Giveaway Time!

Happy Wednesday!  I am so excited to have a giveaway to celebrate having fabulous followers!

Here are the goodies 1 winner will receive:

My Building the Alphabet:  Uppercase and Lowercase Letters set on TPT.  Here is a pic of one of my cuties building the letter A.

 

 

AND

you can win BOTH sets of Lakeshore's Building the Alphabet Hands On Builders!

Enter this giveaway on the Rafflecopter below.  I will pick a winner on Halloween!  Good luck!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Fabulous Farm Fun!

This week we learned about farms and even took a trip to a local farm.  

 

Here was some of the fun we had.  

We did an experiment to learn why pigs lay in mud.  This idea came from Mrs. Jump. 

The mud was actually pudding.

We also made this little pig.  The sentence strips have sentences that state some of our learning about pigs.  We made him some food and covered him in our mud.

 Here is our farm vocabulary barn.  These are in Jessica Williamson's Down on the Farm unit. 

 We charted what we get from different farm animals.

 We created Mrs. Jump's cow glyph.

We added hay to the cows and bulls since we learned that's what they eat.

We created sight word corn with our thumb prints.

Here is all of our work!

Parent Conferences Freebies

It's that time of year when we start having conferences in my district.  I don't know how you feel about conferences, but I really enjoy the time to talk to families one on one.  It is scary, but I like to think of it as a small group time for families.  You can really learn a lot about your students, where they come from, and their families view on learning and school.

When I schedule conferences, I send home a note with all of the times I am available for conferences and have each family check three times that they would like to meet.  The note states that I will try to schedule them for one of the times they choose.  Then I send home this note as a confirmation:

I try to keep each conference at 20 minutes. Here is the schedule I use:

2 minutes to share glows (praise of their student)

8 minutes to go over conference report (freebie listed below)

7 minutes to answer questions

3 minutes to share the importance of reading (freebie listed below)

Here are your freebies!

Happy Conferencing!

Writer's Workshop

In my district we use Lucy Caulkins' Writer's Wrokshop for our writing curriculum.  I love the way she introduces the idea of writing to students.  Even in our seventh week, we have grown so much as writers.  

Here are some of the anchor charts I have used this year for my eager writers.

 

I introduced this one when we started writing on the second day of school.  We started with pictures, then we started adding letters by labeling, then we started adding words.

I used this one when we started talking about labeling.

 This one has helped with writing actual letters and words.  It has really helped a lot.

 I also give each student a writing folder.  This is mine.  It's gigantic!

In Lucy Caulkins, she has the teacher place a green sticker and red sticker on each side of the folder.  The green sticker is for pieces that can still be worked on and the red side is for pieces that are complete.  Here is the inside of my folder with pieces that I model for the class.

Because of the differences in writing abilities, Lucy Caulkin's encourages teachers to have a variety of paper out for the different needs in the classroom.  The paper varies based on the amount of space for sketching and the number of lines for writing.  Here is how I store my paper.

There is a list of my students attached to the side of the paper tray with a small sticker dot next to their name.  The sticker dot tells them what tray to get paper from.  When a student needs to start choosing from a new tray, then I cover their old dot with a new sicker.  Easy peasy!   

To organize my writing conferences, I created this chart with the days of the week and student pictures.

Each student meets with me once a week.  On the days they don't meet with me, they work with their writing partner.  Their partner is located on the chart next to them.  Writing partnerships allow writers to still get help and support even if they cannot meet with me that day.

After I model my writing then I call my conferences to my table.  Those students go back and start on a piece of writing.  Then I ask the rest of my students to point to their partner and get started.  While we're working I play classical music and then start conferring with the students at my table.  While conferring I use my conferring tool kit.

It's stocked with everything I need to prepare young writers, including letter formation guides, letter/sound pictures, pencils, sharpeners, erasers, date stamps, spider legs, marker boards and my favorite thing ever

OUR DEDICATION STAMP!  

This is used when we publish a piece and want to dedicate our writing to someone.

I truly love using this writing program.  I saw amazing growth last year in my kinders.  One goal I have for this year is to try and get some parent volunteers to come in during our 40 minute writing block to help some of the partnerships.  The more help, the better!  This is definitely a time to utilize volunteers if you have someone who really wants to be in the classroom.

Happy writing!

Magical Product Swap

I was blessed to participate in Mrs. Stanford's Product Swap again this quarter!

I received a products from Time 2 Kindergarten, which is maintained by Tiffani Mugurussa.  She sent me here Visual Symbols for Classroom Directions Cards from her TPT shop.

All of her products look fabulous, but I was excited to get her direction cards because there are so many different direction choices.  Here is a pic of them. 

Tiffini also provides you with numbers to place next to the directions.

I was able to use these direction cards with my class over the last two weeks and they really do help kinders with understanding the order to complete their work.  Tiffani's hard work has made a difference in my classroom.

Hop on over to Tiffani's TPT store and her blog to learn more about her and grab her goodies!

When do your kids go book shopping?

I was sent a few emails in the past few weeks about how and when I let my students know when they can book shop for new books in the their book boxes.

I have a morning "Buzz Work" wheel that my students check each morning to see what they need to work on that day.  These are activities that they do for morning work and when they finish their work throughout the day. 

Basically each student's name in on a section and colored bee is pointing toward that section.  I turn it each day so that students have a new activity each day.  Below the wheel are baskets with bees attached to them that match the wheel above.

These baskets provide the work that they work on each day.  Every color bee is represented on a basket except for blue.  If a student is on blue, then they can book shop that day.  So each student gets to book shop once a week.  I also allow anyone to book shop during our social centers at the end of the day.

Before they can book shop, you will need to make sure your students understand your classroom library system and how to choose good fit books.  (You can read about my library here.)  Here is a chart that helps us with choosing good fit book.  I found this idea on Kim Adsit's site. 

I taught this lesson with the sisters' suggestion of using shoes.  I LOVE to use this book to help the lesson even more:

While we're talking about books, here is a little chart I made with photos of students showing them what good readers do:

I made this with the class by showing them the photos that I snapped and asked them how the kids in the photo were being good readers.  I was sooo proud of their responses!

We're getting there!

Happy Saturday, peeps!  I am so thankful for this week because I feel like we finally jumped over that hump that is the first few {CrAzY} weeks of kindergarten - PHEW!  There was so much learning that happened with my cuties and they have been expressing that learning at home and in other areas of the school.  

One of my favorite things that happen in kindergarten is when we move past reading the pictures and we start reading the words.  I encourage finding the sight words that we have learned while doing Read to Self by giving each student a small hand lense that stays in their book box to hunt for these words.  It may be reading just one word amidst a whole sentence, but they're reading words and they feel soooo successful!  They are always pointing out our four words that we have learned and I LOVE IT!  Sprinkles to these cuties!

Anyways, I just had to share my joy with you all.  Little celebrations are celebrations too!

This week we started learning about plane shapes.  I started with circles and gave each student a pipe cleaner to play with for a moment (always play with manipulatives first) and they started using them as mustaches!  How cute!

 

Anyways, then I taught them a circle song in which we bent the pipe cleaner into a circle while singing it.

We also read Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and used a lot of shape activities form Julie Lee's Chicka Chicka pack on TPT.

We also tasted coconut and graphed the results and discussed what we learned:

We also created Chicka Chicka Boom Boom trees with our names.

Here is all of it put together!

 Another shape activity that we did at the end of the week was create shapes with our bodies.  I compile these photos into a class book.  Here is one picture of our body shapes.  (By the way, I learned who the leaders and planners are in my class with this activity because those kiddos jumped in so fast to tell their friends how to lay to make the shapes.)

We had trouble making a rectangle so we made a plan on the marker board.

 We also played some alphabet games.  Here we are playing Alphabet Swat!  All I do is lay out letters that we have learned and give two students a fly swatter.  Then I call out a letter and they swat it.  They loved it!

We also went on a letter hunt to review our letter that we have already learned.  When we found a letter that we were reviewing we recorded it on the recording sheet.  To spice it up we wore super star reader glasses!

We played Alphabet Bump to review our letters that we have already learned, but I forgot to snap pics of it - Stink a roni!

I promise I am almost finished...

We also reviewed out sight words by arranging our friends wearing letter vests in the correct order to spell a sight word.

We also turned our home living center into a vet's office since we were learning about community helpers this week.  I was so impressed with my cuties' kindness toward the animals and how they wanted to take care of them.

One last exciting thing is that my sweet bloggy friend, Heather at Heather's Heart, is having a give away that you will not want to miss.  Click the pic below to enter.

 

Thanks for reading this super long post.  Happy Saturday friends!