienced.  Feel free to use it with your class for any rainy writing piece!  Click the picture below to download it at my TPT store for free!

Yesterday's St. Patrick's Day festivities were AMAZING!  The look on the kids faces was absolutely priceless!  They walked inside to find the classroom a complete mess! They wanted to clean up the room before they even unpacked!  They had the mess cleaned up in two minutes flat.  It was awesome! While they were cleaning one of them noticed green glitter all over/around their traps.  And of course, all of their traps were triggered.  They immediately reset all of the traps to try to catch the sneaky leprechaun! Then, they saw their first clue.  They had a blast following the clues all around the building (you can get the clues I made for free in my previous post here ).  When the last clue said the pot of gold was on my chair they all said "How didn't you notice that there was a pot of gold on your chair all morning? Were you sitting on it?"  Amazing! When they got back to the classroom, there was a rainbow on our ceiling and a pot of gold on my chair!  How excitin

I have never been one to go all out for St. Patrick's Day, but the other week our smartboard stopped working (temporarily, thank goodness), and I mentioned, "It must be a leprechaun!"  Based on the reactions of the kids, I had to get into it this year! I sent home a letter to parents asking them to have their children design a trap to catch a leprechaun.  Here's what they came up with: Aren't they amazing? ! Well... tomorrow is the big day.  We left our traps set up over the weekend and we'll get to see if we caught anything!  Tomorrow morning, I'm going to go in and mess up the classroom (turn the calendar backwards, mix up the days of the week, turn chairs and tables on their sides, move furniture around, etc.) I'm also going to have the kids go on a "Leprechaun Hunt!"  We're going to go around the building following the clues to try to catch the leprechaun!  While we're out of out classroom, someone will be going to our room to pla

I used to write blogs all the time, and they used to be so much fun. I was reading through old blogs tonight, and its just weird to see the way things have changed. I don't know why my blogs less frequent & less fun, but they definitely have. Even in reading my newer blocs, I feel like something is missing. They're much less random & rambling. They're more quick to the point, and I daresay a big cagey. I can't complete account for the change except that I know I know I don't like blotting as much as I used to. I feel more defensively. Every time I blog or tweet or speak, its an opportunity for people to point out my faults in someway. Its crazy how much people on the interwebs love to tell each other they're wrong. I digress. I just want to get back to blogging more and talking about all the irrelevant things that interest me. So I am going to make a concerted effort to do just that. I will be blogging more and my blogs will be filled with more nonsense

Since I finally figured out how to add the button to follow me and I have my first four followers, I figured I'd celebrate a bit by posting a free game!  Click any of the pictures to take you to my TPT store to download it!   To my new followers - thank you for following my new blog!   Enjoy the freebie!  Let me know if you like it!  Check out some other free items through this linky! You can also check out other Easter themed freebies on these linkies!

In the past several months I've been putting some thought into the trends that I see emerging in software development frameworks. Working in the IT industry means that things are always moving and survival requires keeping a close watch on trends. It looks like application development is quickly moving away from servlets, and towards javascript. After prototyping a pure javascript web application using web services I realized that servlets are an antiquated way of designing applications. This blog entry describes an approach I used that worked well for me. Overview Here's a diagram from my slide deck that describes what I aimed to accomplish Although I used SOAP web services, the design works equally well with REST services. I did find a few frameworks like DWR , but these didn't meet my needs since I work in a corporate environment that prefers to not use open source code. Besides, I already had a rich set of in house web services available that I wanted to leverage. Crea

I started something this year which has made a MAJOR difference in my classroom... word crowns.  I use these crowns in two ways... for new words that we're adding to the word wall and to review words for the spelling test. First, let me talk about the new words.  New words get a fancy crown... like this gold crown below (from the dollar store of course!), or a crown with bunny ears, or a crown made from bulletin board trim. Every crown has re-adjustable velcro in the back of it (you can kind of see it on the right half of the photo above).  This lets me store the crowns easily and easily adjust them for different students from day to day. There also a small piece of velcro on the front of each crown that I attach the word to... I figured this was easier than storing 100 crowns throughout the year (each with their own word) and it allows me to easily put a picture with the new word. Once we introduce a new word, the student gets to wear it all day on their new crown  The picture on