Mrs. Ryder's First Grade Funzies

Teacher tired. It's a real thing, y'all. Teacher poor is another real thing, also. Toward the end of last school year, my hubs and I were stretching every last penny. I would dig around our pantry and fridge and attempt to make dinners out of the ingredients we had on hand. We had several bars of cream cheese, so I went to Pinterest and searched for cream cheese pasta sauce recipes. I came across a recipe that ended up being one of our FAVORITE meals ever!! I was so thrilled to have found a new, EASY staple dinner recipe. Here are the ingredients I use-- I didn't pin the recipe I found, and now I can't find it again. I got inspiration from the recipe but did change it a tad from what I remember: 1/2 bottle of Olive Garden Signature Italian Dressing (we buy ours @ Sam's Club) Cream Cheese (8 oz) 2 tbsp Grated Parmesan Cheese Pasta of your choice (I've made it with spaghetti, angel hair, fettuccine, bow tie, & penne- great with all!) I use 1/2

I am loving the trend of b&w stripes with watercolor flowers. I decided to make a few that I could use in my classroom, and am happy to share them! You can get them FREE in my TPT store, here . :) They download as a Power Point file, and from there you can edit the text any way you want. The two fonts I used are  KG Second Chances Sketch and  KG Neatly Printed . I think a pretty script would be great too! If you've never downloaded fonts, be careful- it's addicting! And I promise, it SO easy! You can just Google "How to install fonts on Windows 10" (or whatever system your computer is). That's how I learned to do it! Usually you just: Click "download" from wherever you're getting the font.  Open up the downloaded file location.  Right click any "TrueType Font" files and click "Install". That's it!  Make sure to have your Word, PowerPoint, or whatever program you're typing in closed or just resta

Things have been so busy lately with school starting. I am trying to take this Labor Day weekend to not even THINK about school and just enjoy time with my family. I have done pretty well so far besides an hour or two of school Pinterest and Instagram browsing... I saw a photo on Instagram of a super cute computer background in a teacher's classroom, and I realized then that I have had the same stock photo on my school computer for SIX years now. I just never thought about changing it. It was a simple and quick task, and something just for me to enjoy. I made a similar one for my home computer, but instead of having "Mrs. Ryder" on it, I simply made it for our family-- "The Ryders". By the way, if you're ever going to use your last name in a sign of any kind for your family, please don't use an apostrophe before the 's'. Just trust me! #grammarnazi Here is what my home PC screen looks like now: I love it. Here's how you can make y

This is so EASY you won't believe it!! Seriously...this took me 30 minutes. Pencil -check. Sharpie - check. All set!!! Alright, let's get down to business.  I was up late last night stressing about school starting in a week and a half and I had only been up to my classroom for 3 TOTAL hours! I have a 3 y/o & a 19-month old, so taking them up there with me is not an option. Hubby has been working OT, & we are so busy with plans most evenings, so I don't have many chances to get up to the school. ANYWAY -- So I was up and restless and started cleaning out our office room. I found these two small canvases that we had leftover from our daughter's 2nd birthday paint party. I suddenly remembered something I had read about using pencil to transfer fonts to canvas, so I figured why not try?!    Here's the step-by-step directions!   First, using a program like Power Point, type out what you want to have on your sign. If you don't already have c

Fry's research shows how important sight word mastery is! The first 100 Fry words are found in 50% of our printed language. If your students know the first 100 words, then in theory, that means that they already know about 50% of the words they will read in school! Wow, that is some powerful info! The first 100 Fry words are recommended to be memorized by the end of first grade. Unlike Dolch words, Fry words are any part of speech and based purely on the most commonly found words in published writing. Fry's research is also much more recent than Dolch's research. The debate between these two lists will be saved for another post. :) Many of these HFW (High Frequency Words) words don't follow our phonics rules, so they need to be memorized (sight words). For example, look at the HFW "have". It does not follow the rules of the "-ave" word family (gave, pave, Dave). If a student tried to sound it out, they would see the vowel-consanant-e (silent e,