Wonderful Winter!

Since I am on Christmas break, I am working on some activities for my winter theme which we will start when we return to school. I hope you will be able to use them too!

Snowman Sight Word Concentration Game

I created this game to give my kinderkids more practice with the sight words they are expected to know at this point in the year. I printed 2 sets on blue paper and the students will find the match. If they can't read the word they have to put it back down.

Winter Number Match

I created this game to have my kids practice matching numerals to sets of objects and the number words during our small group math time. We are just beginning to learn number words so I may pull my hair out to begin with, but I think it will be a fun way for my kinderkids to practice this skill. I printed this on cardstock and laminated for durability.

Winter Counting Activity Sheet

This sheet has the kids practice counting sets of winter objects up to 20 and practice writing the numbers.

If you choose to use any of these activities, please leave me a comment! Thanks!!

Currently!

Oh Boy 4th Grade is having a linky party about what teachers are "currently" doing...


Here is my list!

It's a Winter Wonderland...

Since we don't get much winter weather here in SC, we have to pretend. I love doing winter themed activities in my classroom during the month of January. This is such a fun unit and my kinderkids always love learning with winter themed activities. Here are the activities I have created so far on my winter "break".

Winter Rhyming Game

This game has the kids practice matching rhyming pictures. I plan to use it in my small groups. I printed it on cardstock and laminated for durability.

Winter Letter Match

I created this game to use with my intervention group to help them practice naming and matching uppercase and lowercase letters. They will match the uppercase snowflake letter with the lowercase penguin letter. I printed this on cardstock and laminated for durability.

If you choose to use any of these activities, please leave me a comment! Thanks!!

Giveaway (and a great blog too!)

I just discovered a great new blog "A Cupcake for the Teacher" and she is giving away a $10 Target gift card. Just go to her blog and follow it!

More Christmas Fun

I had so much fun creating things to use in my classroom for Christmas that I thought I would share a few more with you. I hope you can use them in your classroom as well!

Christmas Beginning Sounds Match

This is a game I created to use with intervention group as a way to practice beginning letter sounds which many of them are still struggling with. They will have to look at the picture on the ornament cards and put it under the correct beginning letter. I printed this on cardstock and laminated for durability.

Reindeer Uppercase/Lowercase Letter Match

I created this game to use with my intervention group to help them practice naming and matching uppercase and lowercase letters. I printed this on cardstock and laminated for durability.

(Sorry it is sideways...it would not rotate!)

Christmas Counting Activity Sheet

I created this counting sheet to have my kids practice counting sets of objects up to 20 and writing the matching numeral.

If you choose to use any of these games, please leave me a comment! Thanks!!

Sunshine Award!

Wow! I am so excited! Julia from Loving & Learning in Pre-K nominated me for the Sunshine Award 2011! You made me smile!!

The Sunshine Award rules are...

1. Thank the person who gave this award and write a post about it.

2. Answer the following questions below.

3. And pass the award to 10 fabulous bloggers, link their blogs and let them know you awarded them.

* Favorite Color?  yellow

* Favorite Animal?  manatees...they are sooo cute!!

* Favorite Number? 3

* Favorite Drink? Mountain Dew

* Facebook or Twitter? Facebook

* Your Passion? Teaching and creating things to use in my classroom!

* Giving or Getting Presents? I LOVE giving gifts! I love looking for the perfect gift for each person on my list!

* Favorite day? Saturday!! It is the day when I can relax and enjoy my family!

* Favorite flowers? Daisies/roses...can't decide between the two!

 

 

Here are the blogs I am passing the award on to:

1. Cole's Little Pups
2. Ms. Preppy
3. Peace, Love and Kindergarten
4. Kindergarten Korner
5. Can Do Kinders
6. Kinder Kraziness
7. Miss Kindergarten
8. Frog Spot
9. Playing with Pixie Dust
10. Kreative in Kinder

Update on Gingerbread Man Tens Frames

I made these gingerbread man tens frames a few weeks ago but I couldn't find any small Christmas erasers to use as the counters. This weekend while I was in Walmart I found these Christmas presents "confetti" for $0.97 for each pack with 36 pieces in a pack. My kids played the game today during small group math time and loved it!

Christmas is Coming!

Christmas is one of my favorite times of year so of course I have to incorporate it in my classroom. I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas season in your classroom and homes as well!

Christmas Syllable Sort

I created this game to have my kinderkids practice sorting pictures by the syllables in their names. I printed it on cardstock and laminated for durability.

Christmas Tens Frames Match

I created a tens frame matching game for my kiddos. They match the numeral to the tens frame with the correct number of dots. I printed the game out, backed it on construction paper and laminated it for durability.

If you choose to use any of these games, please leave me a comment! Thanks!!

Christmas Crafts

I am wondering what you all are having your kiddos make for Christmas. Here is the one that I do every year.

5 Little Snowmen Handprint ornament

These are the cutest ornaments. I paint each child's hand white and then put the shatterproof blue ball in the palm of their hand. I help them put their fingers on the ornament to keep them from overlapping as much as possible. After they dry the kids use paint pens to draw the faces on their snowmen. The tag to attach to the ribbon can be found here.

Update: Here is a picture of an ornament from last year!

Here Comes the Gingerbread Man!

I love gingerbread! They are so cute and for Christmas my kitchen is decorated in them! Whether you are using them as alternative for teaching Christmas or using them to teach fairy tales, gingerbread men are adorable and fun!

Gingerbread Man Tens Frames

I created these gingerbread men with tens frames and numbers to have the kids match mini Christmas erasers to the correct number on the card.

Gingerbread Man Rhyming Match

I created this game to use with my small groups and my intervention group who are having trouble with rhyming words. The kids will have to match the two pictures whose names rhyme. This skill can be very difficult for some kids to catch on and I like to give them all the practice I can.

Gingerbread Man Number Ordering

Christmas Ornaments Number Ordering Worksheet

I created this game to have my kinderkids practice recognizing the numbers 1-20 and put them in order during our math group time. Then the kids will use the worksheet to cut apart the numbers and glue them down in order on a piece of construction paper.

If you choose to use any of these games, please leave me a comment! Thanks!!

Favorite Christmas Books

I love the Christmas season and even though I teach in a public school we are still allowed to teach the secular part of Christmas. My students love hearing all of my Christmas books read aloud to them. My all-time favorite Christmas book is Gingerbread Baby by Jan Brett. I have been using this book since I started teaching and the kids always love it as well! I also purchased Jan Brett's new book Gingerbread Friends when it came out and the kids like it as well since it is the sequel to Gingerbread Baby. I hope you will use some these in your classroom!



Here's a Peek At My Week!

This was a very short week for us (only 2 days!) so we worked on some skills that my kinderkids need more practice on.

We have been working on rhyming words since this is an important skill for the 2nd quarter. We will be doing some whole group activities including this one. I have a set of 12 pairs of rhyming pictures. Each child will get a card and then they will have to find their rhyming picture partner. They will then come up and put the pictures in the pocket chart and tell the class their pair of rhyming words.

I am so thankful!

I have been thinking this week about how thankful I am for all the blessings in my life. I have a wonderful husband and a great life for which I am grateful each and every day. I am thankful for my parents who raised me to be the person I am today. I am thankful for my extended family and in-laws who mean so much to me. I have a great group of coworkers on my kindergarten team who are always willing to help out when I need advice. I have such a sweet class of 22 kinderkids this year and the list could continue to go on... so I am posing this question: What are you thankful for?

I am linking up with What a Teacher Wants for their linky party. Hope you will visit!

Favorite Thanksgiving Books

Teaching Blog Addict and Learning with Mrs. Parker are having linky parties about our favorite books for teaching about Thanksgiving. I love teaching about Thanksgiving so of course I have quite a few favorite books. My top 4 would be: The Great Turkey Race, The Amazing Turkey Rescue, Thanksgiving is For Giving Thanks, and Thanks for Thanksgiving. The first two books are so much fun and the kids always want them to be read over and over. I hope you will try a few of these in your classroom as well.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I am looking forward to teaching about Thanksgiving over the next couple of weeks. Here are some of the games I am using in my classroom. I hope you can use them too!

Matching numerals and sets

I created this math game to help my kinderkids practice matching numerals and quantities. I printed it on cardstock and laminated to make it last.

Uppercase & lowercase letter match

This is a game for my intervention group to practice matching uppercase and lowercase letters. I printed it on cardstock and laminated to make it last.

Thanksgiving rhyming match game

This game is a matching game using rhyming pictures. I plan to use it as a memory/concentration style game within my small groups. I printed it on cardstock and laminated to make it last.

 If you choose to use any of these games, please leave me a comment! Thanks!!

Fall Fun

I feel like I haven't been on my blog in FOREVER! My personal life has been crazy with a great deal of tragedy in my husband's family so please forgive me for not being active. Hopefully things will become better as the days pass!

Since this week will be two weeks before Thanksgiving break for us I am doing some more fun fall activities with my kinderkids. I hope you can use these activities as well!

Squirrel-Acorn Beginning Sound Match

I printed this activity on cardstock and laminated. The kids have to find the 3 pictures and match them with the letter sound they begin with.

Squirrel-Acorn Letter Match

I printed this activity on cardstock and laminated. The kids match the uppercase and lowercase letters. This is going to be a great activity to use with my intervention group of kids who still need extra practice identifying these letters.

I also found some great activities to use this week on Kindergarten Hoppenings blog. I love her I Have Who Has game for fall alphabet. My kinderkids have become obsessed with this game.

 If you choose to use any of these games, please leave me a comment! Thanks!!

Creating a poster for my class

I followed the steps on Peace, Love, and Learning's blog to create a poster for my classroom. I LOVE IT!! I hung it on our door and the kids love it. It was a perfect addition to our classroom right before parent-teacher conferences. The parents loved seeing it too!

(Sorry the picture has a glare! I laminated my poster before hanging!)

Reasons I LOVE Teaching Kindergarten

I absolutely LOVE teaching kindergarten and here are my reasons why!

1. KinderKids are always willing to give you hugs at any point throughout the day.
2. KinderKids appreciate everything! Even the little things that we do for them, they appreciate it. I hear "Thank you" many times per day from my kiddos.
3. Seeing the face of a child who is successfully learning to read is a precious sight! Their faces beam with excitement.
4. We sing and dance to learn new things. The kiddos think we are just having fun but don't realize how much they are learning from these songs.

My First Blog Award!

Thank you to Dee at First Impressions for awarding me the Blog On Fire award! This is my first award and I am so excited! I am very new to the blogging world and this is a tremendous honor. Through blogging, I have met some fantastic teachers who have been wonderful about sharing their classroom experiences with me. I have learned so much from other teachers and have so many new resources to use within my classroom.

So with this award, I need to share seven things about myself, then pass the award along to other "hot" blogs.  Here goes!

1. I have been married for 5 years. My husband and I do not have any kids yet, but we have a spoiled yellow lab.
2. I love fall/spring weather when the weather is mild here in SC.
3. I went to elementary school in the same school where I am now teaching.
4. I love to take photographs so I spend a lot of my time with a camera in my hands. My husband says that I should have pictures of every event.
5. I have only one sibling - a younger brother who I always made into my student when I was playing school as a child. He was my very first student!
6. I love to shop for my classroom so the Dollar Spot at Target gets a lot of my hard earned money.
7. I decorate my house for almost every holiday so right now my house is decorated for fall/Halloween and soon I will be changing out the Halloween decorations for Thanksgiving.

I'm passing the Blog on Fire award to these fantastic blogs:

1. Kindergarten Hoppenings
2. Growing Kinders
3. Busy Bees
4. Can Do Kinders
5. Peace, Love and Learning
6. Doodle Bugs Teaching
7. Kinder Kraziness

Farming Fun

I love teaching about the farm. This year I am using this activity with my kinderkids to practice counting sets of objects up to 15 and identifying the numerals. I printed them on cardstock and laminated for durability.

Matching numerals to quantities (farm)

I created this activity to do during my small group time. My kids need practice with syllables. This activity gives them hands-on practice. I printed it on cardstock and laminated.

Farm Syllable Sort

 If you choose to use any of these games, please leave me a comment! Thanks!!

Happy Fall Y'all - part 2

I have been enjoying a mini-vacation with my sweet husband in the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina. It is beautiful and the leaves are all sorts of shades of orange, yellow, and red. It was gorgeous!



Tomorrow is back to the real world for me so I thought I would share an activity that we did a couple of weeks ago. Have a great week everyone!


My students love learning with foods so I created a graph for them to complete with the multi-colored goldfish crackers. The kids loved sorting them and counting how many of each color they had. This also covered several of the Common Core Kindergarten Standards.

Goldfish Graph



Happy Fall Y'all!



I love the fall season as you can tell from the decorations at my house! So of course I love teaching fall, pumpkins and Halloween to my kinderkids every year. Here is an activity sheet that I made for my kids to do one day this month for homework.

Halloween Counting Sheet (less than 10 objects)

I created these pumpkins to have my kinderkids practice ordering numbers. I am only giving my kids the first 20 numbers, but I made it go to 24 because I had that many boxes.

Pumpkins (ordering numbers)

I created these pumpkins to have my students practice sorting by size. I have them run on different colors of paper so they can do this during small group math instruction.

Pumpkins (sorting by size)

 If you choose to use any of these games, please leave me a comment! Thanks!!

Beginning Letter Sounds Games

I created a few more concentration style games.

Ll concentration

Dd concentration


Ff concentration

Grade Level Linky Party

Kim at The Teacher's Lane is having a Grade Level Linky Party. She has the blogs organized by grade level and there are a lot for each grade level from preschool to high school. Make sure you plan to spend some time on the blogs when  you head over!

Zero the Hero

My kinderkids look forward to seeing Zero the Hero visit our room every tenth day. They start counting down the days until he comes again as we put the straws into our counting caddy on our calendar board. Zero the Hero is a teddy bear that I have dressed up with a scarf as a cape. He always brings a poem and a "treat" that is the shape of a zero. These treats are sometimes food items and at other times they are an activity that we do together. We are getting close to the 40th day of school so I thought I would share what we have done so far this year. I change it up some each year.



10th Day: We made a 10 with 10 zeros on it (hole reinforcers).

Number 10 (2 per page)

10th day poem

20th Day: We made a 20 out of circles and put a star sticker on each circle (20 stars total). These will print 2 on a page.

20 stars sheet

20th day poem

30th Day: We sorted Apple Jacks cereal that Zero the Hero left for us. Then we counted our 30 pieces by 5's and 10's.

30th day poem

Letters of the Week

At our school, the kindergarten teachers teach 2 letters per week during the first half of the year. We work on naming the letter, identifying the sound or sounds associated with that letter and reviewing the letters and sounds we have previously taught. I have designed some beginning sounds practice sheets. This week we are working on the letters Oo and Rr. I hope you can use them with your kinderkids too!

I and G

H and P

O and R


E and W

Favorite Books For October

Learning with Mrs. Parker is having a linky party with the favorite books for teaching in October. I love teaching about fall, pumpkins, and Halloween so of course I have quite a few favorite books. My top 4 would be: Five Little Pumpkins, The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything, Stellaluna, and Skeleton Hiccups. There are other books that I love to read as well. I hope you will try a few of these in your classroom as well.



Sight Word Games

In our school, we teach our kinderkids a certain set of sight words each quarter and assess them on this list. I have created a memory style game for the first and second quarters. I print them and back them on construction paper to make them more durable; then laminate them. I hope you can use them in your classrooms.

1st quarter sight words memory game (pumpkins)

The 2nd quarter game also includes the words from the 1st quarter.

2nd quarter sight words memory game (snowflakes)

Graphing Bear Counters

This week my kiddos have been working on sorting and counting. This leads into creating graphs and comparing sets. This is always a favorite of mine to teach. This week we sorted, counted, compared, and graphed our teddy bear counters. The kids had a blast! I hope you will enjoy using this graph with your kiddos!

Graphing Bears

Pumpkins

I love our pumpkins unit that I do each year. The kids love learning about the life cycle of pumpkins, doing pumpkin investigations, and finally visiting the pumpkin patch to pick their own pumpkin. Here is a math actvity that I created for my students to practice counting out the specific number of erasers. I purchased the jack-o-lantern erasers from the Dollar Spot at Target last week. The counting mats go from 1 to 20 which is the common core standard for kindergarten. The second set of counting mats has tens frames for those who use Everyday Math.

Pumpkin Counting Mats

Pumpkin Counting Mats with Tens Frames

This sentence building activity from Maggie's Kinder Corner Blog is a perfect addition to this unit. I hope you can use it too!





Sight Word Game

I just found the most interesting sight word game on K Double Stuffed's blog. She has the sight words on cookies that you can print on cardstock and laminate. I am planning to put magnetic tape on the back of them and use a real cookie sheet to have my kinderkids practice reading them.


Click on the pictures below to go to her blog!

More Beginning Sound Games

Here are some more concentration games that practice beginning letter sounds. I hope you can use them!

Bb concentration

Cc concentration

Hh concentration


Rr concentration - color


Bb concentration - color

I will continue to post more games as I create them.

Beginning Letter Sounds

Each week my kindergarten team introduces 2 letter sounds. We introduce these in the order of the PALS reading program. This week we will introduce the letters I and G and their corresponding sounds. During small group reading, I practice these beginning sounds by playing beginning letter sound concentration games. I am sharing these two games with you. I hope you can use them too. I print 2 sets of each game and glue them to construction paper to make them more durable. Then I laminate them to make them sturdy for little hands.

Ii concentration

Gg concentration

New to the Blogging World

I am brand new to the blog world. I have become addicted to the teaching blogs that I have found so I decided to try starting my own. I love finding new materials to use within my classroom and thought I would share some of the things that I have created. I hope you enjoy reading and please share any suggestions you have!


Here is a little bit about me. I am starting my 6th year of teaching. I have taught both kindergarten and first grade: kindergarten for 2 years, first grade for 3 years, and now I am back to kindergarten. I love teaching my "little people" and they make me smile so often. I am married to my wonderful husband of 5 years. We do not have any kids of our own yet, but each year I get a set of new kiddos to love.