Happy Birthday Give-Away

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Kinderkarla

Happy Birthday to me!  Happy Birthday to me!  The first 4 people who respond to this post with their email address can choose anything $6 or under in my TpT store and I will send it to them for free.  I'd love it if you'd follow me here and at my store as well :)
Thanks for your support!

Where is Spider? and an upcoming Birthday Give-Away

One of our language standards this quarter focuses on using "commonly used prepositions".  This, of course, ties in with the math standards about positional words.  I've created a packet with a seasonal theme of spiders.  I like the Raffi song "Spider on the Floor" and will probably use this song as a beginning point for the activity.  I will ask the students to change the song so that they are using different prepositions- over, behind, under, beside, in, etc...  My packet has a color book that takes a spider to different locations using Halloween themed clip art.

Then, students can make their own book (or a page in the class book) with a black and white version.

Students can draw their own spiders where they want them- making sure to choose a preposition to describe the spider.  Then students can finish writing the sentence.  Instead of drawing spiders themselves, I cut out some cute spiders with my Cricut that I think the students will use on their page.

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Where-is-the-Spider

Tomorrow is my birthday and I am having a give-away.  The first 4 people who respond tomorrow morning after I post this picture can pick anything $6 or under in my TpT store (and that's pretty much everything) and I will send it to them for free.  It's my way to thank my followers- and maybe get a few more in the process!  Just look for me to post this picture tomorrow and respond with your email address.  Don't do it today- wait until you see this TOMORROW October 15th.

There was an old lady who swallowed a bat!

One of our big standards for 2nd quarter is RL2 With prompting and support, retell familiar stories including key details. There are so many fabulous Halloween books to do this with!  Here's a freebie I created to go with the fun book There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Bat!.  It includes sentences and picture cards to go with the story.  I plan to use them in a pocket chart to sequence.  Another standards we teach this quarter is L1b Use frequently occuring nouns and verbs.  Well, this story is great for nouns and verbs for Halloween.  I made word cards that have most of the verbs from the story.  I plan to have the students match the verb with the noun that goes with it. This will help with retelling the story, but it also brings the students attention to nouns and verbs.  Also included in the freebie are larger pictures.  I plan to print and laminate them and stick a piece of magnetic tape on the back.  Then they become a great reading center where students can retell the story on a magnetic board (I use the front of my teacher's desk).  Hope this is something you can use!

Sequencing FREEBIE!

Fall Break

Gosh, it has been so long since I posted anything!  It seems like the first quarter of school went by so quickly!  I feel like I've been playing catch up and barely managing to stay afloat this year!  We were on Fall Break this week and I've been busy making things for the classroom and for TpT.  Here's a link to a sample of my latest Read it, Trace It, Put the Sentence Together. Freebie Sample


http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Kinderkarla

At my store you can find the entire series of these- I have Fall, Halloween, Bats, Spiders, Owls and much more!
Enjoy!

My Classroom is Ready...

...and my kinders come on Monday!!!  Here are some pictures of my classroom.

Part of my meeting area wall

The calendar

More meeting area wall stuff (the hats and number are sticking with strip of magnetic tape- my new favorite thing)

My common core objectives (from Deanna Jump)

My Daily Schedule (more magnetic tape)

Jobs and Clip Chart (this is the door to my storage closet)

Birthdays (used my Cricut)- I have NINE kinders that are starting when they are FOUR!

This will be my focus wall- will put letters, HFW, thinking maps, math vocab etc...

The library (the open door is my kinder neighbor teacher)



The next five pictures show all the way around the room.



I still have a lot to hang up around the room- but we'll do that together the first few weeks of school.  I can't believe we start Monday! I will post more once I get more things up!  Just got home from Meet the Teacher.  25 wonderful little faces!  Can't wait til Monday!

24 Hours and Counting...

I can get my room key on Friday (We start school on August 6th).  It's really late getting our key this year because the district is holding summer classes on our campus.  Even though my room is not being used, I can't get in until Friday at 12:30.  I spent yesterday working on some last minute projects that I needed to get done, but were very time consuming.  Here's what I was up to...

Sharing Bags:  For Meet the Teacher Night, I always have the kiddos go on a hunt around the room looking for important things- the bathroom, their cubbies, their nametag, etc...  One of the items they will find in their cubbies is a sharing bag.  Not a new idea by any means, but I thought I would share mine here.  Last year I made the mistake of not giving students a day to share these bags- it was whenever they brought it back.  So, one day we had 15 bags to share.  Well, you can't disappoint those eager faces ready to share their treasures, so I sat through way too many sharing bags in one day (spread out over several sessions of course because no one could sit still longer than 5 minutes LOL).  So this year, the tag on the bag says what day to bring the bag. Except, in this freebie I took out the date and just put in a line in case your start date isn't the same as mine.  Sharing Bag








Meet the teacher paperwork:  Like I said above, students go on a little hunt through the room with help from their parents.  I do it this way for a couple of reasons. 1)  It gives parents and kinders a focus.  It's not a free for all, let's take everything off the shelves and just play, although there will be at least one who does that. 2)  I am not bombarded all at once by parents and kinders.  Of course, I have a couple of things I need to tell them but I would rather do that at the end on their way out so we don't get bogged down in a parent conference type situation.  3)  It's fun for the kinders- searching for their name in 3 places, finding their cubby by themselves.  Of course, it doesn't always work.  There will be parents who skip the hunt and just come directly to me, but at least there is supposed to be a structure to the evening.  Meet the teacher

Common Core Standards/Objectives:  Does your district require that your daily or weekly standards/objectives are visible somewhere in the room?  Mine does and I hate it- but not because I don't want to be accountable for my instruction.  It's because it's so time consuming and a waste of valuable space.  I purchased Deanna Jump's Common Core Standards document Common Core Standards Posters for Kindergarten and I made the cute hanging thing she shows in that document.  However, my principal didn't really like it. She said it was too small.  So, I spent most of last year using an entire white board to write the weekly standards.  YUCK!  It was ugly, it took a lot of space AND a lot of time writing it each Monday morning (and I had lots of other things to do Monday morning besides that....)  So, this year I am trying it again, but in a different way.  This time I made headings for each subject and I am using Deanna Jump's standards.  I attached magnet tape to the back of everything and I am going to stick it on the board that way.  It will be more visible (I hope) and it gets me out of writing them each week.  I am still using a huge chunk of white board space, but it will be less than last year because I am not writing it. Hopefully it will work for my principal. Standards Headers

Common Core Questioning Jars:  To go along with the common core standards, I recently purchased Tara West's Common Core Questioning Jars for ELA and Math.  I LOVE THEM!  Common-Core-Questioning-ELA-Math-Jar-Kindergarten-Bundle  It's a great way to review skills we are learning.  But I had to find jars/containers that would work.  I couldn't find anything that I liked that wasn't glass at my local Target (and I didn't have time/energy to go searching for cute jars) until I was in the checkout line.  Then I saw these Ziploc storage containers-designer edition.  The cute thing about them is that they have a design on the top that has some of the same colors as the labels in her unit!  It was meant to be!  They are a little small, but hopefully it will work.  So, I spent a LOT of time printing these, cutting them out, folding them and putting them in the jars.

Whew!  It was a busy, busy day.  I wonder what fabulous things today will bring.  It's my last day with no school commitments!

Happy School Year!

http://www.amazon.com/Happy-School-Year-Susan-Milord/dp/043988280X/ref=lh_ni_t 

One of my favorite back to school books is a book called Happy School Year!  It's about the first day of school- the whole school celebrates with cupcakes and sings "Happy School Year to You!"  I created this page for my students to do that first day of school.  We talk about what we want to learn and do in Kindergarten and then I let them color the cupcake and candle, draw a picture of what it is they wish, and try to write what their wish is.  It's a great writing & drawing sample for the beginning of the school year. And, most of the time, I need to go back through with the students and have them tell me what they wrote and I will write it down underneath their attempt. It's also something that I can keep in a writing portfolio to show parents.Here's the link to my document.  Kindergarten Wish