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!