Now that I am back in the land of the living it is starting to sink in that I AM ON SUMMER BREAK :) Ahhhhhh such a great feeling!! I still have 2 more days to be at school this week, but I don't care, the kids are home until August!! Wednesday is one final dose of Common Core training before the summer, and tomorrow is our post planning day ( which is basically just make sure all your ducks are in a row and clean up your room day). I'll be spending most of it cleaning and organizing my room but NOT PACKING!! I was very excited (and relieved) to find out on Thursday that I will be returning to teach Kindergarten AND I'm in the same room. The month of May is a stressful one in the life of an annual contract teacher, and this year was especially hard with many of us returning, but many of us finding out that there "are no positions available". What a sad way to end the year :(
But on the bright side I am overjoyed not to be changing rooms. Last year I never got around to renting a storage unit so the contents of my classroom were spread across 3 garages and most of my dining room. No good. Much more to come on some of my new organizing and decorating ideas for my room...Pinterest is a beautiful thing :)
For now, I am linking up again with Classroom Freebies and sharing another ocean freebie. I hope this will be helpful for those of you still struggling through those last few days of school! I just cannot get enough of these cute ocean buddies from KPM Doodles!! (PS. Everything in my store is still 20% off today in celebration of Memorial day!!)
Hi friends!! I'm finally starting to feel alive again. I spent most of the last week in school fighting a cold and Friday I officially lost the fight. It's a miracle that I made it through the day. I've been completely out of it since then...what a way to start summer!!
I'm linking up with Kindergarten lifestyle and throwing a Memorial Day sale in my store today and tomorrow. Everything is 20% off :)
Have a great holiday weekend...we are having a tropical storm down here in Florida!!
Today was my last Monday of the year and tomorrow is our last full length day!! I will probably be at school well into next week packing up and doing post planning Common Core meetings but I don't care...summer is within my sights :)
I snagged this adorable little Kindergarten Memory Book from Jennifer Elliot this weekend.
In the midst of performance practices, field days, talent shows, and movie parties,(not to mention giant wolf spiders that have started invading our rooms) we started working on the memory books today and they are turning out SO CUTE! I was CRACKING UP at the drawings and sentences about their teacher. Most of my kids drew me in a purple dress (my favorite color is purple, yes but I think I have worn a dress to school MAYBE once this year...maybe). I got a lot of "My teacher is pretty" (Gold star for those kids) "My teacher is a princess" (Two gold stars haha), but my favorite by far was "She is our boss".
I can't wait to see the rest of the pages that we do tomorrow. Click here to find the book in Jennifer's store...it's on sale for a dollar!!
And while you are there don't forget to check out my Summer Skills Pack :)
FINALLY, since I didn't want to miss out on the Manic Monday fun, here's is one last ocean freebie :)
It was totally not my intention to create one of these packs, but I was going through report cards this weekend thinking about my littles who will be leaving me so soon and I started thinking that I wanted them to have something just to help them reinforce their skills over the summer so they are at least a little more fresh in their minds come August. So I started throwing together some pages and before I knew it I had this:
I'll be honest, I created this solely with my class in mind with the skills that I knew they most needed to practice so this product might not be for everyone, but I decided to post it in my store just in case it could be useful to others as well.
We are all about mini books in my room so I made each week into a book. I figured that might be easier for my parents than keeping track of a calendar or a bunch of papers.
This is the free preview that shows the entire contents of one book. There are 8 books in all:
5 school days left until summer and this teacher is SO ready. I have been neglecting my poor little blog this week, and I'm currently fighting a headache and avoiding report cards so this is going to be short and sweet. But I did want to share a few pictures from the end of our dinosaur unit.
On Monday we finished up dinosaurs with some fun stations. My sand FINALLY dried so I was able to bury the pasta pieces and have the kids "dig them up". This was so funny to watch. Some of them were so meticulous about it...brushing off every last grain of sand before placing their "bone" in the right place on their sorting mat. They had to find enough of each bone in the sand before they could build their dino. I used jumbo shells for the skull, rotini for the spine, linguini for the ribs and mini pene to make the arms and legs. Apparently I didn't get a shot of the finished "T-Rex" but they turned out pretty cute.
They also got to make fossils using Play-doh and these great dinosaur skeletons I snagged from Amazon.
I forgot to snap a picture of the dinosaur directed drawing that they did at a third station but they turned out SO cool! I just found these on Making Learning Fun and I am going to print and laminate a bunch of them to use for next year!
I meant to share this earlier...my kids absolutely could not get enough of this song!! They were singing it to themselves during centers. (We did have to have a little talk about how the singer was not actually saying the "a" word...even I went scrambling for the mouse the first time I heard it haha)
OK that's all I have for now...like I said, short and sweet. I suppose I should get back to my report cards now.
Oh goodness is it going to be a busy 2 weeks. We are finishing up dinosaurs on Monday and then "diving" into oceans until the end of the year. Plus starting practices for our end of the year performance, CUM folders, finishing assessments, water field day and trying to wrangle 18 summer-crazy 5 and 6 year olds for 10 more days.
I am very excited to get into our ocean unit. Somehow I never made it to oceans last year. Tonight I am going to share some ocean morning work sheets. I shared a farm version of these a few weeks ago. These make great skill reviews in the morning. I usually put a reading one on one side and a math one on the other side. I hope you find them useful :)
