Treasures from the Dollar Tree

After reading so many of the wonderful teaching blogs out there, I went to the Dollar Tree today inspired. I found lots of great treasures that I can't wait to put into action.
These are my finds:

 I'm most excited about the coconut cup I found. I have found tons of awesome activities for Chicka Chicka Boom Boom on various blogs (I can't quite remember where I found them all. But they didn't come from my head.) I plan on reading this book the first week of school. The first things we're going to do with the coconut is count the letters that I'm going to put in there. We're going to pass the coconut around and when the music stops, that child has to count the letters in it. (Saw this spill cup idea on someone else's blog) We're also going to use some coconut matching cards I found over at  Peace Love and learning  and the coconut will be perfect for storing that game. I'm pretty excited about reading this book to my kids and all the activities to go with it.


I plan on using the popcorn containers for our sight words. We call them popcorn words. I'm thinking of having my talented sister draw me a big popcorn box for a bulletin board to post the popcorn words on. But we can use the container to pull out the words and probably make some kind of sight word game out of it. I might find a cool idea when I purchase Fran's at Kindergarten Crayon's sight word pack when she's done. (She has the best stuff!)


I also picked up some random things that I haven't quite found a purpose for yet but I'm sure I will. There were neat speech bubble die cuts, star die cuts, and cupcake die cuts. I found a stuffed caterpillar that goes with my theme of Busy Kindergartners. Some containers for dice and foam shapes that might become stamps after reading the fabulous ideas at

I was on the lookout today for materials to make a monkey necklace out of. Another teacher friend suggested making character necklaces to go with my Five Little Monkeys unit. If you have any suggestions for how I can do this I would appreciate it.