I'm FLIPPING out over summer!

Summer is here...

and I'm flipping out over sharing you some of my flipped classroom adventures from kindergarten!

What is a flipped class?  Well, apparently I've been doing it for years and wasn't aware that is was an innovation in learning.  ALL kindergarten classrooms are being flipped constantly because our kiddos NEED engagement.  Flipped classrooms are when you transform your room to add engagement and excitement into lessons.  Here are some of my flipped classrooms and lessons over the last 5 years!

When I taught pre-k in 2013, I flipped my room monthly and would leave it up  for the month's unit of study.  One of our units was an animals unit.  Some parts were created by me and my wonderful aide, while other parts were student created.  Here are some pictures of this unit of study with my pre-k kiddos.

Since my return to kindergarten in 2014, I've transformed our pretend station monthly, often with student help.  Here are pics from two different years in our apple orchard.

We also had a pumpkin patch!  Again, I created parts, students created parts, and we added parts throughout our unit of study, including the parts of the pumpkin baggies seen below.

Another fun classroom flip was our Santa's Workshop where kiddos baked cookies and made toys with pretend paints and toy tools.

Along with Santa's Workshop, we enjoyed Holidays Around the World with an airport to travel to different places each day.

See us checking in at the airport on my Twitter page!

I found these awesome passport stamps to use from Oriental Trading!

One of our favorite classroom flips was Dinosaur Day!  I used a lot of ideas from Deanna Jump's unit.

I even made my kiddo's shirts to wear!

I wore my dinosaur costume!

We played dino-themed sight word head bands!

Fossil excavations!

Building dino caves!

Non-standard measurment!

Excavating for rocks, well actually chocolate chips!

Another fun flipped day was pirate day!  We put our literacy skills to the test with pirate themed activities on the week we focused on the chunk -ar.

I played my pARt as captain!

These ideas also came from Deanna Jump!

Phonics review lessons are perfect for flipping your classroom.  Q and U's wedding day was a great reason to flip our room!

Science lessons are another great reason to flip your room.  I already mentioned apples and pumpkins, but take a look at our five senses ice cream flip!  We enjoyed a lot from Bonnie Katheryn!

Sense of touch with "sprinkles" that have letter magnets hiding in them to place on picture mats for beginning sound practice as well.

QR stories for sense of sight

                                      

Painting ice cream pictures with scented paints

Sense of hearing with ice cream ordering

The last flip I wanted to share was student created one for a space station.  Look at the sun the kiddos had with objects in the sky!

Check it out in action on my Twitter page!

Math is loads of fun with classroom flips as well!  For the 100'th day of school I set up a spy lab because Zero the Hero was kidnapped!  We performed all kinds of tasks in my laser-filled spy lab!

My VERY BRIGHT STUDENTS dressed the part with their spy lab vests and Secret Agent name tags.

I dressed the part too!

This is just a small list of the flips I have done the past few years, but there are so many more!  How can you flip your room?

Think about it over the summer and make a list now.  I am moving to second grade this year and I am starting a list of flips for my second graders, while also reminiscing over these sweet littles who are moving on to first grade...

Such sweet memories of my fabulous years in kindergarten and Texas.

Next stop... Utah and second grade!

Morning Meeting

It's Spring Break for me!!

I have been a busy bee the last month preparing for the Texas Kindergarten Conference.  It was oodles of fun and I LOVED all of the awesome, dedicated kindergarten teachers I met.  I presented about guided reading, writers workshop, STEAM, and morning meetings.  I thought I would share some of my morning meeting freebies and information with you!

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I begin each day by wearing my greetings apron at the door.  I simply attach three different greetings to it and the kiddos choose how they want to say hello to me upon entering the classroom.  The cards are from Resendez Rocks' TPT shop.

I even wore this apron in Ukraine to teach English last summer.

Once the bell rings for the announcements to begin, my cuties join me at the carpet and we listen to announcements, then begin our morning meeting.

We start by choosing a cool cat helper.  I simply flip a paw to the next student.

That student helps with everything for the day.  Their first task is to flick the greetings spinner.  This was a make and take item during my presentation.  The spinner tells us how we will greet each other.  Here is the link to grab the greetings so you can make your own spinner!

Some of the ways we greet each other include a Hollywood hello, in which we use a karaoke microphone to say hello.

This fun microphone is on Amazon.

We also give a pat on the back with a fluff stuffed gardening glove - another make and take item from my presentation.

Another fun hello is learning a foreign way to say hello.

These are from Lakeshore, but I made a smaller set that you can grab for free in my TPT store.  Just click the pic below.

After we greet each other we go over the schedule for the day...

...then we welcome back anyone who was absent the previous school day with our mascot - Coder Cat.  (Our school name is Coder and our school colors are orange and black, so I found this cutie kitten to be our mascot.)

Coder Cat says "You've been gone.  You've been missed.  Where would you like your Coder Cat kiss?"  Then the returning child points to their arm, nose, etc. where they would like a welcome back kiss.

Once we finish welcoming returning students, then we begin our morning message.  We fill in missing sounds, find wight words, chunks, reversed letters, and capital letters that should be lower case. 

Here is a video or our morning message.

Once we complete our message, then we stand on our Sit Spot paws and "close our eyes and visualize a _______" in which I state something they can be that relates to our learning.  This tells my cuties how to transition to our Promethean board to wiggle with Go Noodle so we can have a brain break before beginning Daily Five.

I use my Rocky the Raccoon puppet to help my littles remember to close their eyes and visualize since this is one of our comprehension strategies from my Beanie Baby Strategies product.  Once we are at the Promethean, I use my magic wand to everyone back into children so we can dance.  They love it!

That's about it!  Lots of learning for the first 15 minutes of the day and a lot community building!

Happy New Year! A fabulous FREEBIE for you!

Happy 2018!  I hope your year has kicked off to a great start!  

 

My little cuties and I have already celebrated 2 fun-filled days of learning in 2018 with a New Year's theme.

With only 2 days of school this week (Thursday and Friday) I didn't introduce any new content.  We just reviewed skills and concepts from our first semester.

In math our review skill was counting backwards from 20.  We read The Night Before New Year's.

This book talks about staying up late and celebrating the New Year.  Then we watched the You Tube clip of the ball drop in New York City.  This showed my cuties that people countdown to celebrate.

I was surprised at how intrigued they were with this small clip!  This showed my cuties the ball drop and allowed me to show them how to make their own ball drop craft to practice counting down from 20.  Here is a clip of one of my little's ball drop.

These were so simple to make.  I gave each kiddo a small paper plate, sparkly stickers, and a bingo dauber to create the ball.  The countdown strip is just a strip of squares.  Easy peasy!

We also reviewed our sight words from the first semester.  One game we played was Sight Word Jenga.  I found tiny Jenga games at Dollar tree.  I divided each tiny set into 3 games, with 15 blocks each.  I did this with 3 of the tiny sets, giving me 9 Jenga games for my 18 kids to lay in pairs.  Each set of 15 blocks had words written on the side.  I showed my kiddos how to build their Jenga tower and play.  The only difference from the regular version is that the student had to read the word before pulling the block.

We also practiced sight words by writing them on balloons.

Syllables were another review skill this week.  We used party blowers to blow out the number of syllables in words.

All of these skills and goodies were used in our New Year's Dance Party!!

In writing, we read Squirrel's New Year's Resolutions and created a bubble map of resolutions.

Then we created party people with their new year's resolutions.

"I can be nice to everybody."

This is one of my ESL students!!

"I can be nice to my mom and Mrs. (misis) Roe."

As you can see, we have done a whole lot of celebrating and now it's your turn!  Here is my updated January QR stories for FREE forever!!  Snag it today or tomorrow or next year as my gift to you!

Have an amazing year!!