Five for Friday

It's been a long time!  I'm so excited to be linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching for Five for Friday!

She gets home tomorrow!  My oldest daughter has been in Costa Rica with our high school's travel club.  She was able to spend time volunteering at a local girls school near Puerto Viejo as well sightsee and enjoy the culture.  I can't wait to hear about her trip!

I can't decide if I'm more excited about going to Vegas for the TpT conference or shopping for outfits to wear at the conference!  Here are a few of my purchases (so far).

I have a thing for maxi dresses :-)

Rain, rain go away!  I'm all for a rainy day in the summer to enjoy down time in the house, but it has been raining in Indiana for a week.  Yesterday this happened!

Our dog was checking out the damage to my husband's police car.  Luckily, the car came away unscathed!  The tree not so much.

I'm starting my fifth Anchor Chart Toolkit today.  I love making these toolkits!  They take the hard work out of making anchor charts.

Finally, since the rain has no plans of stopping today, I'm taking my daughter and her friend to paint pottery.  I think I'll paint a set of  "a to z" bookends that I've been eyeing!

Have a great weekend!!

Teachers Love Summer!

Who loves summer most?  We do!  I'm linking up with Aimee (I love her name!) at Primarily Speaking for her Teachers Love Summer linky.

Friends!  I love spending time with my besties.  We have late night porch nights in the summer, and our families even spend every 4th of July at the lake together.  These ladies make me smile!

Summer reading!  I love to read for pleasure and for inspiration during the summer.  There's nothing better than sitting out on the front porch in a rocker with a good book.  Right now I'm reading these two books...

Painting!  I love to paint furniture.  This year I'm painting a bench for my classroom and a chair for a fundraiser.  Here's my project from last summer...

Creating!  I enjoying having the extra time each summer to create products for my TpT store.  There's never enough time during the school year!  This summer has been pretty productive, so far...

You can check them out here.

Vacation!  This year we will spend our annual 4th of July vacation relaxing at Norris Lake, TN.  I'm most excited about going to the Teachers Pay Teachers Conference for the first time!  I can't wait to meet the faces behind all the stores and blogs that I follow!

The Today Show!  I love spending my mornings with Matt, Willy, Savannah, Al, Natalie, Carson, and Tamron.  My morning ritual is to watch the Today show while enjoying a chai tea latte.  I go through Today Show withdrawal every August when school starts!

I hope you have an amazing summer!!

How do you teach simple, compound, and complex sentences?

One of the first steps to teaching students to write with a variety of sentences is to teach them to recognize the different sentence structures.  This is easier said than done.  While my students seem to understand the way to write and recognize the structures during instruction, they often lose it when it's not practiced over and over.  I use jar activities during my workstation time to review and practice concepts that have been taught earlier in the year.  I recently made a jar of simple, compound, and complex sentences for this purpose.

The Super Sentence Jar includes several different activities that students can do to practice recognizing the different sentence structures.  Students can play BINGO, sort sentences, do a sentence search, or buddy up with a partner and quiz each other.  I also included editable BINGO boards and sentence cards so more can be added.

If this is a skill that your students need to practice, you can check it out in my TpT store.  It's half price for the next 24 hours.  I would love to hear how you practice/review skills that have been taught throughout the school year!