Spooktacular Sale!

Thanks to Abby at The Inspired Apple for making this adorable graphic!

I am joining in in the Spooktacular Savings Sale on TPT with dozens of your other favorite bloggers! From now through Sunday October 28th, everything in my store will be 20% off. You can find my best selling product, Shapes Galore for the Common Core, and an ABC Order Sort Literacy Pack! Head over here to my store by clicking on one of the two photos below to take advantage of the 2-day sale!

I'll be back next week to share all the fun things we did for Halloween/Fall!

{Shapes Galore for the Common Core!} Teaching Unit

I am excited to announce a new product I just posted on TeachersPayTeachers and Teacher's Notebook... Shapes Galore for the Common Core! This unit includes fun activities and resources for 2D and 3D shapes and meets the common core standards! This unit is perfect for teaching and reinforcing skills about shapes. It includes posters, word wall cards, and math ring vocab cards for 2D shapes and fun activities such as shape hunts, spinner games, sorting mat/pocket chart activities for 2D/3D shapes, and more! Check out the two preview images below:

You can click on the cover page below to take you to the product in my TPT store, or click on any of the two links to my stores in the right sidebar on my blog.

Currently October!

It's October already, which means... time for the Currently Link-Up with Farley over at Oh' Boy 4th Grade! I really can't believe it's time for October and Fall and pumpkins and everything that goes with it because it is still a cool 100 degrees here in the desert. I'm so ready for jackets and crisp weather but we won't get it for awhile here so I'll live vicariously through you all!

Labeling activity, Freebie, and a Giveaway!

Well, a month and a half into school and we have been rockin' and rollin' with ourselves! My class has been amazing and they keep impressing me every single day with their learning. I'm currently knee-deep in benchmark testing for the first time this year, but in the meantime we've been busy working on colors, beginning sounds, letters, writing skills, shapes, and counting. One thing I like to do to help my kids practice their early writing skills at the beginning of the year is labeling activities. I'll usually post the words either on the word wall, at the writing center, or on the whiteboard for the kids to use as references to label their pictures. For some reason, when we do these labeling activities, their handwriting turns out more beautiful than anything they've ever written before! I made up an activity sheet and matching word cards for our latest labeling activity we did this week using animal naming words. I hung up the four word cards on the board for them to look off of:

Then, using them as a reference, they labeled their animals on the activity sheet and then colored the picture.

You can download the animal naming words labeling sheet and word cards for FREE here on Google Drive (formerly Google Docs!): 

Animal Naming Words Labeling Sheet** (read note below about printing)

Animal Naming Word Cards

**One thing to note about the Labeling sheet - I made it to be printed on LEGAL-sized paper, so you'll have to manually go in on the PDF and change it to print on that size or else it will automatically print it to 8 1/2x 11 paper. Hope that makes sense! I wanted the kids to have as much room as possible to write their words.

Now for the exciting news - Heather over at the blog Heather's Heart is having an AMAZING giveaway just cause she loves us! 2 winners will get a $50 Target gift card, a $25 Lakeshore gift card, and a $25 TPT gift card! Woah! You know teachers love shopping at all 3 of those places! How generous of her! Check out the giveaway here: Heather's Heart Giveaway ....and hurry! There's only 3 hours left to enter!

Practicing Writing Concepts With Predictable Charts

One of the biggest things my kinder team takes pride in is our students' ability to do some amazing writing by the time the end of the year rolls around. At the beginning of the year, I'm always referring to the things that "good writers do" and we create an anchor chart together to leave up on the wall for the whole year. One of the strategies I've found most helpful is for my students to participate in shared writing with predictable charts. A great resource for learning how to implement these in your classroom is this book, Predictable Charts: Shared Writing for Kindergarten and First Grade: 

After we learn a new sight word, I have each student dictate a sentence using the same sentence stem so that they see it used over and over and I record their sentences on chart paper like this:

After each sentence, you write their name on the end in parentheses (mine aren't shown). Every time I write a sentence, I make a huge deal about using a capital letter at the beginning, "finger spaces" and a period at the end. I usually do the predictable charts during my morning message time and have about 4-5 kids a day go so that by the end of the week, my whole class is done! Once I have every student's sentence recorded, I type each sentence out and give the kids theirs in one strip:

I have them cut off their name first and glue it in the corner of the writing paper:

Then they cut up each word in their sentence - I tell them to cut on the "finger spaces"! - and then glue them back in order on the writing lines.

After they glue their sentence back together, they have to copy and write their sentence exactly like the one that was typed out, practicing all of their things that "good writers do", and then illustrate!

Some get it and they come out great!

Others need a bit more practice.... :)

But either way it is a early-kinder writing strategy that I love using in my classroom! And my kiddos always think it is the coolest thing that they get their very own sentence to use. I love that they are excited about everything at this age! One of the things I love most about kinder is how much amazing growth they make throughout the year, especially in writing!

Blog Hoppin' Freebie Friday {a few days late!}

Okay, okay, yes. I am late to the party for Freebie Friday. But the good news is, you get something free even though it is no longer Friday! Everyone likes free, right?

The first freebie I am offering is something new I created last year to go with a new Kindergarten Common Core Standard -- word endings! Students are to be able to tell what a word means based on its ending. To help my kiddos visually, I created word ending picture cards and a reference poster to help them with meaning. These are great for K-2 visual anchor charts!

Click here to get the word endings poster below!

Click here to get the set of 6 word ending cards show below!

The second freebie you can grab is a center game for reading, writing, and matching color words! You can find it in my TPT store, along with a monsters uppercase/lowercase letter matching game, for free! Here is the color word center in action with some of my kiddos last year:

Click here to go to my TPT store and get my other two freebies: Onward to my store!

Where I Work Wednesday : {Teacher Week}

UPDATE 8/23: I posted pictures of "where I work" last week, so here is the blog post again that I'm editing to be included in Teacher Week: Where I Work Wednesday! Enjoy!

Though I have gotten through one full week of school already, I am just now getting around to posting pictures of my classroom! I have been totally swamped the past few weeks between attending meetings, welcoming brand new teachers to my team, and preparing my own things for my class that this is the first time I've actually had the chance to sit and make a post about it. I love how it turned out! Since school is in full swing, you may notice my tables looking more scattered and scraggly with papers and student's items, but try to pretend you don't notice. ;)

So this is what my classroom looked like post-summer cleaning when I first came back in July...

...And ended up looking like this by the time Meet the Teacher Night rolled around! Much better!

This is my book center. I love how it turned out. I accidentally ended up with somewhat of an Eric Carle theme in my room that began when I innocently bought a set of The Very Hungry Caterpillar nametags for my students... and then I ended up making this giant tree, which now houses my kids' incentive charts.

Here's a closer view of the incentive tree...

And these are the charts that are hanging from the branches! How fun!

Next here's my word wall, that I always do a good job of adding our sight words to at the beginning of the year but not so much as the year goes on... it's my goal to be better at that this year!

In front of that is my writing center table that I had to make smaller this year because I have way more students in my class than last year - I had to make it only one table so I could use the other one for my extra students. I bought the 3-drawer thing this year in an attempt to keep my papers more organized for my students to use!

Here's my calendar set-up. I made the red ten frame template (found it on pinterest) since that has been a huge push with the new common core. I'm just going to put velcro on the back of some red/yellow counters and put one up there for every day that we are at school for the month. As you can see I haven't quite finished making it as there is nothing on there and we have been in school for 7 days, haha.

This is where most of the technology happens - desktop computer, laptop, document camera. How did I EVER teach kindergarten without a document camera?? Lifesaver for modeling!

Finally, on the first day of school I noticed some mysterious mustaches that had appeared in my room - I went to tell the kids "rule number 5" on the first day and did a double take when I saw my mustachio'd friend! Then the kids found another one on our line-up poster. It was really my neighbor teacher's boyfriend that was the culprit, but a few of my kids came to the conclusion that it was done by the "Mustache Maker" and he was a bad guy that leaves mustaches everywhere. HA! That's a good enough explanation for me!

So there it is! Thanks for joining me on a tour around my classroom. I've loved seeing what everyone else has done in their rooms so far, too, on various blogs. My class is off to a GREAT start so far with their behavior! Hope it continues!