DoubleDutyTeachers

          This year of teaching in the time of Covid is SO different and unlike anything we've experienced. However, we still knew we wanted to bring in some of that room transformation magic! This year, our gifted enrichment unit was all about the solar system. One of our ELA units this year is called "The Making of a Scientist" (5th grade Guidebooks unit) where the students research the start of the solar system and if Pluto should be considered a planet. So for the first time, we introduced our Solar System Room Transformation! It was out of this world!      To start, we gathered our materials (linked below) and the help of our husbands (they always deserve a shoutout). We cut table cloth rolls displaying constellations to size and hung them up on the ceiling as our night sky. We also draped some star backdrops (also table cloth rolls) on the walls for more of a dramatic look. We inflated our inflatable solar system and hung them from...

Glow Day has quickly turned into our favorite day of the year! It's an opportunity to amp up the fun and engagement for ANY content area. We were inspired by Hope King and heavily relied on experience from @AdventuresofMsSmith. After researching how they pulled off a glow day, we took some of their ideas and made it our own. We hope YOU do the same as well! So we started with a Teachers Pay Teachers pack of Glow Day math centers from @AdventuresofMsSmith . Her Instagram highlights helped this process tremendously. We also gathered inspiration from Hope King's blog post on her Glow Day.  We also have Instagram Highlights if you'd like to see videos detailing how we pulled off each station and gathered materials to make this possible! These Glow Day game station ideas can really be used in a lot of ways and for any subject matter. We started with her pack and then added a couple stations of our own to make the day cross curricular. Once these supplies are purchased and the...

     Do YOU want to go to Jurassic Park?!     Our students sure did! When we found out our gifted enrichment unit was going to be dinosaurs- we immediately headed over to Hope King's ultimate Jurassic Park room transformation for some ideas. No need to reinvent the wheel people! Work smarter- not harder!       We managed to pull this off with some help. Weeks before we set this up, we emailed out to our student's parents that we were planning this surprise and asked if anyone had old dinosaur toys laying around that they wanted to donate. You know a lot of kids go through a dinosaur phase at one point or another- let us take that off your hands! They came through with this and more. We even had parents offer to make us giant cardboard cut out dinosaurs- SO COOL! Now we can keep these in storage (You know, behind my bookshelves) and reuse them again! The total set up took about 2 hours with the help of our husbands. The first time you do some...