We could not believe it! A REAL author...a REAL, AMAZING, TALENTED author, Doreen Cronin, has allowed us to use her book
Diary of a Spider in our amazing and fun letter and journal writing unit! We can not sing her praises enough! She was so kind and we appreciate her generosity SO much! EEEEEEEE! In fact, when we received her e-mail giving us permission we both danced around the room jumping up and down like crazy people. We originally created this unit when we first began selling on TPT but after realizing that we may be infringing Doreen Cronin's copyright of the book we pulled it from our sight. As we were pulling out our October files to begin planning next month we decided to ask Ms. Cronin if we could post the unit...and she said "YES!" So it is up and ready for you to purchase and it is perfect for the month of October. Here is the original post from our blog detailing the unit.
Halloween is just around the corner and while looking through our
October files we began to feel a bit pumpkin-ed out by all of our
regular go-to activities for the season. Each year we have done some
kind of fun and interactive character activity, such as the Pumpkin Elf
or the
Candy Corn Bandit.
While this has always been a HUGE hit with the kiddos we were feeling
the need to try something new. This gave us the perfect excuse to be
creative (otherwise known as "not getting our correcting done during our
prep") One of our favorite book series to use during Writer's Workshop
are the Diary of a Worm, Fly, and Spider books by Doreen Cronin. Being
that spiders make the perfect Halloween character, we ran with it and
this is the unit that we ended up with!
http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Diary-of-a-Spider-Mini-Unit
Keep in mind that while spiders are perfect for Halloween, this unit
could really be used at any time of the year to teach all sorts of
writing concepts including voice, point of view, friendly letters, diary
entries and so much more!
Keep on dancing in your teacher shoes!
Deanna and Jenelle
On one of our many adventures through Pinterest-land we came across a photo that blew our mind and inspired us to go Christmas crazy. It was a photo of an Elf on the Shelf who had tied up a Grinch stuffed toy. So fun! So we decided to go all out and had our stuffed Grinches wreak green havoc on our classrooms. He even taped the Elves to the wall so that they could not escape! When the students came into the classroom it was like an explosion of excitement and panic (Our poor elves!). We took action right away and wrote top secret letters to Santa letting him know that the Grinch had been very naughty in our classrooms! Of course we made sure to say how smart and wonderful the Grinch was out loud so that he would not suspect that we were tattling on him. The Grinch also left us some really fun outfits to wear in his honor..AKA gave us a really great excuse to dress up!!! We followed up the next day by having our elves tie up the grinch and then finally on the last day of school before break they were both sitting together reading a story about the true meaning of Christmas (magically throughout the day the pages even kept turning). We know that this post is BEYOND late, but we wrote it and never posted!! Oops!!!!
Each week as teachers we inevitably have to answer the question,"What are we going to do this week?" In the primary grades its more like every five minutes we are answering, "What are we going to do next?" 
We decided that we wanted to come up with a creative and exciting way to answer this question. Since we have classroom sock monkey mascots, Scooter and Socks (See our previous post)...we figured why not make them a part of our weekly antics? So we decided that they should drop the first graders a clue on Monday mornings that will give them a hint about what is to come later in the week.
