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.

Randomness and a Freebie

I have been racking my brain since Sunday to try to come up with a real topic for blogging on and I've come up with nothing. Nada. So here I am with a random hodge podge of stuff.
I have about a month before school starts back and really sooner than that I need to head to my classroom. I don't even know if I can get in my room yet. Usually I head back into the classroom in the month of July. I'm a weirdo. I like working in my room before school starts because there is no pressure. I can work on projects and if I feel like leaving I can. It is time for me to start thinking about what I want to do in my classroom and the next school year.
I'm planning on using bright colors in my classroom. I created a decor set all in rainbow colors to use this year. You can check it out on TPT. It is my first editable item. It was a lot of fun to make and I can't wait to get all ready for my room.

Here's the link on TPT

I realized while laying in bed the other night that I still needed name tags and tags for cubbies. I usually use a placemat for the name tags that has letters, numbers, colors, and such on it. But I won't use those until the second six weeks. (You can find a freebie of that on my facebook page under fan freebies tab.) So I made a freebie to share with you. 

Click here to go to the freebie. 

Mondays I keep my almost 3 year old niece. We have a blast together and I get to "teach" her. Yesterday we played Hi Ho Cherrio.

I don't think I had played this game since I was a kid. I was so impressed that my niece was able to play the game. I had to interpret the spinner some for her but she was able to count the fruit off her tree or out of her basket. Of course she also had fun just taking all the fruit and putting in her shell from the beach. But it got me thinking. This game would be perfect for beginning of the year math workstations. It practices counting, one to one correspondence and just playing a game. I'm definitely going to be finding this game for my classroom. 

We also had a lot of fun with pipe cleaners and beads. We made bracelets but again there was a lot of learning to be had. There was counting, sorting and then fine motor skills. It reminded me of this pin that I found on pinterest. 

I'm definitely going to be setting this one up for the first rotations. Looks pretty simple to get going and good for the kids to practice counting and some fine motor skills.

So those are my random thoughts for today. I spent part of my day with a family from school whose son has brain cancer. I asked for prayers back in January but I thought I'd share again. Please pray for this 12 year old boy and his family. I am so amazed by the strength his parents have had through this all. 

Monday Monday - Freebie

I am going stir crazy being at home. It is so hard to just be at home alone. Chris's dad has been in from Africa since October and they are going back in a week or so. So he's been spending a lot of time with them. I haven't been able to do some of the things and I just haven't been up to it. I'm recovering well from my surgery. In physical therapy today they said I was way ahead of schedule. So I'm feeling good about that. Just bored. I spent part of today talking to my assistant at school about truancy issues. Then I spent another part of the day catching up on celebrity lives. I now know where the stars of The Hills are. I caught up with Kourtney Kardashians new baby. I also got to read about Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds wedding. Thanks to my teaching bff. She brought me some trashy mags and dvds last week. I also have been creating. Last week when I was at my parents I didn't have my laptop and more importantly didn't have my external hard drive which has all my clip art on it. But I was definitely inspired by some of the fun holiday clipart I've acquired. I've got two of my activities posted and hope to get the rest posted today. But it might be tomorrow with cyber monday going on. The first is 4 math workstation activities called Mistletoe math. I blogged about it the other day. The second that I got posted is Deck the Room. It's a write the room activitiy.

You can check this file out here.
But I have a freebie for you from this file. It's the short and long a write the room with a recording sheet. I hope you enjoy it.

I'm linking up at Classroom Freebies for Manic Monday. Be sure to check out the other freebies.

I've been doing some cyber monday shopping today on TPT. What did you buy?

Friday Freebies and other random ideas

Last night was the last day of VBS. It's been a lot of fun but I'm glad it's over. I have been exhausted. I enjoyed being in the nursery with the little ones. Especially my sweet niece Kaley. Most of the little ones were 2 and that is such a fun age. Chris and I might have gotten a little teasing about me working in the nursery and when we might have a little one of our own. Since we've only been married a little over a month, I think we have some time. Although while I was at McKay's, a local used bookstore, I found a book called Our teacher's having a baby. I got it because I figured someone could use it and I will hopefully use it one day. I had it sitting on my desk at school because I wasn't sure where to put it when organizing my library. I thought about it and realized that I should put away or there would be all kinds of rumors going around school. So hopefully I put it away in time and no rumors will be started.
I've been spending some time on my computer this week trying to get a few random things done. I love the birthday balloons I've seen on blogs and on pinterest. That's what I did for my students' last year. Since I have the same kids this year, I needed a new idea. While I was cleaning out my treasure box, I found some bubbles. I have 12 so hopefully I can find some more next week. I think they came from the target party supplies. I made some labels to go on them. They just say Have a bubbly birthday. I have them as part of a freebie at the end of the post. I plan to have pictures of completed projects for my Made it Monday Post.

I have had this pin on my summer project to do list all summer. I finally decided to start working on it. When I went to the link for the picture, I found the freebies at Tattling to the Teacher. But they didn't fit my theme or the things I needed. So made some tags for my own. I would show you pictures of a completed project but I don't have a printer at home. So Tuesday when I'm able to go to school, I'll finish up this project. This freebie is at the end of the post too.
Another project I've been working on is my teacher binder. There are tons of these out there. I'm including a freebie that I made using Erin Bradley papers. I would love to make you a cover sheet of your own. If you are interested, just leave me a message and I'll be glad to email you one. Here's your freebie of the things I've talked about. Click here to download from dropbox. Please leave me some comment love if you download my freebies. I guess I need to get back to work on some units. I'm linking up with Friday Freebies at TBA. Be sure to check out all the great freebies.

Classroom update

So this week, I finally ventured into my classroom. It's probably a little earlier than I usually go in but I want to reorganize and inventory my classroom library. It's a pretty big project so I wanted to give myself time to work on it. So Tuesday, I went into my room and started sorting all my books. I put them in as many categories as I could with authors, characters, and subjects. I discovered that I do not have as many non fiction books as I would like. But I'm thinking of creating my first donor's choose project to try to get more nonfiction books. Anyway, after I made my piles, I made a list of all the categories I had made. I also started scanning in some of my books into the app Classroom Organizer. It's a web based service to inventory all your books. Check it out here. I can add books with an app on my phone by scanning the ISBN number. Not all books will scan in, especially the scholastic ones that I got through book orders. A lot of those don't have bar codes. But you can type in the book. What I like is that I can see the lexile, ar level and points and guided reading level for the books. I've only gotten a small portion scanned or entered in. It is a little tedious and I can only work on it for a little while. I went home and made labels for all my categories. Some of them I combined into favorite authors or favorite characters if I only had 2 or 3 of one. I also made some labels for my monthly tubs that I keep all the books and activities to go with it. If you would be interested in these labels you can get them by clicking here. I don't know that I suggest doing them the way I did. I printed them out and then cut them out and mounted them on scrapbook paper and laminated them. Here's a picture of them all laminated and in need of cutting out.

This is a picture of all my baskets. I still need a few more baskets for books. But I'm kind of a spending halt. But you'll have to read about that tomorrow on my Friday finds.The next step next week will be to attach the labels to the baskets and get the baskets on shelves. I'm hoping I have enough shelves. I'm trying to give up some of my space and make the room more the kids' space. I plan to punch holes in the cards and use zipties to attach the labels to the basket. I'll take pictures when I'm finished. I still haven't decided exactly how I want to the label the books so they know what basket they put the books back into. I've used color stickers before but that didn't work. I'm really going to have work on modeling and modeling on keeping the library in order. I didn't feel like I had accomplished much with all the library stuff because I just kept making a bigger and bigger mess. So I worked on my bulletin boards some. I wanted to try out the tissue paper borders I saw on Classroom DIY.  I'm really trying to focus on the colors red, black and blue. I don't want to redo everything I already have like my clipchart but I did recover my bulletin boards using black fabric. My large word wall one already has red fabric. But I took down the Dr. Seuss border and am using black ribbon with white polka dots. Here a couple of blurry pictures of my bulletin boards. I ran out of tissue paper so they aren't complete.

I think they look pretty good. I'm planning on doing our work one with black tissue paper borders similar to these. I'll post pictures when I'm done. I didn't finish the word wall one and I didn't get a picture I might have to get an opinion when I finish the ribbon part. It might need an extra border. I also plan to take down my Dr. Seuss alphabet and numbers down and replace them with Annie at The Moffat Girls' alphabet. Here's a picture of it all laminated:

I haven't decided what to do about the numbers. I might make my own or keep searching for some that match my color scheme. I'm still working on super hero things and I have added a few things to my file. So be sure to download it if you are interested in the freebie. I've added some signs for different boards and places around the room. I also made some monthly signs for my calendar. I'm not sure how well they will work because it's my first time making these.
Click here to get the freebies.
I'm trying out dropbox so let me know if it doesn't work. 
If you download one of my freebies, please leave me a little comment love.

Super Hero Theme

So I posted the other night that I thought I was going to do a superhero theme in my classroom next year. I'm pretty pumped about it. I didn't have a chance to talk to Chris about it until Friday night and I was going to post this yesterday but I ended up doing a Daily 5 post instead. Anyway, I've decided on 4 group names. I'm going to have The Supers, The Amazings, The Invinsibles, and The Fantastics. I've made some signs to go with these group names. I've also made some small pictures of the groups that I'm going to put on cardstock and laminate to put on my students desks. We can't hang stuff from the ceiling. I'm thinking about changing out the fabric on my bulletin boards as well. One is orange and I can't change it out very easily because my Promethean board was installed on top of it and then one is multicolored. I've been thinking about the whole idea of streamlining my room to only use a few colors for things like that. I'm thinking I might do the bulletin boards in black and then add some accents in red and blue. I don't know if I will or not. I don't have to take all that stuff down so I usually don't over the summer. I also left my student work board up from last year. I hadn't planned on redoing it. But I think I might add some of the tissue paper border I saw on Classroom DIY I think. I do know that I want to make a cape and a mask for the kids to take a picture on the first day of school. Camille at An Open Door has a great post about a super hero project. I'm thinking this would be the perfect way to use these pictures. Check her post out here. 
I was very inspired by Jennifer at Herding Kats in Kindergarten to create a placemat for my class. Hers are super cute but they didn't fit my theme (She has a great Where the Wild Things Are one and a super cute Pete the Cat one.) and I'm going to be teaching first grade next year. So I took her idea and tweaked it to make it work for me. I made sure it was ok with her before I shared it. So I'm sharing the placemat and the group cards. I hope to make some more things with a super hero theme but I don't seem to have enough time in the day to get everything done I want to do.
I like sharing stuff through Scribd because I can see how many downloads it gets and embed the file in the post. But I've had several people say that it doesn't work without having  to pay something. So Click here to get the download from Google Docs.

I started reading chapter 4 of Math Work Stations last night and my head started spinning. Diller shares so many great ideas. I think math Monday will probably have to be on Tuesday again this week to give me time to create some things to go along with this chapter. So be sure to check back for some math freebies.
One last thing, this Thursday there is a bloggy get together for anyone in the East Tennessee area or beyond. We're meeting at the Smoky Mountain Brewery in Gatlinburg on July 5th at 12. If you are interested, please drop me an email so I can give you some directions and traffic pointers.

Math Monday - Counting and place value

Here's my schedule I'm going to try to stick to:
Sunday - Crafty Post
Monday - Math post - I have things to share from my workshop that I went to and I'm reading Math Work Stations.
Wednesday - Book study post. I'm going to participate in a Daily 5 book study and the In Pictures and Words.
I would like for another day to be a technology kind of post and one day to be a reading post. So we'll see what actually get done.  But maybe this will help me keep some posts going as I go on my honeymoon next week and get ready for my wedding this week. I am working on some guest bloggers for my honeymoon week.
 I was suppose to go to another workshop tomorrow but I just think I have too much to do this week for the wedding. Chris and I bought a new mattress on Saturday and it's been delivered on Wednesday. I still need to clean out from under the beds and get ready to move all the beds around. We're moving my full bed into the guest room and setting up Chris's queen bed in our bedroom. I also have to finish the closets. Chris needs to get all his stuff out of Grandmother's house as soon as possible. I can't believe I only have 5 more days before I get married. Ahh!
Anyway, on to math for this post. I went to a workshop last week called "Building an Understanding of Numbers K-2.". The presenter was John SanGiovanni and he had a ton of ideas. They were things that you could take back to the classroom and use.  I thought I'd take a few math posts and share some of his ideas with some freebies.
Here are some of the counting ideas that he suggested:

• Count on 2 more - use number cards 0-9. Turn over one number card. Place that many cubes in the first circle. The idea is to get them to put the number in their head and then count 2 more. So they can put the 2 more in the second circle. Then they fill out the number sentence at the bottom.
Math Games - Count on 2 More

How Many Stars? - Have the students make an estimation of how many stars they can draw in a minute. Then give them a minute to draw stars.Then there are a variety of counting activities you can do with this. You can have them count how many they made or they could count how many they made in their groups. We had to count the total number at our table using only the math our students had. So we made groups of 10s and then used our fingers to keep track of our groups of 10. He also suggested doing this over a period of time and then graphing the different numbers.

Making 10 - Spin a 1-9 spinner. Use a ten frame and put that many counters into the frame. Count to see how many are needed to make 10. Record the number using a number pair or a number sentence. 

Math Games - Making 10

Make it and Find It - Using a 100s  chart and place value dice. (I think you could use any dice that had numbers 1-10 on it and then one with 0-9 on it. We used these really cool place value dice that he said you could order from Amazon. I plan to check it out)

Find the number on a hundreds chart and place a marker on it. A variation of this game would be to play the game with a partner and try to get 4 in a row. There are a ton more variation of these games. But Chris is about to be asleep on the couch and I want to go cuddle with him. Only 4 more days until we'll be married. I'll be back next Monday with some more math games. Well I will if I can get the post scheduled before the wedding.  I'm linking up with Classroom Freebies Manic Monday.

Randomness and a freebie

I have no idea what I'm going to blog about today. I just knew I wanted to share a freebie for Manic Monday on Classroom Freebies. It isn't that I don't have things to blog about. I'm just not in the best mental state right now. I'm a little overwhelmed by the end of the year stuff and the fact that my wedding is less than 5 weeks away. I know I'm not the only one who is overwhelmed right now. We have 10 more days of school. I'm trying to keep things as normal as possible but it's hard to do with kindergarten graduation practice and having to turn in all library items. And the fact that my kids are acting like they have lost their minds. I woke up this morning determined to have a good attitude and to have a good day. So here are 5 great things:
1. Summer is less than 3 weeks away.
2. I'm marrying my best friend in less than 5 weeks.
3. I finally have my voice back.
4. I already did the last school newsletter article for Kindergarten last week. One less thing on my to do list.
5. My kids have made huge progress since the beginning of the year. I think Daily 5 has changed my teaching for good.
Thanks for listening to me go on about negative things. I try not to but sometimes I need to let it all out. One more questions, I loved the discussion last week about math and common core. I have about 2 week left and I'm trying to figure out what to focus on in math. I haven't touched time and it's not part of common core. I'll have my kids again next year. I  can't decide if I want to touch on time a little or review addition and subtraction. What do you think?
Here's a completely unrelated freebie.
Rainbow Sight Words

Easter Egg Freebies

I had my currently scheduled to post today but I finished up some Easter egg activities and thought I'd share them before it got too late. I have seen tons of great ideas of how to use the plastic eggs so I was inspired to make some ways myself.
Here's how I'm using them:
I put sentences I found on someone's blog (I don't remember who and I feel really bad about that.) in one set o eggs. Tomorrow they are going to pass the Easter bucket around and then draw out an egg.
I made sight word strips and then  cut them apart. I put the pieces in a set of eggs. They are going to draw out eggs and then put the word together. They are going to use the sight word they got in a sentence in their journal. And then swap with a neighbor.
I also made some addition and subtraction sentences 0-5 to work on. I think I'm going to make that a math center later this week. They can use jellybeans and ten frames to solve the problems.
We're also working on even and odd numbers. So I'm going to put an even or odd number of jellybeans in the eggs and they kids have to use a ten frame to tell if they are even or odd. They will swap. I'm going to number the eggs and they will record it on a sheet.
So I have a few freebies to share with you.

Math Practice for Easter Eggs

I'm also sharing a recording sheet for the jellybean activity. Hopefully you can use some of these before Easter. The frame in the document came from The 3 AM teacher. If you haven't checked her clipart out, you need to. She's awesome.
Even and Odd Jellybeans

If you download any of these activities, please leave me some comment love. I'm always looking for some feedback on the things I create.
Been meaning to blog about the fact that I've won two giveaways lately. I won second prize in Ms. Patterson's giveaway. I got some good loot. Including some new graphics from the 3 AM teacher that I have a ton of ideas for using. I also won a giveaway of some books from the Waddlee-ah-chee blog. So exciting. I only have 3 and a half more days of school before spring break. Woo Hoo!

What a seusstastic week!

Oh my gosh. We had so much fun this week with Dr. Seuss. It was a busy week though and I didn't have time to post all week when I had tons to share. I've got to start scheduling some posts on the weekend. Here's what we did this week: Monday we read The Cat in the Hat and made our own Things. I was inspired by a pin I had pinned and could never find the original source. I like to do art projects with writing usually but this one was just an art project. I know there is a lot of debate about doing art for the sake of art. But I think it ties into listening and following directions. I gave my students the colors of construction paper they needed and then they had to follow my directions to cut it correctly. They all turned out differently. I forgot to take a picture of all of them completed, but here's a picture of my example. 
Tuesday we read Green Eggs and Ham. We played a fun rhyming game that I got from Preschool Printables. We also completed the freebie that Jennifer from Blue Skies in First Grade posted from her labeling packet.
Wednesday we read Horton Hears a Who and completed text to self connections about how we were good friends. We started the book If I Ran the Zoo on Wednesday and then finished it on Thursday. It was not a book I planned to read but we needed a time filler. On Thursday we finished the book and then they drew their own animals for the zoo. They did a good job with being creative and coming up with different animals than your usual zoo animals.
Friday was The Lorax day. We read the Lorax and then made our own mustaches. I have pictures but my computer is not cooperating with me and let me upload the pictures from my camera. I loved the mustaches that I had seen on Pinterest and other blogs. I had them write a sentence about what they could do to help the environment. They loved the mustaches. Then they made Lorax backgrounds and added truffula trees with straws and Easter grass. They turned out really cute. I had planned on making those blue jello with the red gummy fish I had seen on pinterest for the kids as a snack. But I couldn't find any gummy fish. So I made strawberry jello and bought some cool whip. We had cat in the hat parfaits. They were yummy but I didn't get a picture of them.

One of the other teacher's mom came dressed as the Cat in the Hat and read to the kids. And then the afternoon got crazy. We were sent back to our classrooms to practice tornado drills and were not allowed to leave the room. Luckily the storms blew over us without a lot happening. Other than some terrified kindergartners because they kept hearing the word tornado over and over. They were so hyped up on thinking something bad was going to happen that one of my students when it was time to go home asked me "Is there really a missile coming to the school?" I had no idea what he was talking about. He then said she said that on the intercom. Turns out he heard the assistant principal say the word mission and thought she said missile. It was a little crazy.
I have received two awards this week and I hope to post about them tomorrow. Meanwhile, I have a few freebies for you. I love doing literacy bags with my kids. The next few weeks we're going to be doing a Dr. Seuss literacy bag. Here's the information I'm sending with the bag. Even if you don't use the bag idea, you can use the sheet to have your students write about their favorite Dr. Seuss book. The graphics are from the 3 AM teacher. I'm also giving you my homework from last week as a freebie. The graphics are from 3 AM teacher and scrappin doodles. I used part of One Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, Two Fish as their reading homework.   If you download these let me know and leave me a comment on how you spent your week. I think we're going to continue a few more Dr. Seuss activities next week in  centers and our homework.
Dr. Seuss Literacy Bag
One Fish, Red Fish Homework

Freebie Friday (A day late)

I had every intention of posting this yesterday afternoon, but I was not feeling well yesterday. I think I have a sinus infection and I was feeling awful yesterday. I just came home and crashed.
We had a teddy bear day yesterday. One of letters of the week last week was b. So we read different things about bears all week long.
We started the day by doing our read to self as read to our bear. The kids have reached 15 minutes which was our goal for this year. I'm really proud of how well they are doing. I need to spend a little more time in some mini lessons before letting them read. I have one little girl who gets really upset during read to self. She was crying but seems to be adjusting. We haven't quite figured out what was going on with the tears. But hopefully she'll get used to it. Our poem of the week came from Kristin at A Teeny Tiny Teacher. The kids did an awesome job with it this week. They were able to read it pretty fluently by the end of the week. We read A Bear Snores On and discussed some Text to Text connections.

Click Here to get your own copy.

Kristin had some other great ideas for Teddy Bear activities. I was inspired by her gummy bear activity to create my own. I was going to use hers but then I remembered my kids don't know how to subtract. So I gave my students 10 gummy bears to use as counters to solve the addition problems. So check it out here. The graphics are from KPM Doodles.
I'm working on one more post for my praise challenge to post hopefully tomorrow. But if you have a praise you want to share please comment below. If you grab my Teddy bear sheet, leave me a comment as well.

Valentine's Day Units

I've been working on a couple of units for Valentine's day for forever now. I really wanted to get it done before February 1st but it just didn't happen. I have Valentine's Literacy Activities and a Puppy Love Math unit up on my Teacher's notebook store. I have a couple of freebies for you from them.

Click Here for preview activity

Click Here for a Preview Activity

 You can check them out in my Teacher's Notebook store.


I'm really torn about selling stuff on Teacher's Notebook. I just recently read a blog post about everyone selling things and no one sharing anymore.When I read this post, it made me feel bad for selling things. It made me feel like I wasn't sharing my items anymore. But that's not true. I shouldn't feel bad for trying to support myself and for being compensated for time and clip art that I've bought. After reading this post, I decided that I wouldn't follow this blogger anymore. I didn't need to feel bad for trying new things. It makes me happy to create and offer some freebies but also it is exciting when I sell stuff.  I still see lots of freebies out in the blogging world and I try to still offer freebies every week.  I totally understand people selling things. Now that I've been working on a few units of my own, I can see all the hard work that goes into it. It has taken me forever to get this Valentine's Day stuff made. I made it as a response to things I needed in my classroom. I started some tutoring last week and I plan on using these activities with my small groups. I want others to be able to use my stuff and love to share my ideas. But I also like to buy things on Teacher's Notebook and TPT myself. It's been nice to be able to use the very small amount of money that I've made to buy other materials. The most expensive things I have on my store is $3.50. I chose that because that's about what I like to spend on items. I don't really like to spend more than $5.00 on stuff but some of the packets are worth it. I am going to spend money on books and things for my classroom, I would rather spend this money supporting other teachers. What do you guys think about selling stuff versus offering freebies?
 I would love to hear what you have to say about this. Also, if you grab one of my freebies please leave me some love. I need all the encouragement I can get in this venture.

First Snow Day!

Today is our first snow day of the year. Where I live, we get out a lot for snow. Usually by this time we've been out several days. But our winter has been really mild. I live in the mountains so it doesn't take a lot of snow to get us out of school. But I didn't get to sleep in. I still got up around 6 like I usually do. I've been catching up on my blog stalking and pinning. I can tell I'm back in school because I just don't seem to have time to blog like I want to. I've seen several linky parties I'd like to participate in and have a few ideas to blog about. So maybe I'll spend some of my day writing some posts to schedule to publish. I've got to go into school and get my external hard drive to finish working on my valentine's day packet and my lesson plans for the week.
Report cards were suppose to go out today. I'm glad I got all my assessments done and the report cards done so I don't have to worry about that. When doing our math assessments, I noticed a few areas that some of my kids still need to work on. They don't seem to have a great concept of number still. I'm really struggling with figuring out common core and our new math series. The unit I should be on in math is about fractions and ordinal numbers. This isn't in common core. At least not that I can see. I've looked and looked through them. And after doing assessments I think we need to work more on our numbers 11-20 and composing and decomposing those numbers. I also have some kids that need to work on one to one correspondence still. My math instruction seems to be suffering this year and I need to get a handle on it. I've focused so much on reading and writing that my time seems to get away from me. Then I'm left with like 20 minutes or so to teach math. I do review a lot of math concepts during morning meeting so maybe I need to add more in there. I also have a couple of math centers in my center rotation. I'd love to do math stations but I just don't have the time in my schedule. Because about 5 of my students leave at 12:30 I can't teach new concepts after this time. I guess that doesn't mean that I can't do some math stations then. Now that I've rambled on about where I'm at in math, I'd love to hear your take on it. Those of you that have adopted common core what are you doing about concepts that aren't included in common core but seem important. Like fractions, patterns, calendar, ordinal numbers. I would love to hear what you do in your class with math.
I also have a freebie for you for practicing writing numbers. There are five documents included in this freebie. Different way to practice the numbers and a blank one for differentiation. This meets this common core standard:

• K.CC.3. Write numbers from 0 to 20. Represent a number of objects with a written numeral 0-20 (with 0 representing a count of no objects).

Click here to get this file.

Please leave me some comment love if you download this document. I'd love to hear about your math.

Teacher's Notebook Sale and Freebie

I finally finished my Letter Detective packet and posted it to Teacher's Notebook. It took me forever to get it done for some reason. I've been working on it for months. In honor of finishing the packet and updating my packets that were already up, I'm having a 20% sale. So check it out. And here's a freebie to try out my letter detective unit.
Click here to go to this item in my Teacher's Notebook Store.

Click here to get this freebie.

Please leave me a comment if you download this item and use it. It's nice to know someone out there is getting something out of my creations.

Peek at my centers this week!

Last week was the first time, I had my students go to two different centers a day. It went much better than I anticipated. The goal is to have 16 centers and only have to change things up every two weeks. I only do centers 4 times a week. Fridays we usually do different kinds of centers or science activities. Currently I have about 10 centers going and I'm about to add 2 more. I have been trying to add them a little at a time. So here's what we're doing this week with a few freebies thrown in there.
1. Play dough center - I've been having the students make different letters and words. I have a recording sheet in a previous post but I'm noticing I need to change it up a bit. So this rotation, I'm going to add some cookie cutter letters and have them make their popcorn words that way. We'll see how it goes. You can click here for a copy of the recording sheet I made. You could use this if you use letter tiles or some other way for students to make words.
2. Stamping center - I've updated it using new sight words and some color word sheets from Work Smart Not Hard in Kindergarten. 
3. Math Game - Right now they are just working on using counters to make different combinations of 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. They shake the counters and then draw it on a whiteboard. Eventually I'll add a recording sheet but right now they are still exploring.
4. Math Exploration - They are going to be making a number book from Fran at Kindergarten Crayons. I found it this summer and can't find the exact post. She has awesome things if you haven't checked her out. The kids will use bingo counters to make the numbers in ten frames.
5. Promethean Board - They do a center of flip charts that we've already worked on as a class.
6. Computer - They can go to www.starfall.com or another game we have a license with.
7.Reading corner - Surprisingly enough my kids love to go to this center and I have nothing too special over there. I have some pointers they can use to find words they know and big books we've read. This week we have Mo Willems books and David Shannon books. Last week we were working on Mo Willems and this week it's David Shannon.
8. Listening center - I'm using an old ipod and they can listen to two different stories. I'm wanting to add a recording sheet element but I haven't had a chance yet.
9. Write the room - I created a sheet for the kids to use to record different words they find around the room. The get to use clipboards and wear silly glasses so they are happy. I would share the sheet but I haven't bought the license with scrappindoodles yet but when I do I'll be sharing it.
10.Art center - They are creating an i with scraps of paper and glueing them down.
11. Writing center - We are working on a class book to go with Don't let the Pigeon drive the bus. I made a sheet for the kids to add to and draw another vehicle. I also made a picture dictionary of transportation words.  Class book for Pigeon and Vehicle words
My last center was going to be a science center but it hasn't all come together yet. I have a "brain" in a jar they were going to draw and observe. I might still be able to get it together but we haven't modeled using the recording form yet and I usually like to model first.
That's the plan for this week in my classroom and my centers. Check back later this week to see how they went and maybe I'll remember to take some pictures.

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.

Literacy Centers and the Letter A

Next week we're going to be working on the letter A. While we have already gone over all the sounds and go over them everyday, our reading series (Treasures) is designed to focus on one letter a week. Last week was our first attempt at literacy centers and they went well. We also had a special rotation on Friday of centers related to the letter M and monsters. I would like to do a letter celebration every Friday. So this week is A and apples.
Here are our centers for during the week:

1. Play dough - Using the alphabet cards from Kindergals, my kids have been making their letters with play dough and then I'm going to add some sight words from Fran at Kindergarten Crayons and her sigh word packet. I'm adding a recording sheet this week. They have to highlight the letters they make. You can get that here.
2. Stamping Center - Inspired by  Work Smarter Not Harder, I made a name stamping sheet that some of them are still working on. You can get that at  an earlier post. I also added one I made with our sight words from this unit. You can get that here. 
3. Math Exploration - They are going to be exploring with unifix cubes. I've made some number cards that they can match with quantities of the cubes. We haven't done much counting with our math series and I feel like we need a lot of practice with those skills. So far in the math series, we've working on sorting and now position words.
4. Math Game - I bought Kreative in Kinder's dice unit on her Teacher's notebook. If you haven't checked out her stuff you should. She's great. The kids are going to play a monster themed one this week. Then on Friday for apple day we're going to play an apple themed one from her Apples unit.
5. Computer center
6. Promethean Board - a picture sorting flipchart. They will sort pictures of things that start with m and things that start with a. This will be a change from their starfall they have been doing.(I'll be posting my A flipcharts later this week so check back)
7. Reading center - This is the first time they are going to this center. So for now they're just going to read quietly on the carpet. We're going to talk about the behavior for the reading center and make an anchor chart to hang there to show them what to do. I'm hoping to incorporate the 3 ways to read a book I have been seeing all over blog world.
I've been trying to introduce a new center every rotation and make sure we practice the activities so the centers will go more smoothly. So this week we're going to get ready to start the listening center on the next rotation. I want to go over the procedures like turning the pages and pushing the buttons. I also want them to complete a listening sheet as a class first. 

Most of the apple centers we're going to do come from Kreative in Kinder's apple literacy and math centers. We're going to use her dice game, her alphabet matching game, and hopefully her apple poem for an art project. Be sure to check back at the end of the week for pictures of our activities.

Literacy Centers

One of the things I've been seeing a lot in the blogging world is literacy centers. This is something I have never been good at it. But I really wanted to try this year and with all the support in the blogging world I think I can do it. We've just been having play centers the past 2 weeks. I have been a little discouraged about starting some literacy and math centers because my kids seem so young and like they can't be independent. But after getting some inspiration from a variety of blogs, I think I'm going to try to introduce some learning centers this week. I need to work with some of the kids in a small group. My ELL students need some extra help with sorting in math and some of the students need some practice with holding their pencils and writing their names. I would also like to do some assessing at some point. So trying literacy centers will hopefully help that.
We need to do some work with our names and I love the idea of a stamping center where I  can just change out the words to stamp. So the first center I'm going to introduce to them is a word work stamping center. I've made a sheet to practice writing their names and then stamping them. (click here to get it) I was inspired by the stamping sheets on work smart not hard teaching kindergarten. Click her button to get some more stamping sheets. I plan to introduce it whole group and show them what to do and then pull them with groups to let them practice it while the rest of the class is having their center time. We'll talk about how to take care of the stamps and what to do with their work when they are finished. I'll introduce this one Tuesday and Wednesday.

The next center I'm going to introduce is a math game center. We're working on sorting and classifying and the vocabulary same and different. The math series provides some centers for the kids to use. I'm not crazy about all of them but the first one is a memory matching game. The kids have to find the matches that are the same. Again I'll introduce this game whole group and then we'll take the time to play the game with partners. 

 The third center I would like to introduce this week is some kind of alphabet center. I've already introduced them to the idea of using play doh to make letters. Last week we made the word can out of playdoh as a class. I got the letters from Kindergals (Click here to see their post). I've glued them to card stock and laminated them. We'll do a whole group lesson again to review and hopefully they'll be ready. The plan is to be doing these learning centers and some of the play ones on Thursday and Friday after spending Tuesday and Wednesday introducing them.

Wish me luck! If you have any hints or tips for starting literacy centers, be sure to let me know. I've been doing some research on the blogs. I'll update with pictures hopefully later this week to let you know how it's going.
Writing this post helped me to sort it out in my head what I wanted to do and gives me a little accountability to actually do it.. Another perk of teacher blogging.

Color Week Activities

For the past 2 weeks, we've been celebrating the colors. I'm kind of glad it is coming to an end but we've done a lot of really cool activities that I thought I would share.
Red day - We read Clifford goes to school. The plan was to make a Clifford mask from Scholastic.com. But we didn't actually have time for this activity since it was the first day with all the kids.
Blue day - This is one of my favorite days. We read Blueberries for Sal. They then completed this sheet and cut out blueberries to put in a pail and practiced writing their names.I cut construction paper in blue in half and drew 8 blueberries on the sheet. They could choose how many they wanted to put on the sheet. This group needs some practice writing their names. This was our first cutting and gluing activity. It was a little scary.

Blueberries for Sal Document 
Green day - We read Five Green and Speckled Frogs and made frog puppets. More practice with cutting and it went a little better. I sent these home that day so I don't have any pictures of them.
Yellow day - We read I'm your Bus.This was a really cute book. It talked about riding the bus the first time and had repetitive text in it. Then we made buses to go with it. I was inspired by the buses I saw on Deanna Jump's Fun with Literacy and Names packet. I cut yellow construction paper in half and then gave them 2 black squares to cut the corners off for the wheels.

 

Purple Day - We were going to read Harold and the Purple Crayon but I couldn't find my copy of the book. So we watched it on United Streaming and the kids loved it. Then they completed a sheet that said __________ loves his/her purple crayon and drew a picture to go with it. I then made a class book out of their sheets. 

 

___________ loves his/her purple crayon sheet    

Orange Day - My boyfriend found this story Axle the Freeway Cat on this website http://en.childrenslibrary.org/. This was a story he liked when he was a kid. It's a good story with good vocabulary and an orange cat for orange day. We read the story and then made cats. I had traced a circle and 2 triangles on orange construction paper. (I couldn't copy it onto the paper because we have a new copier and I didn't want to be the one to jam the machine.) They cut out the shapes and then added the face. I gave them some black rectangles for whiskers. They turned out pretty cute but I only have a picture on my example.

  

Brown Day - We read Brown Bear, Brown Bear What do you See? and completed the little book from Kinderpond. This actually went really well. I was worried because it involves a lot of coloring and cutting.But the kids did really well. We had a little lesson on how we color and we don't color. I was proud of how well the did and that most of them could put the pages in order with a little prompting so we got some sequencing done as well. Here's a picture of one of the completed books. 

Overall color week went pretty well and I learned a lot about my students and their abilities. Hope you can find something useful in this post. Please leave me a comment if you use something from here. I could use the encouragement.