Peek at my Week

We had a great week last week learning all about pets. I hope to be back to share some of what we did and a new unit I'm working on soon. I have enjoyed my weekend big time and not working on school stuff at all until Sunday rolls around. It's so nice. Yesterday Chris and I headed to Cades Cove and had a picnic. It was a beautiful day out in the cove. Here's a pic I instagramed.

In about an hour I'm going to have girls from our youth group over to start a new girls ministry. I'm pretty excited about it so this is going to be a quick post. I'm linking up again this week with Mrs. Wills for her Peek at My week Linky.

You'll notice I've abandoned math workstations for now and have incorporated math into my literacy centers. I just can't get two different rounds going yet so I'm going to try this out.
Be sure to download the plans to access the links and freebies that are in the plans. Click here to download. 

This is week is all about apples and the 5 senses. We're suppose to go on a field trip on Thursday to the National Park. Hopefully the government will get their act together so we can still go.

Be sure to head over to DeeDee's blog and see what everyone else is up to this week.
I'm off to get cheese dip made and salsa out. Happy Sunday Friends! I would love to hear from you if you download my plans.

Peek at My Week

So maybe eventually I blog more than once a week with my visual plans but not currently. I have some ideas for some posts so hopefully this week I'll be back with a great math lesson we had this week.
Anyway, I'm linking up with Mrs. Wills for her linky party.

Remember to get to the links and freebies you have to download the link from google docs. Click here. There are a couple of freebies in my plans.

 My workstation plans are the same as last week. I try to do my literacy stations for 2 weeks and then I haven't been able to get a handle on math stations yet. I am having a hard time fitting them it. But I keep writing it down in hopes that I'll get to it.
Be sure to head over the Deedee's blog and check out everyone else's peek at their week.

A Peek at My Week and a freebie or two

I had this already to go yesterday but I had left my hard drive at school which had my freebie on it. I'm exhausted this Monday so I'm just going to share my plans with you. Remember that you have to download the plans from google docs to get the freebie.
I'm linking up with Mrs. Wills Kindergarten.

Click Here to download my plans and get access to the freebies. 

Be sure to head over to Mrs. Wills Kindergarten to see what others have planned this week.

Five for Friday on Saturday

I'm so happy for a Saturday this weekend. I enjoyed our weekend away last week but it is nice to be at home and not have any real plans either. I'm wish I had been able to sleep in but my brain was way too full. There are some things going on with our community and the sale of some land connected with our school. I have no control over any it so it doesn't do any good to worry about it. But it was going over and over in my mind this morning. Anyway, I'm linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching for her 5 for Friday linky party.

I actually took several pictures this week which is amazing. Of course most of them are during center time because that's the only time I have a chance to take pictures. My literacy stations are going pretty well, Next week we're going to try 2 rotations a day. Math is a different story. I think I have them all taught now so hopefully they'll be able to do them this week. My biggest issues is that we do them in the afternoon after rest time. It is a little too rushed. I'm going to try a different schedule this week and see if that helps.
Anyway, here are some pictures from the week:

1. Sunset Sunday night. We were still at the beach on Sunday so I took this picture of the night sky. It was a great and relaxing trip (at least for me. Chris was busy in meetings.) Sunday was really nice. We spent most of the day at the pool.

2. Literacy center pictures:

 Our writing station has been focused on writing their names. I used an editable kit from Maggie at Maggie's Kinder Corner for the writing part. They had to make their names out of magnetic letters first.

Computer station is working on starfall.com. We're still working on how we work together in centers. It cracks me up that they are so far away from each other.

3. Math Stations:

 I finally got these pipe cleaners and beads together for this station. I cut a pipe cleaner in half and labeled them with masking tape. I used numbers 1-10 and made 2 of each number.

I introduced roll and cover games to the kids last week and they loved them. So this week I used these nursery rhymes ones from Jennifer Knopf. They are a freebie so check it out. They love this game. I think a couple of them might be ready for 2 dice.

3. Field Trip:
We had our first field trip this week. We have a partnership with the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and every grade level K-8 goes on at least 3 park trips a year. The first one is Kindergarten helps get them familiar with the park and what jobs park rangers do. They got to see the rescue equipment and the cars.

This is one of my friends' kid. They all got to climb through the backseat.

4. Math Time

I bought Deanna Jump and DeeDee Wills's new math unit, Guiding Kinders: Math Workshop Unit 1 this past weekend. This picture is from one of the activities in it, Match it. The kids picked out a number and built a tower. Then their partner had to build a matching tower. The kids had a blast.

5. Friday was payday, iced coffee Friday, and 2 pm dismissal due to a car show.

Of course, somehow I still didn't leave school until like 5:45. But I got a lot of stuff printed out, laminated, copied and plans done for next week.
Be sure to head over to Doodle Bugs Teaching to check out the other Five for Fridays.
I had planned on being back tomorrow with my visual plans but I left my hard drive at school and I had a freebie so we'll see. I would love a little love!

Promethean Board Ideas - Recycled Post

I have been racking my brain trying to come up with something to blog about it and I have a few ideas but no energy to blog. So I'm reposting an old post from last fall. It has all my promethean charts in one place. So check it out! If you have some things you'd like to see me blog about leave me a comment.


I have had a really hard time getting back into blogging since school started. It has been so hard to  balance everything. On top of school, I feel like Chris and I are so busy all the time. He's a boy scout leader and a youth leader. I help with the youth and also teach a class on Wednesday nights. We just started a Sunday school class for young adults. I'm really not sure how we're going to balance everything when we decide to start a family. Then on top of all this I've had jury duty and dealing with my knee issues. It looks like I'm going to have surgery the week before Thanksgiving on my ACL. We went yesterday to get a second opinion and although I'm still not going to be able to run, I feel a lot more positive about it all. I'll be out of school at least a week and on crutches probably close to 6 weeks. They gave me the crutches last night and I'm suppose to be practicing with them.( I got tired of being at school and just stopped this post yesterday afternoon.)
This is Wednesday now. This is my third go on writing this post. I'm determine to get it written today. I haven't been blogging like I would like. I like to blog about ideas and things that are going on in my classroom. I don't think I've done that much lately. But I was happy to see that pictures from my blog are being pinned and I'm getting some traffic on some older posts. So I've tried to revamp some of those posts and ideas. I reblogged about apple week activities on Smedley's Smorgasboard of Kindergarten blog on Monday. You can check that out here. I offered a freebie so you might want to head over there when you finish reading this post.
Another topic that gets a lot of traffic on my blog is my promethean board posts.  I love my board. I don't know how I ever taught without it. I use it for everything. Last year when I was in kindergarten I created a chart to go with every letter. I have a couple to share with you if you are interested.
Flipchart on the letter A
Flipchart on the letter M
Flipchart for the letter P
Flipchart for the letter S
Flipchart for the letter T
I also use my promethean board to do calendar each day. This is my kindergarten one you can check out.
Calendar flipchart for Kindergarten In first grade I do things a little different. So I'll have to post again and share some of my resources for first grade.
Here's a flipchart that I use for literacy centers. They are pages taken from my letter charts for the week.
Center flipchart

Hopefully this will help someone out. I'm always getting emailed about my flipcharts and now you can get all of them from this post. I'll be back next week with a post on first grade flipcharts.
I hope to be back later this week with some information about reading groups.
Let me know if these flipcharts help you out any.

Visual Plans for the Week and a freebie

I am probably crazy for spending the past hour or so working on these when I could be out soaking up the sun. But I wanted to do it. I am trying to stick with this linky party and it helps me get a little more organized for the week. Since I'm going to be out on Monday I need all the organization I can get. (I just realized I didn't print out and copy homework for next week. Whoops.)
So I'm linking up with Mrs. Wills for her weekly party.

Remember you must download the plans from the google doc to get the links to work. These are just picture files. Click here to download.

Last week was my first week of literacy stations and it went really well to have the play and learning centers mixed together. We're only doing one rotation a day so it'll take us 2 weeks or so to get through them. I'm hoping after this week we'll be able to try out doing 2 rotations.
I didn't too much with the math workstations as rotations but did get the games introduced so I'm hoping this week we'll actually be able to do some stations.
Be sure to click on the plans. I have a freebie in there for an easy peasy dice game and I've linked to several freebies from Jennifer at Herding Kats in Kindergarten.
I had a request to share my template for my plans. I was going to work on it today but the sun is calling my name so I'll be back later this week to share it. (It'll give me something to blog about)
Be sure to head over to DeeDee's party!
Here's a couple of pictures from St. Simon's Island.

Five for Friday

I think I have linked up with Doodle Bugs Teaching maybe once or twice for this very fun party, Five for Friday. I'm so excited to be linking up today. I actually remembered to take a few pictures from my week. Plus I'm off school today so I had time to blog. Chris has a conference for work in St. Simon's Island in Georgia so I used a couple of personal days and tagged along with him. As soon as I get this post written I'm headed to the pool overlooking the ocean.

So here are my pictures from the week:

1. Last night was open house at school. It was a long day but I enjoyed getting to know some of my families better. I have my kids for 2 years so it is nice to get to know the families really well. I had about 6 families come by. One of my sweet little girls brought me this bag of seeds. She was taking the seeds out a bell pepper and wanted to bring me the seeds. So she did. That's what I love about kindergarten. You get very thoughtful and random gifts.  

2. Last year I bought some of these zipper document folders from Big Lots. I thought I would use them to store centers or activities in and I never did. But I bough more at Big Lots this summer. So as I was working on organizing some things last week I pulled these out. I'm using them to store: stuff to copy, to laminate, today's work, writing center materials, word work materials, and then I used 2 to store everything my sub would need. I'm loving them except I can't seem to peel the label off them. If I could I would make a prettier label. But they are very functional even if they aren't pretty. This one is my word work activities. Right now I have mixed my play centers and my learning centers. It worked well. I worked with a group on word work and an assistant worked with a group for writing. In word work we did some letter matching and in writing they worked on their names. Then I have a group at the reading corner, computer, home center, blocks, imagination station and sensory table. I paired them up because 2 is about all I can handle working together. Currently they are going to one station a day. I hope to get them going to 2 after this week. I also need to change some partners up. 

3. We made our first graph this week. We have been learning about colors so I used this activity I had gotten in Fran Kramer's Pete the Cat unit. They colored  shoe their favorite color. My favorite color is purple. I'm not surprised several of my girls picked that color too. 

4. More Pete the Cat fun. We've been working on recognizing, counting and writing our numbers 1-10 for the past 2 weeks. I introduced them to roll and cover games. They played by themselves for this first round. They did well and we're engaged so I think it was a success. This game is from Little Miss Kindergarten. (I looked and looked for the freebie on her blog but I couldn't find it)

 5. I'm not above bribing kids. The last time I was in kindergarten, I read a post over at Deedee Wills blog about quick treats and every since them I've used them a ton. I usually use some kind of seasonal candy or m and ms. But with all my food allergies I have in my room, I'm using skittles. It amazes me how thrilled kids are with one skittle.

So that's my Five for Friday! Leave a comment and let me know how your week went. We're diving into our math and reading series next week and have our first field trip. I am going to try to be back with a Peek at my week but we will see. Head over the Doodle Bugs Teaching.
I'm headed to the pool with my kindle (and maybe the book Conscious Discipline)