Five for Friday! Sunshine, Costco, Dinos and a GIVEAWAY!

As I sat down to gather my thoughts for today's Five for Friday I almost couldn't remember anything I'd done at school this week! We're getting set to write report cards, so I can only blame my scarce collection of photos and scatty memory on a super busy week. :)  My five random moments are just that - quite random!

Summer break?  Nope, just an almost-Winter's day in Queensland!

It's the perfect time of year to enjoy long walks in the sun!

This week I decided it was time to get organised!  I transferred all of my TpT ideas to one notebook, instead of random bits of paper and notes on my phone and laptop.  I've got two 'to-do' lists on the go as well, one for home and one for my blog etc.

It's helping so far!

I introduced one of my favourite Maths games to my kidlets this week!  I call it Dino Dash.

The idea is simple.  Kidlets roll two pocket dice, with dot patterns for 0 - 3.  Each child has a card with a rock path on it and we use a container of plastic dinosaurs.  After the dice are rolled kidlets move their dinosaur along the path after counting the total number of dots.  This works on counting, subitising, number bonds and introduces addition in a relaxed way.  Later in the year I'll change one of the dice to show numerals - perfect to work on counting-on skills.  Once the dinosaur reaches the end of the path they have a rest under the tree, and a new dino starts his journey!  The kidlet with the most dinosaurs under their tree at the end of the playing time is the winner. :)

You could adapt this game to play with any manipulatives that you have - frogs on lilypads, insects on flowers etc.  My kidlets go mad for this game!

Big excitement 'round these parts recently...

...Costco opened!  It's the first in Queensland so the hype around opening day was HUGE!  I'd shopped at Costco when I was living in Canada so I wasn't quite as excited as some of the other people I saw there. Everyone was loading their carts up with huge smiles on their faces and one of the employees I spoke to said they turned over more than $1 million on their first day.  Crazy! Although my photo only shows about 5 people there it was actually super duper busy, so I just had a quick look and only bought a few cleaning products and a 10kg bag of rice to make rainbow rice for the sensory bin at school. :)

Time for the GIVEAWAY!  It's a miracle - I finally added a new product to my TpT store!

Not sure about you, but I find Show & Tell in the classroom tedious (I know... I'm a terrible teacher)!  It seems to veer between kidlets whose parents have made a larger than life poster that the child has had absolutely no part in and those that have literally grabbed something out of the car on their way into school.  I wanted a way to make Show & Tell times effective for developing oral language skills by providing guidelines as to the type and amount of information children should present.  The templates also help me to assist those little ones who've forgotten what they wanted to say, and because everyone has had the same poster to complete they all feel proud of theirs when it goes on display.

(I've included two sets of templates - one with Aussie spelling and the second is US friendly!)

There's 10 different topics in the pack.

Check it out here or 'Pin it to Win it'!  Leave me a comment with a link to the board you pinned to and I'll give away three copies at the end of the weekend. :)

Happy weekend friends!  I hope wherever you are you're enjoying some rest and relaxation - you deserve it!

Lauren