The Lovely Liebster Award

My Little Blog has been awarded the Liebster award from Cheryl at Crayons and Curls
Thank you so much Cheryl - this was such a nice surprise after a very tough week.

Here are my top 5 picks (sooooo many to choose from!)

1.  A Teeny Tiny Teacher - I love to read Kristin's posts - she always has me laughing!!!!!
2.  Growing Kinders  - awesome center ideas!!!!!
3.  Can Do Kinders - such great ideas and freebies!!!!!
4.  Kindergarten Works - love all of the wonderful organizational ideas
5   Kindergarten Rocks - so many wonderful ideas to use for workstations (so well organized)

Thanksgiving Feast

I know it is a little late to be posting about Thanksgiving, but sometimes it takes awhile to get those pictures off of the camera and downloaded to the computer.  Anyway, this year I am trying to make all of our classroom party treats of the healthy variety.  We made vegetable soup, homemade butter for our dinner rolls and ants on a log!  I will post our Christmas feast pictures soon.

Christmas Decor

Just a few pictures of our bulletin board and our adorable hanging snowmen!  We did the snowmen a little at a time for morning work.

My New Painting Easel

My wonderful hubby woked so hard on this all summer for my classroom.  How awesome is my new painting easel.  I love it!  It is on wheels so I can push it out of the way easily and it has storage on all sides along with drying racks on all sides.

Love Interactive Writing

Here is a picture of our latest wall stories.  The top one is our Thanksgiving Story and the bottom one is "How to Make a Scarecrow"

Name Charts

I have been introducing my class to "name charts".  They use these charts with student names (name with a picture) during workstation time.  They have a lot of fun using these - they lay them out on the carpet and have a great time inserting student name cards on the blank line and reading the text.

Little bit of Fall in the classroom

Just a few odds and ends pictures of how our classroom looked in the fall

This was done during interactive writing time.  It is our bulletin board right outside our classroom door.

My wonderful daughter painted the tree for me

We completed this fall poem during an interactive writing lesson as well.  This is our poem wall in our classroom.  It is used during read the room as well as our wall stories

Our cute little leaf men!  So Cute!

Latest Wall Story

Here is our latest wall story that we wrote together about the life cycle of a pumpkin.  We completed this wall story just a few days prior to our field trip to the pumpkin patch!

You can see our next wall story that we are working on "How to Build a Scarecrow" 

Halloween Fun

We had a great time last Monday celebrating Halloween.  This year I decided to try something a little bit different.   I did not have a designated party time.  Instead we played fun educational games all day long!  Here is just a quick look at what we did!

We did  a fun CVC activity with pumpkins.  We pulled small plastic pumpkins out of two bags (one for the consonants and one for the vowels) We put the pumpkins together to create a CVC word and then recorded them on our sheet. We had fun blending the sounds together to create a word.  Some real and some where make-believe!  Great practice for Dibels!

We played pumpkin bingo (of course - what is a celebration in the classroom without bingo!!)

We played this fun build a pumpkin game with pattern blocks that came from Mathwire

We played this fun candy corn game.  I found this on a blog -   We used two dice with dots and practiced counting up all of the dots and then eating that piece of candy corn that was on that number.  Was great at first, but a few got tired of eating the very very sweet candy corn.  I think I will used M&M's next year - easier on the tummy!

We had an amazing feast.  Each student brought in one piece of fruit of their choice to contribute to our "Frightenly Fun Friendship Fruit Salad"  and we had amazing pumpkin muffins and apple juice!

After our feast of yummy food we had our annual Halloween Parade around the school.  This is always a big hit.  The fire department always comes with thier fire truck (they are basically across from the school) and our high school, that is right next to us, has a few of their band members come out and lead the parade with music, but sadly they could not make it this year :(   And all of the neighborhood folks come out to wave at us.  We ended the day with a great Halloween movie!

A Little Of This and A Little Of That

Hard to believe that the first nine weeks of school is already completed and I have hardly posted at all (I seem to always forget my camera)!  Here is just a few snippets of what we have  been doing.

Here is our apple tree graph.  I got this idea from Mrs. Jump's class (thanks!!)

 

This was our pumpkin glyph - turned out really cute!

Here is our data that we collected from our glyph

Just a few pictures of some of our stations that we have been doing:

Sorting "A" and "M" pictures

Roll count and color pumpkins 

I have several of these "roll count and color" activities that I use for a math tub.  Just about every theme you can think of and I would love to have these for a freebie for all of you. but every time I load them into my google docs they come out distorted - the squares don't show up and the pictures are not there either and the font that I use changes to another font.  Any ideas on how to fix that so that I can post all of my roll count and colors for all of you???

This was my small group math activity a few weeks ago.  I would show the group a number card and they were to "show" that number on their ten frame.  They would then check their neighbor to make sure that they had the correct amount of counters shown.  Then they were to write the number in the box and color that many counters in their ten frame on the paper.  This went really well!

This was an activity that I saw on someones blog ( I am so sorry I do not remember where I got it form, if it is yours send me a note and I will give you credit!!)  I changed it a little.  I added two more legs and then changed the numbers to be 2 thru 9.  They were to pull a number tile out of a bag.  Say the name of the number.  Find it on the spider's leg and cover it with a counter and then write it on the recording sheet.  When all the legs were covered we cleared the board and started over.  This was great practice for number identification and practicing writing the numbers.

Here is another roll count and color - this time it is SPIDERS!!!

I love to do pattern block pictures every week.  If I can't find one to match my theme then I create one.  I also have my students complete a graph with these pattern block pictures.  I will take a picture of it soon and post it!

Oh never mind!!!  Here it is - I have it printed on the back side of the pattern block picture.

This is a game that I  believe came from Shari Sloane's website.  I love this game and I am in the process of making one just like it for "one less"  I will take pictures of that and post it as soon as I get it done.

Befuddled with ABC order

Her is my problem: my students are required to get into abc order (by last name) for lunch and we have to do this on the playground due to coming into lunch from recess.  Now we have never had a problem before, but this year abc order seems to elude MANY of my students! My assistant (she is the one that is with them at recess and brings them in for lunch) is beside herself with trying and trying to get all 26 of our little active 5 year olds into a line that somewhat resembles our abc order list.  I will say that my class is a very young class and we seem to be very immature this year.  I know I know, as I type this I realize that using the word immature seems silly - I mean they are only 5 YEARS OLD for goodness sake, but by comparison from years past and to the other 3 classrooms, my class seems to be wondering the playground with a confused look on their faces when we ask them to get into abc order or for that matter other tasks as well.  We have practiced and practice to no avail.  Does anyone out there in blogger town have any advice before a teacher and an assistant pull out all of our hair!!!!!  We need  HELP!

What an Amazing First Month of School!

I have neglected my simple little blog for way too long.  It has been a very busy and crazy first month of school.  I have a few pictures to post to show you what we have been doing.  

We had so much fun making shapes in shaving cream.  The room smelled so clean!!!!!!

 

A few pictures of our work stations:

Rolling playdough snakes to make color words and letters.

 Sorting letters by straight, curves and both, and also by capitals and lowercase - this is an activity from Lakeshore

These wonderful stuffed letters were my amazing find at a garage sale this summer.  I got the whole set for a few dollars.  I ran colored pictures on card stock, laminated and voila an instant workstation that my kiddos have been loving!

Rainbow writing.  This has also been a well-loved work station.  They love to use the markers!  I need to find a different way to bind the books together next year though!  The books are too thick to stay together with the staples.  I either need to bind with combs, which I don't want to do, or find longer staples!!

Of course the ever popular listening center with a response to literature sheet to go along with the story.  This is Chicka Chicka Boom Boom.

My poetry notebook workstation.  This workstation is one that I am very proud of.  Each student has a poetry notebook three-ringed binder.  Every Monday we introduce 2, or if I am ambitious 3,  new poems.  Then when it is there turn to go to the station they listen to me reading the poems in order that they are in their notebook.  When the tape is over they do the directions that are at the bottom of the poem such as circling the capital and lower case letters and they of course illustrate the poems.  Keeps my kiddos engaged for the duration of workstation time! Yeah!

Stamping names in playdough..  I have the letter stampers from Lakeshore - they are well worth the cost!

At the pocket chart workstation students were sorting letters into capitals and lowercase.  After they sorted they had a response sheet that went along with the center.  They were writing the letters that they sorted!

Computers - who doesn't love the computer workstation!  It was so amazing to show my kinders how to use the Starfall website on my amazing new document camera.  Let me tell you I am loving that little device!

This was the activity that my students did with my assistant in a small group.  They chose a card from the stack, identified the letter, found it on their sheet and colored the apple.  I honestly can not remember where I got this apple sheet, but I do know that it was from one of you wonderful bloggers.  If it is yours please let me know and I will give you credit and link it to your blog!!!!!