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