Long Weekend and a freebie

We had a four day weekend and I should have gotten a lot more done. I was really lazy on Friday and didn't feel all that great. But we stayed busy Saturday and Sunday. My hubby is a boy scout leader. This is one of the things that I really love about him. He was an Eagle Scout himself and just took over the troop about a year ago. We had a ceremony for four boys to cross over from the cub scout pack into the boy scout troop. I was not only very proud of my hubby for being a part of this but it was neat because 3 out of the 4 boys I have known since they were in kindergarten and one of them was in my class for kindergarten and first grade. Sot it was neat to see how they have grown up. This is one of the things I love about living and working in a small community. Sunday we spent most of the day with church related stuff. My hubby and I are youth leaders and our youth group was singing at a a benefit concert. Last night I finally got around to doing a few things on my to do list. One of those was to make a place value write the room. I had one in my winter math workstations pack but I wanted to update the clipart to be non seasonal. I have some great new clipart from Ashley Hughes. After making this activity, I think I'm going to make a whole math unit using some cat and dog clipart. My kids are obsessed with pets.

Click here to get your copy of the freebie. 
I hope you can use this freebie. I plan on using it this week. My kids need some more practice with place value. I didn't get much done today either. I still have quite a few things on my to do list. I spent the day with my mom, sister and niece. We had a lot of fun shopping and hanging out. My two year old niece Sophie is a mess. I did get one other project finished this weekend. It's my alphabet soup pack. These are foldable books and graphic organizers for each letter.

Check it out on TPT here.  I hope you had a good weekend even if it wasn't a long one. It's time to get back to the grind tomorrow. Our next break is Spring Break which is the first week in April.
I'm linking up with
Classroom Freebies Manic Monday.

It's been too long!

I haven't posted anything all week and it feels so weird. I spent Sunday and Monday night camping in the Great Smoky Mountains with my wonderful boyfriend. But I had no phone or internet for a few days and then spent the rest of the week trying to catch up from being out. I had big plans of getting caught up on my blogging yesterday but got sucked into pinterest instead. I just keeping pinning and pinning. It's crazy.
I can't really tell you anything we did last week. It was a whirlwind of just trying to get through with the insanity of Halloween looming over our heads. I did a terrible job with transportation and trucks. We just hit the high points.
Monday we're not allowed to have a Halloween party for the first time ever. We're a K-8 school and it is so distracting to the other grade levels to have the whole Halloween hoopla. But I don't anticipate getting too much done on Monday. We're going to read Stellaluna and do some activities about bats. We're also going to work on the -at word family a little bit. I'm working on a word family activity.  By the afternoon, I don't expect to be able to do anything so I'm hoping that my teaching friend will have The Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown for us to watch. I think I have some Scooby Doo and maybe Garfield Halloween to watch.
The rest of the week we're going to be working on the letter i and doing an author study on Mo Willems. I'm really excited about this author study. I've seen so many good ideas on pinterest and other blogs. If you haven't checked out his website you should.
http://www.pigeonpresents.com/index.aspx
There is a great pigeon teaching guide that has a lot of good ideas for using the pigeon books. I was a little frustrated though because I was trying to find the guide to drawing pigeon on the Hyperion Children's book website and instead kept being taken to the Disney books website. So if anyone knows how to get to that I would appreciate it greatly. We're going to be doing some writing using the pigeon character. You'll have to check back later this week to see how it turns out.
So while camping, we went bike riding. I'm really not a great bike rider. I didn't really ride much when I was a kid on a real bike. So I'm learning as an adult. I really enjoy riding my bike though. There were some places where I had to walk my bike up hills and we were on a road with a lot of traffic (It's Cades Cove. If you are familiar with this area, you'll understand). It was making Chris really nervous so he finally just sat me down on a pull off and biked on to get the car. I had to wait for about an hour for him to come back to my rescue. So I got a little bored. First I worked on singing the 50 states song. I use to know it really well but it turns out I was leaving like 15 states out. I finally got all 50 states in while waiting. I'm sure I looked like a nut sitting on the side of the road singing to myself. After I tackled that song, I started thinking of other songs I could sing using the sight words of the week. Our sight word for the week, was see which made me think of Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do you see? So while sitting on the side of the road, I came up with the Smoky Mountain version of Brown Bear with animals found in the park. I am working on a power point of the story that I hope to have ready to share this week. So check back. Meanwhile, I've got a few other things to share.
Letter book for t and i
t flipchart (You must have activeinspire software to open)
sight word stamping sheet
If you find something you can use, please leave me a little comment love. I love getting comments. Here a couple of pictures from the beautiful mountains I live in. It has been a gorgeous fall.

P is for Pumpkin

P flipchart

P book

Pumpkin Glyph Activity

If you use any of activities or freebies, please leave a comment. It's nice to know someone is using what I'm working on. 

Flipcharts for the Letter A

I'm loving making these flipcharts that follow along with our reading series and practice the skills needed. This week I'm having the students complete a flipchart during their center time as well. I'm pretty excited and I hope it works out well. Up until now, they've just been using a website www.starfall.com during center time. But I took our sorting pages we've already completed and added them into a flipchart. Here a couple of tips for making charts like this for yourself:

• I use microsoft word to find my pictures. You can use the shared resources/my resources as part of the promethean software. But I've found it difficult to search when I'm looking for something specific. I can search better using word. So then I just copy from that document and past into my flipchart. The reading series we use has picture cards that go with it. So I use their ideas for pictures to sort and just search for them. 
• You can use the camera tool to capture any picture you want on the internet. I've found that copying to the clipboard works best for copying and pasting into the flipchart. The camera tool is found under tools.
• You can insert any media you want into a flipchart. Go under insert and then media. I've put a lot of the music we use and the cds that came with the reading series into my music files. I just have to insert the clip and it is already in the flipchart. 
• To insert pages from a flipchart you've already created into a new flipchart is very easy. Open the new flipchart and the flipchart that you want to copy from. Go under view and choose show browsers. The first icon on this tool is the one that shows all the pages in your flipchart. You click on the page you want and drag it to the title of the other flipchart on the top of the page. This will put that page into your new flipchart. 

I hope these tips and charts are helpful. If you download my charts or use my tips, I would love some feedback. It means a lot to me that someone else can use what I've created.
Click on title of chart to download.
Letter A flipchart                          Flipchart sorting for centers

Side note: I finally have a blog button. Thanks to Ms. M at



I used her post on TBA but couldn't get the html right. I commented on her post and she got right back to me. I emailed her my code and she fixed it for me. So a big thank you to Ms. M!

Literacy Center Update

I'm participating in the linky party over at Clutter-free Classroom. Click back to check out the other peeks into their classroom. 

We started literacy and math center this week and it went really well. Of course it probably helps that 6 of my 17 students are out of the room at this time. I was worried because we've only had free choice centers up to this week and I wasn't sure how they would take being told what center to go to. On the second day of centers, one student told me he loved doing these activities. Which made me really happy. Now that I'm into them I see some changes that I'm going to have to make. My center work board is not very user friendly and some of my signs need to be redone. I have some centers in baskets and the signs were too big for the baskets. So with my favorite thing, scrapbook paper, I redid the signs and used the kids' pictures to show where they needed to go. (see my post http://mskerriandherkrazykindergarten.blogspot.com/2011/09/im-so-excited.html to see what they looked like.)This summer when I was originally planned some of these centers I wanted to have 8 centers that I traded out the activities done in the centers. I was going to have an alphabet center, sight word center, writing, math exploration, math game, promethean board, reading (this would include listening and big books) and computer. But I've rethought this a bit. This is what I'm thinking now:

• Stamping center - practice sight words
• Play doh center - currently we're working on letters. But we could do numbers and words.
• Writing
• math exploration
• Math game
• Reading
• Promethean
• Computer
• Listening
• Art

I also like the sensory tubs and fine motor centers I've been seeing so I might include those too. I'm working on teaching them the centers and will add one new one a week. This week we've been working on stamping, play doh, math exploration, computer and promethean board.  I would like eventually for them to do 2 a day but we just can't make that work right now.
I had decided this summer I wanted to have letter parties each week for our letter of the week. In reality, I think it's going to be fun center activities on Fridays. So, we're had some monster m centers this Friday. One center was a matching game found on someone's blog that I can't currently locate. They made their own monsters out of construction paper. They turned out really cute. An m book that I made. They had to use our circle graph from the week to complete the book. The last one was covering a M in marshmallows. They had a lot of fun. I'll be posting my A activities hopefully next Monday with a flipchart and apple/Aa centers. So check back.
Hers are some of their activities. They turned out cute.