Holiday FREEBIES!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm so excited!  The 2012 Winter Holiday Tips and Freebies is available now!  Click the pics to go to TPT and download these FABULOUS books.  They are filled with pages of freebies from fantastic bloggers!

BIG thanks to Krissy Miner from Mrs. Miner's Monkey Business for organizing both these books!

Gingerbread Unit

Here's the whole week in a nutshell!

Monday:

*Watched story Gingerbread Man

*Discussed main parts of Gingerbread Man story and completed our Story Map

*Discussed verbs from the story and brainstormed a list of other verbs on our gingerbread man

*Used verbs in our pocket chart poem

Tuesday:

*Listened to story Gingerbread Man again

*Sequenced the story whole group

*Sequenced the story individually

*Read emergent reader

Wednesday:

*Listened to the Gingerbread Man again
*Read story the Gingerbread Baby by Jan Brett
*completed a Venn Diagram, whole group, comparing the two stories

*Completed an individual Venn Diagram comparing the 2 stories:

Thursday:
*Reread Gingerbread Baby
*Graphed which story we liked best

*Recorded our information on our own graphs and discussed the results of our data. 

(Forgot to get a picture of one but it looks like this:)

Friday (plans for tomorrow):
*Writing:  My favorite story
No pictures of course since it's only Thursday now, but you get the idea!  


If you're interested in any of these activities you can check the pack out here:

Holiday Shopping!!!!!!!!!!! It's a love/hate thing!

I LOVE the deals!  I HATE the lines, crowds, rushing around and not EVER finding the right thing!

(Thanks Michelle @ 3am Teacher blog for creating this adorable graphic!)

I'm sure we all know by now that TPT is having their FABULOUS Cyber Monday (and Tuesday!) sale but couldn't help but shout it out and celebrate!  My shopping cart if full, I'm ready to buy LOTS of stuff and I don't have to wait in line!

Check out all the great deals!

Color Celebration!

A few weeks ago we celebrated learning our final color word! (And I just now downloaded the pictures!  Can you say procrastinator??)
  We learn one color word a week (along with other words) and now that we're done we did a few fun activities to celebrate.

Color read the room:

Roll, Count and Color:

 Read the color words & color picture to match.

All these activities came from Becky's Crazy for Color Words packet.  

I showcased the packet back in August, during the Magical Product Swap, and was super excited to actually get to use the activities with my kinders!
Becky has lots of other great ideas!  
Check out her blog:

Numbers 1-10. . . the next step

October and November where full over activities that focused on numbers 1-10. 

We read books, sang songs, wrote the numbers, introduced collection boxes, played games, and on and on and on. . . .

(Click HERE  to see introduction to numbers.)

After all that hard work on introducing numbers I was ready to branch out and see what the kids where thinking about numbers.

We created whole group collection boxes: 

The kids were sent out into the room to find anything they could that reminded them of the number we were working on. 

 Most kids are still thinking of counting objects when they do this.  I would think these are the "typically developing kinders" who are exposed to numbers but are still very concrete thinkers.
From this group of kids we got a lot of groups of 5 objects (books, food, cubes, pictures of friends, etc.)

There were a handful of kids who where "thinking outside the box."  These are my higher level thinkers who have been exposed to numbers and the world in general more than the average 5 or 6 year old.  They brought us:
*the #5 from our calendar
*our Dottie Domino Card with 5 dots
*dice showing the number 5
*schedule cards (snack & lunch) because each of those words had 5 letters in them
*a picture of a friend from the class who is 5
*one kid used herself as her example because she was 5

The third group of kids where still wandering around the room even after 5 minutes wondering what they could bring to the floor.  They were the kids who have not been as exposed to numbers as the typically developing student or kids who just don't see the world in numbers. . . yet.

After spending several days on our whole group collection boxes we paired off into groups of 2 and made collection box number posters. 

I supplied them with a variety of supplies (magazines, stickers, empty tens frames, old craft supplies, etc.) and they came up with a poster representing their number.

On day one we gathered our ideas and either glued them to index cards that where cut in half or put them into our number baggies.
Day two we shared our ideas with the class, created a few more ideas for our posters (inspiration struck some after their friends shared ideas) and then the last day we glued all our ideas onto our posters and decorated them.

Now we're going to take a little break from numbers and work on shapes.  

Then we'll be back for numbers 11-20!

Amazing Giveaway!

Click the picture to go to Adventures in 3rd Grade and enter her fabulous giveaway!!!  She's giving away materials for grades K-6 AND a $20 Amazon gift card!

A Few Fun Things

Did you see these?

You can pre-order them on Amazon now!  To be released in February 2013!

And, here's a few videos my class has enjoyed:

BATS:

OWLS:

Magic Squares Winners!

We have 10 winners!!

Click HERE to see if you won one of HoJo's Magic Squares!!
If you are a winner HoJo will be e-mailing you to find out which Magic Square you would like.  

Even if you're not a winner make sure and check out all the FREEBIES from HoJo's TPT Store!  

Click pic to go to HoJo's store and view all her FREEBIES!

And yet another reason I love duct tape!

My kids LOVE the class books they make.  During reading center they are picked first above ALL other books.  They read them over, and over, and over!

One thing that has always frustrated me with making class books is that 1) they took time for me to bind nicely 2) even when I took the time to bind them nicely they still fell apart. . . they are just used too much to hold up for very long.

UNTIL. . . this year I decided to quit putting so much work into making them last because, well, they just weren't going to.  So, I stapled them with my normal classroom stapler (I didn't venture to the workroom to laminate the cover, get the binding machine or even the heavy duty stapler) I just stapled them with my wimpy stapler and then wrapped duct tape over the staples so the staple parts that stuck up a little wouldn't stick the kids.

It's a MIRACLE!  Even the class book we made in September is still holding up!  No ripped out pages, no upset kids because their page is missing and no having to "fix" the books a million times to make little readers happy.

Is it pretty binding?  No.  Do the kids care?  No!

Duct tape. . . I LOVE you!

By the way:  this summer I wrapped a bunch of my old clipboards in duct tape and those are holding up beautifully also!

Scarecrow Season!

It's time for the Scarecrows to make their appearance in Kindergarten!

We have an alphabet read aloud story where a silly scarecrow will use letter sounds to try and scare all sorts of silly things away from A to Z!

Then we'll make a class book using a similar format as the class read aloud:

Our pocket chart activity will use the kids' names and the beginning sounds of their names:

The scarecrow is a pointer we'll use when we read the poem.

Ex:  

a   a   a  

Is what he'll say

When he tries to scare

Addison away!

We'll read our scarecrow emergent reader:

Label scarecrow parts and discuss the parts of a story for the books The Littlest Scarecrow Boy and The Scarecrow's Hat:

And, of course, play some scarecrow math and reading games:

There are a few other Scarecrow activities 

we'll do and I'll post more on that when I have actual pictures for you to see!

If you're interested in any of these activities click the pic to take a look!

And, here are 3 FREE scarecrow poems for you to use to get your classroom quiet, watching you or ready for hallway!

click the pic to download