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.

What's going on this week:

Before I give you a peek into my week, I wanted to clarify something from my post yesterday. I'm not opposed to varying opinions. I think we can learn a lot from each other when we're honest and we take the time to listen. I think of the blogging community as a place I go to seek encouragement and ideas. I get negativity in the real world. I really hope I wasn't negative yesterday because that wasn't my intent to be negative or discouraging. But I chose to stop following this blogger because I have read several posts that made me feel discouraged after reading them. I don't need that so I made the choice to not expose myself to that anymore. I'm not saying anyone else has to do the same. I just was sharing what I was thinking. I hope that I didn't offend anyone because that wasn't my purpose.
Anyway, after watching Fran Kramer's presentation, I have some things I planning on trying put this week. Starting with 2 bingo games I made. My kids love bingo and I never thought about making my own. But I made one with sight words and then one with sort a word families. I'll have then to share as soon as I print them to make sure I have cards for all the words so check back.
I also want to try out here ideas about partner matching with the abc cards and putting them in alphabetical order. I found some free Valentine themed Abc cards on Growing Kinders. I just need to print them out and laminate them. We've pretty much got recognizing our alphabet down, we're still working on getting all the sounds. Today I used my sound cards and had them line up in Abc order. I also had them find sight word partners using our flashcards. I feel like I need to watch the presentation again to process more of her fantastic ideas. I am also planning on wearing a sight word necklace and having the students do a variety of activities with that. I just remembered that while I was typing this post. I need to get up and make it right now.
This week we're finishing up some winter activities that I've been wanting to do and just haven't had time. So our centers have some of the snowmen games I've bought and found for free. We're also going to read Snowballs by Lois Elhert and make those name snowmen I've seen all over the blog world and pinterest. Now that I've located my camera, I should have some pictures of these activities. I'm using quite a few games from Crystal at Kreative Kinder in her Snowmen pack. I love her units and my kids love the activities she has in them. She's also nice enough to change the sight words if you need her too. Then in our writing center we're going to work on some Valentine cards from DeeDee Wills February Writing Center pack. She's another one who I love her stuff. Those two I know when I buy something from them, I'm going to love it and use almost all the activities.
We read The Mitten a few weeks ago and my kids loved it. I've had plans to make a take home bag to go along with it since we got back to school. I finally got it done this weekend and it's going home with a student today. My kids have done a great job with these in the past and seem to love it. This bag contains the book, some retelling pieces with real pictures of animals, and a story map to complete. You can check out what I send home by clicking here. The Mitten Take home bag. If you grab it, please leave me some comment love. If you would like to adapt it for your class, let me know and I'll be glad to email it to you in a word document.
What are you up to this week in your class? I'm looking forward to doing Valentine's themed stuff the next week. We need a pick me up for this dreary but warm winter we're having.

Ms. Kerri's Busy Kindergarten and 5 Little Monkeys

I've been so inspired looking at blogs and all the cool stuff people are doing in their classroom. I make class books a lot but I usually just write the sentence on a piece of paper and copy it the week I plan on doing it. After looking at the plethora (I know not a kindergarten word but I love words.) of class books out there, I decided to try my hand at making one. I'm not sure how other people do it but I used publisher and clip art I found on Microsoft. Not too creative. But it's a start. I would really love some feed back on the things I'm working on.

Click Here to see what I've been doing


The week we do the letter M in our reading series (Treasures), they suggest using this song for oral language development. My students loved this book and song last year. I think I have this book on cd.  The reading series also uses baby animals for whole group reading and writing. So I tried to incorporate those things in this book as well as writing numbers and ordering them. Please let me know what you think. I'm not 100% confident in my first attempt.




I've also been working on some things to go with my theme of Eric Carle books, Ms. Kerri's Busy Kindergartners. I made a name plate for their tables, a label for their cubbies, name tags and cover for their notebooks. I also got the the idea while running today to have each student make either a caterpillar, spider, lady bug or firefly depending on what group they are in. It would be good to see where they are at in cutting to have them cut the pattern out of construction paper.I then could add their pictures on the head of the insect and put it outside my door. The more I think about the more I love the theme of Eric Carle for my class.
If you're interested in any of this stuff, I would be glad to share. I'm not that great at uploading stuff on this blog yet so just leave me a comment with your email and I'll be glad to send it your way. If you look at previous posts, you'll see the name plate and everything else has that same theme.

I figured out how to upload so here's the name plate and cubby decoration if you're interested.
Name Plate
Cubby Decoration

If you like any of my stuff, please leave me a comment so I know. Thanks a bunches!