Snowmen fun

Today was my first day back with kiddos and WOW am I tired!! I forgot how exhausting the first day back from a break is. My kids were great...loud, but great haha. We started off with some fun snowmen activities. I introduced the new theme by using one of the poems from Deedee's great pack.

I forgot to snap a picture of the poem in action but my kids had so much fun with each line trying to guess the rhyme and watching the snowman come to shape. Seriously these poetry packs are awesome!

Here's some other fun things we did today.

Some interactive emergent reader action.

 We talked about what we wanted to learn to do this year. These two were "sleep with out my daddy" and "count to 100". I also really enjoyed "ride a motorcycle" and "do more math like 100+100=200" haha precious :)

 We are reviewing all the ways to represent numbers 6-10 in an effort to move them from the visual representations to the more abstract 5+2 is 7. Today we did this fun snowman sort whole group and then as a math activity.

You can grab this activity from google docs here :)

Short Vowel Practice

I went into my classroom yesterday to clean up the Christmas aftermath and start getting ready for Tuesday. I pulled down my January box and started getting excited. I have one of these Rubbermaid boxes for each month of the year.

It holds all my big tracers, packets of extra copies that didn't get used, examples of crafts, center activities, and other random things like stamps or foam stickers or other themed materials. As I pass each year there are more things waiting for me in these boxes that are already prepped and ready to go haha. It's a great feeling. We are going to be doing lots of fun winter activities for the first few weeks of January with lots of snowmen, hot cocoa, and winter clothes. It should be quite the learning experience since we are living in sunny Florida haha!






Before break we were doing a lot of work with hearing the short vowel sounds in the middle of words. One of our favorite songs to sing is our short vowel song. I have no idea where this idea came from but my kids love it. I taught them the sign language hand signs for each of the vowels. I've noticed that really helps them remember the sounds. Then I have them put both hands behind their backs and I call out a vowel and they make the sign with their hands. Then we sing the song (to the tune of "Where is Thumpkin?")  "Where is short a? Where is short a? Here I am! Here I am! /a/ /a/ /a/ /a/,  /a/ /a/ /a/ /a/, Run away! Run away!"  My kids would sing this all day if I let them. We sing through all 5 sounds like that.

This week we are going to focus more on the short o sound and connect it to hot chocolate. I made a big mug for sorting vowel sounds. This picture is from last year's mug...sorry there's a glare (my classroom lights are so bright!)

We sort the marshmallows whole group and put the "o" words in the hot chocolate. Then the students get their own mug to decorate and a page of marshmallows to sort.

You can find this activity in my store here.

Have a great rest of the weekend friends!!

Happy New Year!!

Happy New Year everyone!! I hope 2013 is filled with lots of blessings for all of you! Congrats to Sarah Marcum and Erin Lohmeir for winning my January Morning Work Giveaway! Check your inboxes girls :)

If you didn't win, don't fret. I'm putting my entire store on sale today to celebrate the new year! Click on the picture to hop over!

Also be sure to check out this awesome new Pinterest board geared straight to Kindergarten teachers!!

Lots of wintery activities.

I have been a busy busy bee. As soon as the weekend hit my brain exploded in fun winter ideas and part of me is getting excited for break to be over so I can start having fun with my kiddos. Only part of me though, the other part is soaking up all these lazy mornings and late nights with friends and family :)

Here's some things I've been working on:
My winter math books are done. My kids did great with the christmas set so I decided to make a winter set as well to reinforce some of those skills that may have floated out of their brains a bit over the long break :)  Click the picture to find it in my store.

I also finished my winter interactive emergent readers. I think it's so funny that I live in Florida but spend most of January teaching about snowmen and winter clothes. Hopefully these will be a little more relevant to your kiddos if you are living ANYWHERE north of me haha

You can also grab those two along with my January Morning Work all together in my Winter Bundle.

Finally here's a freebie for you. A cute little emergent reader that goes through the steps to build a snowman :) Just click on the picture to grab your copy. Happy Monday everyone!!

January Morning Work

I hope you are all having a wonderful break with your loved ones. My break has been a mix of extreme stress and extreme bumming around my house haha. So so glad that we don't go back until January 8th! My brain is already starting to wander into planning mode and I FINALLY finished my January morning work. It is packed with 4 weeks of common core skills in both reading and math. Click on the pics to find it in my store.

 

There are no words

I'M ALIVE!! (and some Christmas freebies)

OH.MY.GOODNESS I cannot believe it is already almost halfway through December!! Life has been all KINDS of crazy this semester and I have neglected my poor innocent blog for far too long! We have been busy busy busy in my room getting ready for our Christmas program, making our big Christmas books (blog post about that to come when they are done!!) report card testing, and doing lots and lots of great learning. I have some random pictures to share from just some of the moments (when I remembered to snap pics) over the last few weeks.  AND a great freebie to share with you at the bottom :)


 This fun sight word center came from the Vicki Plant's fabulous Christmas Unit :)

 Super easy ornaments using pipe cleaners and pony beads. Great fine motor skills...plus the kids were SILENT at this center haha.

These next few are from my Christmas Math Books pack.

 This was another quick fix for a center when the copier broke last week. These reindeer were so simple but the kids loved making them and they turned out so cute :)

 Scrambled sight word book (one of the freebies at the bottom of the post :)

 OK I just discovered Maria Manore's (Kinder-craze) AMAZING interactive sight word readers and I am IN LOVE with them!! This was one of the pages from Do You See The Gingerbread Man. There are a TON more...go check out here store :)

 These are from my partner teacher's class from last Friday when we decorated gingerbread cookies. The hair on these gingerbread girls cracked me up! haha

 These next few activities are in my Christmas Ten Frames pack.

 This is also in one of the freebies below :)

And now for all my sweet followers 2 freebies. The first is a mini math pack to help you get through these last few crazy days. You can grab it below or in my store here.  I also have the scrambled sight word Christmas lights book below. There are blank pages at the end to program your own words :)

Christmas Freebie 1_merged Sight Word Christmas Lights
Have a great rest of the week everyone :) Don't forget to leave some love if you download!!