April Pocket Chart Station Freebie!

Wow, I never thought I would finish my April Pocket Chart Station.  I had some serious block on this one, and I just couldn't get motivated to get it done once I figured out what I wanted to do.  Then, I got stuck on my Making Words activity and re-did it at least three times.  A big thank you to my teammates for helping me work through it and making it easier to understand and visually less cluttered.  I don't know what I would do without Leann and Cindy! :)
So, I sighed a big sigh of relief when I posted it this morning. And, then I took this piece of it out and made it a freebie for the few people out there who click on my lonely little blog. I love making words activities and I think this one will work well for the pocket chart and my kinders' abilities this time of year. Grab the freebie here! And check out some pictures of the activities included in the April Pocket Chart Station.  Happy teaching!

 
 

 

Count Around the Circle

I just recently discovered the book Number Sense Routines by Jessica Shumway and I am loving it!!! I am getting so many great ideas and information and I am only in Chapter 3.  One of the things I am excited about doing today when my Kinders come back is Count Around the Circle. It will be a great addition to my math time.  We will sit in a circle around our meeting area carpet.  I am going to have to start really basic and just count by ones at first.  One student begins and you count around the circle- each student saying the next number in the sequence.  I see all sorts of great things coming from this- and it's a good informal assessment of a student's understanding of counting sequence. Plus, it's a nice new routine for us.  Our math calendar time is getting kind of stale and boring (for me especially) and I am always looking for new ideas to perk things up during math.  I think Counting Around the Circle will definitely do it!  What number routines do you have in your classroom that you LOVE?

Matching Strategy

I love the matching strategy.  It all started many years ago when my teammate and I were involved in a research project at Arizona State University.  We were learning CGI (Cognitively Guided Instruction) and attempting to implement it into our classrooms.  We were team teaching at the time and had about 50 ELL 1st graders in the classroom during math time.  We'd present a word problem and then the students would choose the tools that they wanted to use to solve it.  Well, the matching strategy popped up during one of the subtraction word problems.  Someone decided to make the two sets and then match them up to see the difference.  The student came up to the overhead (I know- old school huh?) and showed their two sets and explained what they did.  I don't even remember if it was a comparing word problem or not, but the matching strategy was born in our classroom and boy did it take off!  Now students were using it for every kind of subtraction problem they could.  Even though it is best for comparing problems, students were using it for your basic subtraction problem- I had 6 cookies.  I ate 3.  How many are left?  They would make the sets and match it up.  Our ASU researcher was a little concerned because the matching strategy didn't fit with the action of the Separate Result Unknown word problem, but we weren't really concerned- we loved the matching strategy.  It continues to be a favorite strategy of mine and each year I wait, sometimes not so patiently, until someone "discovers" it and we can bring it into our bank of strategies for solving word problems. 
When we come back from Spring break on Tuesday, we are beginning our subtraction unit. 

CC6 Identify whether the number of objects in one group is greater than, less than, or equal to the number of objects in another group (matching and counting strategies) is also one of our standards for 4th quarter.  So, it's the perfect time to explore the matching strategy.  "Who has more?"  is an easy concept at this time for most kindergarteners, but I want to push them to figure out the "How many more?" That's where the matching strategy comes in.  I have an activity/assessment pack for CC6.  Click here to see it.  (BTW, I have having a ONE DAY ONLY SALE) But, although the activity is a matching strategy activity, the assessments don't use the matching strategy.  So I created this freebie.  It includes some activities/assessment you can use for the matching strategy.  And, at the end, it has 5-6 pages of word problems (Compare Difference Unknown) that can be used to facilitate the teaching of the matching strategy.  Below are some pictures. Happy Matching!

 

Blend fluency boards

Well, Spring Break is officially over. I feel like I've been productive this week.  A couple of fairy tale packs finished and ready for next week.  I also made two new freebies.  We are teaching blends when we come back after break and I created this fluency boards.  I've used similar things for letters and nonsense words, so I thought I could do the same thing with blends.  I plan to use them in reading group and also have a parent volunteer work one-on-one with different students. Grab the freebie here and here. 

The teachers have a PD day on Monday.  We have a motivational speaker in the morning and then meetings all afternoon.  We are meeting with the 1st grade team for "vertical articulation".  These meetings always feel like pick on the kinder teachers because we always hear what they can't do when they come to first grade and never focus on what the incoming first graders do well.  Maybe this year will be different :)  I teach at a K-8 school, but next year they are building middle schools and we will be a K-6 school.  So, we are having a meeting Monday about transitioning to a K-6 school and what will be different etc... I've always taught in a K-8 school, so I really look forward to getting rid of the big kids and focusing on K-6.  I always feel like Kinder gets left behind a little because we're not a testing grade so maybe going K-6 we won't feel so neglected. 
Enjoy the freebies! :)

Question Words

I am beginning a fairy tale unit when we come back from spring break. One of our fourth quarter standards is L1d Use and understand question words. I made this cute freebie to go along with my fairy tale unit. It's designed for a pocket chart center. Just print the question cards and the answer cards. Put the questions cards in the pocket chart. Students read the questions and then use the answer cards to match the correct answer to the question. Then there's a worksheet where the students can write the answer in a whole sentence (with some picture and tracing help). Grab the freebie from my store here and see some sample pictures below.  Enjoy!

April Morning Math and my crazy life

I have been MIA for quite a while. Let's see, to get caught up- we put our house on the market, sold it in 3 days, 2 weeks later moved into an apartment while our new house is being built. I've been boxing up my life, moving a bunch of it to storage and the rest up three flights of stairs. Add to that the craziness of 3rd quarter and you have my world in February and early March. Wheew- I am on Spring Break and I can get back to some normalcy after that! With spring breaks comes me catching up on the TpT stuff that I just haven't had time for and, of course, coming back to my lonely little blog. I have two new items at TpT that I am really excited about. One is a fairy tale literacy pack. Click here to see it. The other is my April Morning Math packet. Click here for my preview which includes one freebie from each of the four weeks. Here are some pictures of both of them.

Writing center cards

Put together sentence

 

Same sentences for the pocket chart

Brace map to show character, setting, etc... for each fairy tale

Finish the sentence papers for each fairy tale

April Morning Math sample

April morning math sample

April morning math sample

 

Groundhog Day

Here in Arizona, Groundhog Day doesn't seem to mean much.  The "winter" we have is so mild and short, that spring is always around the corner in early February regardless of whether he sees his shadow or not.  So, it's funny teaching my kinders about it because they've never really lived in a place where we have winter.  Kind of like our conversations about leaves falling from trees and cooler temperatures in autumn- our leaves don't fall from the trees in Phoenix until around January and sometimes it's still 100 degrees in September.  But we will talk about Groundhog Day a little this week, and we will tie it into our informational writing unit. 

I have couple of freebies to offer you.  The math one aligns to K.CC.2- counting forward from a number other than 1.  The writing one is a put together sentence about Groundhog Day.  We use these at our theme station and as morning work a few days a week.  Get the freebie here.  They are at my store in a couple of different places.  You can find them here or here.

 

 

For those of you in cold places, here's hoping for no shadow and spring right around the corner!