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)