Classroom Communication

I don't know about you but in my classroom we use many different ways to communicate with each other. Of course my kinders think they have to use their voices to communicate everything at the beginning of the school year, but they quickly learn in my classroom that there are other ways to communicate with me and my assistant. 

For example, we use the sign of crossed index and middle finger raised in the air to let us know when they need to use the restroom. Then one of us will nod and they know they have permission to get up and go. All of this happens without saying a word. It helps tremendously to cut down on the excess noise in the classroom especially during quiet times like Daily 5. 

In my classroom I have two students who speak Spanish as their first language. They are enjoying teaching our other non-Spanish speakers tidbits of the language. It is a great compliment to my lessons and helps me tremendously because I do not speak Spanish myself.

For my parents who do not speak English as their primary language, I have found this translation website to be very useful: Smartling. This website translates other websites easily and quickly. It is definitely one to check out if you don't know about it already!

Now here's the question for you...Do you have any non-verbal language cues that you use in your classroom or do you teach your students another language?

TpT Cyber Monday & Tuesday Sale

Just wanted to let you know that I am participating in the TpT Cyber Monday & Tuesday Sale. All my products are on sale for 20% off plus you get an extra 10% off with the code below! Happy shopping everyone! 

Thanks to Literacy Without Worksheets for the adorable graphic!

My TpT Store

Operation S-Elf-less - Week #1

So Krista Wallden who makes the fabulous Creative Clips clipart has created Operation ELF and the S-ELF-less Challenge. I have decided to join in the fun too! This challenges us to do random acts of kindness for others and this is the perfect time of year to do this. Here is her list for this week:

Here are my RAK for this week!

#3 - A Fun Freebie:

Here is a fun freebie for you using the free clipart from Krista this week. I know this isn't classroom related but it is something fun for Christmas. I used her gift tag clipart to create these tags for your Christmas presents. You can print them out on cardstock or regular paper using a color printer and just cut them out. Merry Christmas to you!

Christmas Tags

#4 - Postive Post-Its:

I left these Post-Its for my teacher assistant and 2 of my fellow teachers! I hope they brightened their day as much I had fun writing them!

#5 - Free Choice:

For my free choice, I decided to fill a shoe box for an adult working at the children's home our church supports in Mexico. This will be mailed to the missionaries down there and given to the kids and adults for Christmas. I forgot to snap a picture of the box before I took it to be mailed...

Five for Friday!

Well there is no way I could share with you all the things we have done in our classroom over the last month while I have been away from blogging. I decided the easiest way to share with you this week's events was by joining DoodleBug's Five for Friday linky party. So here's a peek at my week in five pictures!

1 - My kinders made precious turkey hats to wear to lunch this week. I snapped this quick picture as we were heading out to the buses yesterday!

2 - My kinders wrote their favorite things to eat on Thanksgiving. This little one has come so far this year with his fine motor skills!

3 - One of the kindergarten assistants made adorable Pilgrim hat cookies for all of us this week. They were a great treat! 

4 - My kinders made this fall display last week with the scarecrows they made and their fall writing. They are absolutely adorable!

 

5 - Our class made a chart of facts we learned about turkeys this week and then the kids got to write down three facts of their own. 

Well there's a peek at my week. Hope yours has been great as well. I am looking forward to a two day week next week and Thanksgiving break! Have a great weekend!

Long Time...No Post!

I know it has been a while since I have made a blog post but there has been so much going on in my personal life. My daughter, M fell about 3 weeks ago and was badly injured. She required major surgery and I wasn't able to think about anything but her. We are very blessed and she is making a great recovery thanks to a great deal of prayers and some wonderful doctors! Needless to say our family has so much to be thankful for this year.
I am just so grateful that Miss M is still with us for this Thanksgiving. She is definitely an amazing little girl!

New Sight Words Units on TpT!

Well I have been busy teaching sight words to my class of kinders and as I told in an earlier post I have been working to create activities to go along with our reading series list of sight words. We use the HM Journeys 2011 edition. I have created activities for units 2, 3, and 4. I am also offering a bundle that will include all of the units at a discounted price.

Here are some examples of activities included in the units.

If you would like to purchase any of these units please click on the links below! Thanks!

Journeys (2011 edition) Unit 2 Sight Words Unit

Journeys (2011 edition) Unit 3 Sight Words Unit

Journeys (2011 edition) Unit 4 Sight Words Unit

Journeys (2011 edition) Sight Words Unit Bundle

Apples, Apples!

Ok I have been a busy and very bad blogger lately but this week I remembered to take pictures so I could post this LONG blog post!

Fall is officially here! I love this time of year - the leaves changing colors, the pumpkins, the apples, the cooler mornings, etc.! This week I am teaching our apples unit. This is always a fun one and one I look forward to. Of course here near the coast of SC we don't have apple orchards but my kinders still love learning all about them.

This week we have been doing all sorts of fun things with apples. Here are some sneak peeks into what has been going on in my classroom.

To begin our unit we wrote an a rebus about apples. The word/picture cards are from kidssoup.com. I had these from a subscription a few years ago. This activity really helps my kinders learn some vocabulary and they love that they can read this rebus over and over again!

We have been working on labeling our pictures so I created this label the apple kid sheet. I helped my kids to stretch out the words as a class and they wrote the sounds they heard. I was very pleased with the amount of sounds they were able to hear and write.

 

 

Here is a link to the label the apple kid sheet if you would like to download it!

Label the Apple Kid sheet

We also practiced labeling the parts of an apple. They practiced sounding out the words and writing them before I gave them the printed labels to put on their papers.

I have started creating different colored boxes for the labels to help my kinders find the right box to write in. This seems to really help them with labeling.

We also wrote about the lifecycle of the apple from seeds to tree to blossom to apple. They love that they were able to find the words to write in the rebus we created earlier in the week.

 

 

We taste tested all 3 colors of apples - Red Delicious, Golden Delicious, and Granny Smith. After we graphed which was our favorite we made tissue paper apples of each child's favorite color apple.

I'm sure you can see how much fun we had with our apples unit. I hope you are having a great start to your fall too!

Learning Sight Words

As is every kindergarten teacher in America, I am working hard to teach sight words to my kinders. Our school district uses the 2011 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Journeys reading series so that is where our 40 sight words come from. I have not found all the activities that I wanted for these sight words so I have started making my own. On the push of a fellow teacher, I am going to start putting them into unit packs for purchase on Teachers Pay Teachers. I am starting with Unit 2 because that is the unit we are getting ready to begin next week. I will try to go back at some point this year and create the same kinds of sheets for Unit 1, but I am planning to make the other units as we go along.

This unit contains:

• Search, find, & color pages
• Fill in the blank sentence pages
• Trace, write, color, cut & glue pages
• Review pages (all unit 2 words)

Please click on the link below to purchase at TpT!

Kindergarten Journeys Sight Words Unit 2 (2011 edition) 

 

What I'm Loving Wednesday

I am having a fabulous week! I hope you are too! Here is what I'm loving this week:



1 - My weekend visit to Ripley's Aquarium in Myrtle Beach with Miss M and my mom!
This weekend was Teacher Appreciation weekend at our local Ripley's Aquarium so I was able to get in for free and take up to 3 guests at a discounted price. We took M last year when she was 4 months old and she loved it but now she is 15 months old and she was loving seeing everything. She loved seeing the fish and the sharks. She even got to see the big sea turtle in the tank and the octopus. She was pointing and talking the whole time.

Pointing at the fish

The three of us after visiting the aquarium

2 - My kinders' writing!
They are doing such an excellent job drawing detailed pictures and labeling their drawings. I am so proud of them!

What I'm Loving Wednesday

I just wanted to pop on with this quick post. I am loving so much this week and I wanted to share with all of you.

1 - The summer weather
The weather has been beautiful here in SC and we have been making the most of it.

2 - My new kinders
This is such a sweet group of kiddos and I am loving teaching them. They are such a mixture of personalities and keep me smiling.

3 - My sweet Macy
Her smile lights up the room. She gets so excited to see me when I get home to pick her from my mom's. It just thrills my heart!

What's In a Name?

Last week, we began working on our names unit. I love this unit because it really helps familiarize the children with their own names and the letters that make up their names. I always have students who come in and cannot identify any letter in their names, but by the end of this unit most can identify at least their first letter. This is a fun unit for the kinders too because it is all about them and they are proud of their names.

This summer I purchased Deanna Jump's unit Literacy and Math Fun with Names. This is a great unit with some super fun activities. We did the Chicka Chicka Boom Boom trees she created. I made the rectangles for my students to practice cutting since many of them need to work on this skill. I thought they were so cute when they were finished.

I also made headbands for each child with their names. They loved making these and wearing them all day to show them off!

Lastly, we did this cute activity from Maggie's KinderCorner. The kinders had to write what letter their name started with, cut apart their letters and make their name, and then count how many letters were in their name.

This was definitely a well-loved unit in my classroom and I can't wait to do it again next year. Hope you are having a great start to your week!

The First Week of School

Well we have officially been in school for 7 days now. They have been some very busy but fun days so far. I have 20 lovable kinders that I am loving getting to know better. They are really a sweet group this year.

With the start of the new school year, I have been implementing the Daily 5 into my classroom routine. If you have not heard about it, it is a structure for ELA instruction. We have been working on introducing Read to Self and building our stamina. Today we made it up to 6 minutes. I was so excited! I know that isn't long but it has taken us 5 days to get there. Here are some pictures of them doing Daily 5.

I hope your first days back have been fun (and busy!) like ours! If you do Daily 5 in your classroom, I would love to know how it is going. I am nervous implementing a new program, but I think it will be great. Happy Thursday!

BTS 2014!

Well tomorrow is the first day of school for my sweet little kinders. I know many of them are nervous and their parents are too, but I am sure we will have a great day. This year I am doing a farm theme in my classroom. I am very proud of the way my door turned out this year. It took a lot of hard work but looks great (in my opinion!).

Also tomorrow is the big one day back to school sale on TpT. Everything in my store is 20% off so head over and pick up some things you may have had on your wishlist!

Summer 2014 in Review!

I can't believe that I am back at school already. I know I have been MIA this summer but I have thoroughly enjoyed spending it with my sweet & very busy baby girl! So here's a quick recap of my summer vacation 2014 in pictures.



Excited about Mommy's first day out of school for summer!



Ready to go to the zoo!

Filling up her swimming pool

Having a tea party

Helping Daddy cut the grass with her bubble mower!

Putting her toes in the ocean for the first time!

Loving the waterpark!

Needless to say we have had a very busy and super fun summer! I have enjoyed every minute with my sweet girl. She is growing so quickly but doing so many cute things! I hope you had a great summer as well.

What I'm Loving Wednesday

I am loving so much this week so I thought it was the perfect time to do another What I'm Loving Wednesday post!

 
1 - Summer break! This is my first week out of school and I am loving not having to set my alarm clock.
 

2 - Spending my days with my sweet Macy! She is so sweet and BUSY now that she is walking. She loves playing in her sandbox that she got for her first birthday.

 
3 - The beautiful weather! The days are so bright and sunny and perfect to play outside with my sweet girl! We are enjoying each one so far!

 
I hope you are having a great start to summer too! Happy Wednesday!

iPad Fun!

I previously said that I have received an iPad through Donors Choose. I am still looking for good educational apps for it so any suggestions would be appreciated. The apps that I have downloaded have been loved by my kinders. They are loving using it during small group time.

This is a sight word app where each piece of fruit has a different sight word on it. The app says a word and the kiddo has to touch the fruit with that word on it. I love it!!

This is the Storia app from Scholastic. I have some free books that I have downloaded for the kids to listen to.

If you have any other suggestions for some great apps, please let me know. Thanks a bunch!!