February recap

Happy Sunday friends :) I wanted to play catch up and share some things we have been working on for the last few weeks. Lots of pictures and ideas here but stick with me, there's a freebie at the end :)

I'm reaching way back to Valentine's Day first.

On the day AFTER Valentine's Day we had a TON of candy left over that I decided to put to good use. We did Hershey Kiss bingo. We are way past straight up abc bingo at this point but I didn't have any other boards handy so I just called out words and told them to find different sounds "what's the ending sound in cat?"  "what's the middle sound in box" ect.

 Then we moved on to using missing letters in words. They love these kinds of games and it's so good for making them think about the structure of words and where the sounds are.  And who doesn't love a game where you get to eat your bingo markers :)

Some fun with my February math books . For the first one we used MORE kisses to count up the first number and then count on to find the other number to make 10. Stay tuned for more seasonal math books coming soon :)

These kisses were inspired by the fabulous Julie Lee. We decided to add some tin foil on top of the brown paper. I also cut up rectangles of parchment paper and let the kids add their names (make sure you use sharpies or the ink will not stick!) ALSO, I recently discovered the idea of using small circle paper punchers to make white and black circles for eyes instead of googly eyes. OH MY GOODNESS I am obsessed with how cute they are making my crafts! :)

We made these giant Valentine's for our parents. They were HUGE and so fun to make. I have no idea where this idea came from originally.

Moving on to president fun, have I mentioned how much I am in LOVE with Maria Manore's interactive sight word readers?? They are only $1 each and I am still going to go broke in my quest to own them ALL.  The ones about George Washington and Abe Lincoln were perfect for introducing the presidents this week.

Kim Adsit is just brilliant. We have been loving her Presdients Unit. These Washington flap books were so cute and my kids did really really awesome with them :)

Some president fact writing with a directed drawing freebie I found here.

We have been working on base ten concepts with teen numbers. It's so easy to get confused with the difference between writing the teens "1 and 5" and MAKING them "10 and 5".  We used my teen number ten frame practice cards in our whole group lesson every day this week and that really helped them become more fluent with the vocabulary and concepts.  Then I gave the kids all a set of their own ten frames. After years ago our school printed and laminated class sets of these ten frames on different colors. I use these babies all the time, they are great. Each kid got a ten (I made this bigger and a different color than all the other cards to make it easy to distinguish) and then a set of 1-9 ten frames. On their write boards I had them build a teen number, tell me how they made it, and then write the number. It was a great concrete way for them to understand the concept of ten and ____  and the way that is different than the way we write the numbers.

Then we did this president book. Each page needed a number sentence and a set of ten frames. You can grab this freebie by clicking on the picture below. User tip: you MIGHT want to cut up the ten frame and number sentence pages in half (1-5 is on top). Give them 1-5 of ten frames and number sentences and then give them the other numbers. Some of my littles got overwhemled with 2 pages and 20 squares to look at and keep track of :)

Click on the picture to grab this book!

Congrats for making it through all that. Have a great week :)

Sale tomorrow!!

Who doesn't love a sale?? TPT is throwing a Superbowl Sunday sale tomorrow! The site is offering a 10% discount (just enter the code SUPER at checkout) and my store will be 20% off for a total of 28%!!  Here are some new goodies that you can pick up over in my store.

Happy Shopping :)

Space fun.

Two blog posts in a row, look at me go!! We are loving our space unit so far. I'm only 2 days in and already so glad that this was one of the units that we scheduled to last for 2 weeks. Here's some things we have been working on.

Short u suns. This was a classic example of a day when I prep something and then lose part of it and don't find it until later. Just as we were starting to make our suns I couldn't find the orange rays so I improvised. Our neighboring class's suns turned out much cuter with their big orange rays :)

Pattern block rockets. 

We have started our space books. So far we have water colored our earths and sponge painted paper plates to make suns. 

Here's my example for the moon page (the idea came from my fabulous teaching partner). I have them glue beans down and then cover the beans with a circle of  aluminum foil to make the bumpy surface of the moon. You can grab the sentence pages here.

Tomorrow we are going to make these rockets. (This pic is from last year). I let them decorate their rockets however they want and then use the ten frames to "countdown" from 10 to 1. Add some tissue paper fire, attatch a string to the top and you have some awesome rocket kites. Fun stuff :)

I'll be back later in the week with more space fun and some 100th day action.

In other news, I have some new resources ready for February.  Click the pictures to head over to my store :)

Winter recap and moving on into outer space!!

Hi friends...I hope you all are living and teaching well! I cannot believe it's almost February. We started our space unit today getting ready for our field trip to the planetarium on Thursday...I could teach this unit for a month...we always have a blast with it! Before I get into our space stuff I'm going to do a photo dump of some of our wintery fun over the last few weeks. There's lots of pictures but also some freebies along the way :)

Cute name snowmen.

Short 0 hot chocolate mugs

Snowball painting with wine corks. This went so well! Giving 18 kids paint all at the same time always terrifies me a little bit but it went great and the wine corks created perfectly formed snowballs :) They are my new favorite art supply...a friend of mine bought me a whole box full for Christmas.

More snowman fun! We did this cute Snowman Buttons book from Shannon Martin at Kindergarten Hoppenings. Then we made these snowmen with pom pom buttons and they wrote their own number sentences.

One of our favorite fun Friday activities is sight word 4 corners outside in the atrium. The kids love this game! And living in Florida, we can do this in January :)

Some addition fun with hot chocolate. We worked together to write the addition sentences using the cards and then I gave them their own books and marshmallows to model the problems and find the answer. This was a blast (and of course they got to eat the manipulatives at the end :) You can grab a copy of this freebie here.

More fun with Deedee's January Poetry Stations.

Some good old snowmen painting. I thought this guy turned out hilarious!!

Snowman brace map writing. 

Some roll and write fun with counting on practice (grab these dice here). 

Some winter math books work with making 10.

Every year we read the book Snowballs by Lois Ehlert and then send the kids home with 3 paper plates to build and decorate a snowman with things they find around their house. I modified this a bit one afternoon when I had to sub for an after school art program last minute. I pulled out all kinds of random stuff from my art cabinet, cut some white die cut circles, and got these great little guys!

I ended up having to be out a few days last week and our penguin unit never really got off the ground which was SO sad and depressing to me. These guys really turned out great though. I love art projects where I just give them paper and say "Make me a ___"  How funny is that guy in the middle??

I will be back later this week to share some space fun. Happy Monday everyone :)

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!!