Summer Read It, Trace It, Put the Sentence Together and a small {FREEBIE}

As I was going through files to revise the covers of all of my Read It, Trace It, Put the Sentence Together files, I found a Summer themed one that I hadn't posted.  I used it last year at the end of the year, but totally forgot I had it.  Here's the link to the product in my store.

Here's the link for a small sample freebie!  Maybe you are still in school and could use a quick morning work, or maybe you can save it for next year!  Check out my store for lots of other Read It, Trace It, Put the Sentence Together packs.

An ABC song {FREEBIE}

I've been using this alphabet song for a very long time.  I use it as part of my morning routine/ carpet time.  It loosely goes to the tune of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star".  At the beginning of the year, I do it more as a chant because I want them to get the correct pronunciation of the sounds.  The only problem with this song is that when kids sing it, they tend to add the "uhh" to the end of the sound- which is why we start it as a chant instead of the tune.   Last year, I also began using Jack Hartman's Workout to the Letter Sounds (the open version so we could use our words) some days just to give us a different way to do it.  Anyway, my old copy of the song that I had for my calendar area didn't have very cute graphics.  With all the amazing artists on TpT, I was able to find almost all of the words I needed (even ox which was always hard to find).  Click on the link to get your copy ABC song.

Interviews

Our new principal asked our team to sit in on interviews for our open Kindergarten position. I hadn't done that in a while, so it was definitely an interesting experience.  We started with a phone interview which was difficult.  I felt like we didn't really connect with this candidate as much because it was over the phone.  Then we had a newbie teacher who was very nice, but very needy.  She was at a private school where the curriculum was very directed for them (and she only had 13 students).  Our next two were very well qualified and would make great teammates, but it's so hard to tell from an interview.  Our principal will, of course, make the final decision but it was nice to be a part of the process.  Would love to hear if your principals let you be a part of the interviewing process.  And, what's the craziest question you've ever been asked at an interview?  When I first interviewed in my district, they asked this question- "If you were a flavor of ice cream, what would it be?"  What would you say if someone asked you that in an interview?

Summer is here, but I have a Back to School FREEBIE

      We finished up on Friday and I am already thinking about next year.  Last year, I did not do a great job with shared reading time. I used lots of poems and charts, but not a lot of big books. I may be one of the only kindergarten teachers that dislikes big books, but I can't stand them!  I don't have an easel that really works for big books and the big books are just bulky and difficult with the easel I have.  I end up ripping the pages by accident, or the book closes and the kinders can't see the pages...  Anyway, enough of my anti-big book rant...  I guess my point is that I am always searching for different things to use for shared reading.
      I have a Smart Board in my classroom and I recently discovered that I can take a document and "print" it into a Smart Notebook file!  It takes every page of the document and makes it a page in Notebook. It groups everything on the page as like a picture file so I can't edit it or change it really once I "print" it into Smart Notebook.  This opened up a whole new world for me!  Now I can take shared reading high-tech.  So, I was thinking today about books that I read at the beginning of the year.  I thought about The Kissing Hand and how much fun that is at the beginning of the year.  I also love to use Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?  So, I thought I could make "big books" for shared reading that go along with these books.  And, if you know me at all, you know how much I love pocket charts.  So, of course, I had to make the put together sentences for the pocket chart.  And, here's what I created. I am excited about using them in the first few weeks of school in August!  Hope you like them too!

 

Click on the links for the whole {FREEBIE} book and activity for Kissing Hand and for Brown Bear.

The Busy Beach FREEBIE

We are in the middle of an ocean unit.  I found this book in our Common Core Unit Book Tubs. It is a great book to connect to math.  It goes through different animals on the beach and how many legs they have all together. Click on the link here to get a FREEBIE and enjoy the pictures below that show some of my student samples.

Details Mini-Lesson

We've been writing and publishing "books" for a while now in our classroom.  Some students are very good at telling a story from beginning to end with lots of details.  However, many are not.  I got a story from a little boy last week that said, "We went to California.  We got there.  We went home."  It was at that moment, that I decided I needed to concentrate my mini-lessons on the importance of adding details to our writing.   Recently, I purchased Deanna Jump and DeeDee Wills' Writing Through the Year Unit 6.  It is wonderful and has so many great ideas.  One of the first parts of that unit is a lesson on The Whole Pie and a Slice of Pie.  The idea is that students should zoom in and tell the most important parts of an event.  But this mini-lesson, although fabulous, didn't really meet what I wanted to accomplish.  So, I went to my fabulous teammate and explained what I was trying to do.  We thought about food analogies- cupcakes and frosting, corndogs (don't ask-that one was a little weird!) and finally we came up with the chocolate chip cookie!  The chocolate chips are the details in a story- they are the most important part of a chocolate chip cookie!  Without the chips, a chocolate chip cookies isn't as good.  Just like, without details a story isn't as good.  So, from this came my mini-lesson.  Click here to see it.  I am kind of excited about trying it tomorrow with my kinders.

Rooster's Off to See the World

We've been doing an Eric Carle unit of study in class lately.  I am not crafty, nor artistic so I've been a little in awe of my teammate who finds these beautiful and creative art projects on Pinterest and recreates them with her students.  I try to duplicate, but fall short in so many ways.  Don't get me wrong, we're doing lots of really cute things and writing some amazing pieces to go with our artwork.  But I am just not an artist!  But, leave it to me to find a math connection that I can get excited about!  A few days ago we read Rooster's Off to See the World.  When we read the book we wrote down the number sentences to go with the story and looked for patterns in the sum and in the addends.  Then we colored a cute rooster and added some tail feathers and wrote about a place we want to go and see. Then today I gave the students a word problem: Rooster sees 4 cats, 5 dogs, and 6 pigs.  How many animals did he see all together?  I had the students illustrate that and we talked about how to solve this problem.  Because of all our work with 10, I thought a few students might see an easy way to add the numbers by making 10 with the 4 and the 6.  Unfortunately, that wasn't really the case... most students just counted all to get the answer and were kind of confused about what the number sentence would be.  Disappointed teacher :-(  So, in an effort to salvage my math lesson I decided to adapt a lesson I found when I was google searching common core math.  It's from Georgia.  They have these  pretty amazing units that go with the Common Core Standards for math.  Click here to find them.  Anyway, the lesson is about a trip to a farm.  Basically, you tell the students that you saw a certain number of farm animals' legs and you ask them to figure out what combination of animals they could have seen.  I adapted that to the book Rooster's Off to See the World.  We made a list of some animals that rooster saw- frogs, cats, turtles, and fireflies and added roosters (to give a 2 legged animal).  Then I told the students that Rooster saw 10 legs and asked the students to think about a combination of animals that Rooster could have seen.  We talked with our elbow partners about our combinations and then shared with the group and wrote the number sentence to go with our thinking.  Here are some of their ideas- 1 frog, 1 cat, and 1 rooster (4+4+2); 1 firefly, 2 roosters (6+2+2) and the list went on from there.  Then I told them that Rooster saw 12 legs- we continued in this way for a little while.  This was a pretty cool- it just sort of hit me in the moment math lesson!  We will definitely revisit this idea again!
On a funny note, and kind of connected to the elbow partner conversation, we had an inservice about the Common Core yesterday.  It was one of those really boring meetings where I knew we weren't going to learn anything we didn't already know.  But they showed this really funny video in support of Common Core and writing across the curriculum.  It's called I Choose C.  Click here to see it.