Peek at My Week LInky

This past week was exhausting. I've been so happy to have a 4 day weekend to rest up. Monday I came home from school and fell asleep on the couch sometime between 7:30 and 8. Chris had boy scouts so he was getting home late. I had roast beef in the crockpot. I didn't wake up until almost 9 when Chris came home. I was so confused about what time it was and what was going on. I got up and went to bed with no dinner and didn't wake up until 5 when my alarm went off. I think Chris was a little worried about me but it's the beginning of kindergarten. So I didn't have time to blog in the evening. I'm hoping eventually I'll get a handle on it all.
I'm really excited to bust out m visual plans again. I tried my hand at these for a few weeks at the end of the school year and now I'm tackling it in kindergarten. This week we're continuing with our color week and working on basic numbers. I'm trying out literacy and math stations again. I'd been trying to have each group do an activity and it really wasn't working. So I've incorporated some of my play centers into the literacy centers and put them into groups of 2. I hope to do these while I have some help in my room so we can each work with a group to show the kids what to do. I have my math stations planned but I might just do some of the activities whole group to try to teach the kids what to do. I'm trying to wrap my brain around this and getting it going. I know that I need this so I can finish assessing my kids and start working with them.
I have this plan of how I want things to work in my room and I just can't seem to make it work yet. So I keep trying different things and something will have to work.
So here are my plans for the week:

Click here to download my plans.

I'm linking up with Mrs. Wills for her weekly party. Be sure to head over to her blog and check out what others are doing this week.

Visual Plans for this week

I'm linking up with Mrs. Wills Kindergarten for her Peek at Week Linky. This week is all about plants. I have some great units from my friends to draw from and I'm so excited to be teaching about plants. This week I'm only sharing my reading and science plans. My writing plans are exactly like last weeks. (We'll be doing the Pop Rocks Descriptive writing activity from Abby at the Inspired Apple.) We didn't get to it last week.

Be sure to click here to access the links and the freebie that I included.
I made an anticipation guide for this unit like I did with Oviparous animals. It gave me a good idea of what the kids already knew about plants.

You can get this freebie by downloading my visual plans.
Here are some units I'll be drawing from this week. The are from some of my fantastic bloggy friends.

This one is from Jennifer Knopf from Herding Kats in Kindergarten. Check it out here. 

 This one is from Erica Crowder from Sprinkles to Kindergarten. Check it out here.

This last one is from Shuna from Pocket Full of Kinders. I'm in love with the graphics and activities. Check it out here. 
What are you doing this week? Be sure to check out all the other plans this week over at Mrs. Wills Kindergarten.

Visual Plans for Next Week

So the week before spring break, I linked up for the first time with Mrs. Wills Peek at my week linky party. I just shared my reading plans and that took me forever to do. This week I'm sharing reading, writing/language, and math. It didn't take me quite as long to do these now that I've had a little practice and have a template to work with. I did forget to link up my freebie so you'll have to grab that at the end of the post. I can't do it all apparently. Remember to click on this link to get a pdf of my plans where the clickable links work. 

This week we're finishing up our oviparous animals unit. You might remember some of the reading activities from my last set of visual plans. We ended up having a snow day in the middle of the week and didn't get to everything. So we're working on the same skills again this week. I'm excited to be trying out my dear friend Debbie Clement from Rainbows within Reach's Polliwog song and activities.  If you haven't checked her blog and great songs out, you should. I'm so excited to share this song and her beautiful illustrations with them. They will love it. My kids love to sing this year. You can check out her TPT store here.
I don't think anything else needs explanation. I had a follower ask me last time if I did these plans just for me or if I did them for my administration. I had already done my formal lesson plans the last time I did these. But this week I'm going to add in my common core standards and use these for my administration. I am thinking I should have done that while working on them. Oh well.
So I have a freebie for you. It's 3 different math journal prompts. I usually print them out and cut them. Then let the kids paste them into their math journals. These have a spring theme and focus on subtraction. I added a little tiny clipart picture from Teacher Laura. She just started making clipart and she has some cute stuff. Check her out.

Click here for the freebie.  If you download this freebie, I would love it if you would follow me and/or leave me a comment. I love hearing from you. Be sure to head over to Mrs. Will's Kindergarten and check out the party.

Visual Plans (kind of)

So I have been admiring Mrs. Deedee Wills visual plans for a long time. She's definitely one of my favorite bloggers. She started a linky party not too long ago for sharing of the visual plans. I have been wanting to link up for a while but I've not had time to sit down and try to make some visual plans. I'm pretty excited about what I've got planned this week with oviparous animals, so I decided to give it a shot. I only did my reading plans. I figured this was a way to get my feet wet.
You can click on the link to take you to a pdf that has the plans. Within the plans there are several links you can take to find some great resources. There are a couple of freebies. One is from me and I'll talk about it a little more in a minute. There are also links to some great units on TPT that I'm using this next week.

Click here to go to the pdf to find the awesome resources.

Now a little explanation of my freebie. It's an anticipation guide. Did you learn about those in college and then promptly forget about them once you started teaching like me? No, I'm the only one. I hope not. I'm so guilty of learning some great strategies along the way and then forgetting about them once I'm back in the classroom. Our school system has bought a subscription the website www.pd360.com. Have you heard of it? We got an email about it like weeks before we received any training. We then had a day of training and playing on it and I forgot about it. It's a database of professional development videos. I'm sure there is more to it than that but that's as much as I've explored. Yesterday, I spent a little time looking at some videos about differentiated instruction. This is something I've really been wanting to work on this year. I got a couple of great ideas from the videos and I've reflected a few of them in my plans. One of the big things emphasized in several of the videos was giving kids choice. So when they recreate the life cycles of chicken and frogs, I'm going to give them some choices. They can draw it or they can use the cut and paste that is found in Kaci's units.
Then the other strategy was the anticipation guide. The idea is to get the kids to activate their prior knowledge on a topic when beginning a unit. So I created one about oviparous animals. (You can find this freebie in my plans.)

Have you ever used anything like this when starting a unit? Do you have access to professional development like this? I would love some comments, especially on my visual plans since it's my first time trying this out. Be sure to head over to Mrs. Wills Kindergarten and check everyone else linking up.