Schedule spotlight series linky: Calendar time

I'm joining the party over at Castles and Crayons again this week for her schedule spotlight series.

This week the focus is on calendar. I did a post 2 years ago about my calendar routine. I'll be honest. I'm revamping this post a bit. (I'm on vacation and I was told I couldn't do any blogging while I was gone.)

I use my promethean board for morning meeting/calendar time. I love love love my morning meeting and calendar time with the kids. I think I love it so much because I use a flipchart that I'm really proud of. It is a combination of different ideas and trail and error and searching promethean planet for things that work for my kids. I love it because I can adapt to fit whatever my kids need. All I have to do is add another page.
When I first started teaching kindergarten, I wrote my morning message on a small white board and did my calendar time on a bulletin board. I had a good routine with them. I keep my students for two years. I have them in kindergarten and then first grade and by half way through first grade I was tired of my morning message and my kids didn't seem to need it. But by using my board, I don't get bored or tired of it. I love it!
Here's my morning meeting routine:
When they first come in they see a chart that has their routine for the morning. I use pictures of what they are suppose to do and the words. I saw this idea on Mrs. Wills blog and just adapted it to fit my needs (At lease I think that's where I saw it. I can't find it now). The students can see what they need to do. As they are working on their morning work at their table, they answer a question on the board. I started this year with their favorite color. They moved their name underneath a square of their favorite color. I started these graphs to help them recognize their names. The next one they do is if they are boys or girls. This starts to get them used to the yes/no format we use the rest of the year and they can "read" it themselves. Then they have a yes/no question they answer everyday. I use their popcorn words and different themes and concepts we're working on. I also use a lot of graphing and math concepts with this chart.
When morning meeting starts, we start with a Dr. Jean song I've embedded in my chart. Then we go over our rules which I got from The Polka Dot Patch.
Here's a list of the next slides:

• Morning message (I enjoy playing around with the backgrounds depending on the season and holdiays) I also try to include skills that we are working. We might brainstorm words that have our phonics rule, answer questions about science or social studies, or answer some math problems.
• Calendar
• Days of the week (Dr. Jean song embedded)
• Days we've been in school hundreds chart
• A tens and ones base 10 chart to show how many days we've been in school
• Months of the year (Dr. Jean song embedded)
• Weather (Dr. Jean song embedded)
• Season
• Temperature
• Patterns with shapes
• Number patterns
• 10 frame activity. Students make a number using the 10 frame. We start small and eventually build up to multiple 10 frames.
• In first grade, I add a page for a number of the day. They have to come up with an addition or subtraction problem that equals the number.
• In first grade, I also include review questions from different test resources

 . If you download my chart, I put notes in each slide to let you know what I do there. I love doing my morning meeting this way because we practice so many skills in math and in reading and writing. I try to include questions in my morning message and my question of the day that review our science and social studies themes.
I don't have the activeinspire software on this computer so I can't share any pictures. You have to have the activeinspire software to use this chart, but check it out here.
Here's my flipchart for download in google docs.
Be sure to head over to Castles and Crayons and join the party.

Promethean Board Ideas

First up I need to announce the winners of my giveaways.
Day 1 giveaway winner was Cathy Irwin.
Day 2 Giveaway winner was Kirra.
Day 3 giveaway winner was Mrs. B. I've sent emails to all of you so hopefully you will receive all your goodies soon.

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.

Promethean Ideas

Mrs. Miner is having a Promethean Linky party on her blog so I thought I would join in the fun. I've had my board for a little over a year now. I got it at the end of the year 2 school years ago and am super excited to start a whole loop with it. I love my board. Like I might marry it if I thought I could. I use it for everything and when it's down I'm in big trouble. It got sick (that's how my kids put it) a couple of times last year and I was really annoyed. I start the day off using it to determine if my kids are here or not. Two years ago my kinders had a difficult time recognizing their names so I created a pocket chart where they had to just put their name on it when they got there, then I turned it into a graph where they started just sorting by boys and girls and then I moved into yes/no questions. In first grade, (I loop) the started the year out with a yes/no question on my board. I usually try to incorporate our theme for the week and the sight words we're working on in the question. This is part of our morning meeting routine. We go over the chart and analyze the graph. It turned out to be a great way to teach less than, greater than or equal to. So this year for kindergarten, we're starting the day off just putting our names under our favorite color. I'm sure the first few weeks, we'll have to do it together but my experience with the board has shown that they pick up the technology stuff sooooooo fast. They were deleting things when they messed up and choosing the undo button all the time. We have our morning message and calendar time also on the flip chart. My kindergarten one needs a little work still but I love doing it that way. I still have a calendar up that the kids can use as a reference. But using the board, I could create activities that fit what we needed to work on. In first grade, we practiced patterns, number patterns, had a number of the day where the students wrote addition and subtraction sentences to go with it, time, and so much more. I have no idea how to post these activities on my blog but if you are interested, I could email them to you. So just comment and leave me your email address. The possibilities are really endless with what you could do on the board.
We use the Treasures Reading Series which comes with a cd-rom that has all the paper resources and the teacher edition book on it. I have downloaded the teaching  chart and workbooks on to my laptop. Now I can just pull up the resources I need on my board and then use the desktop annotate function and be able to use all the promethean tools on the chart. I love this because all the students can see it and interact with the charts and it makes teaching how to do workbook pages and worksheets so much easier. We have adopted a new math series and I've heard that it was made for interactive white boards. So I'm super excited to be able to use it. I've also created a flip chart to go with each week of the first unit of our reading series. I haven't gone on because I wanted to try out how they were going to work before creating more. I used the different tools that are part of the program to embed the sound the letter says. I just recorded myself saying the sounds (I use the spaulding program which has motions to go with the sounds and teaches all the sounds a letter says at one time) and when you click on the picture clue you hear me.
I also plan on it being a literacy center this year. I'll probably just start out letting them play games and on starfall with it. Last year, they were good about taking turns and understanding that they could use the wand or the pen but not both. They also know if they argue about something then they will not get to use the material anymore so arguing usually only happens once.
I could talk about the board forever probably. Not to toot my own horn, but I'm actually pretty good on the board. So if you have any questions, I would be glad to try to help you with them. I love technology and finding ways to incorporate it in my class. I also just like to play around on it and try to figure out stuff. Hopefully, I gave you a few ideas and if you would like to see any of my flip charts I would be glad to attempt to email them to you.
Here's the link back to Mrs. Miner's blog for more great ideas.