Polka Dot Classroom Decor

It has been too long!!!  The birth of my son has been wonderful and has made my life vey busy, therefore, my blog has not seen any action.  But the time has come to change that!  I am going to try very hard to blog at least twice a week the happenings in my new kindergarten classroom.

As a teacher, one of the greatest sights is seeing things that I have created being printed, cut out, and laminated!  It is one of my obsessions.  Everything that I want to keep or have the kids use gets laminated.  Our laminator at school is very temperamental, so on the advice of one of my co-workers, I purchased my own and it has been WONDERFUL!  It actually laminates things a little thicker than the one at school, which makes flash cards and other things sturdier.  Here is a picture of the laminator that I purchased, along with the box of laminating film. The laminator was bought at Wal-Mart for under $30 and the pouches I got at Sam's Club for $20 .  Wal-Mart sells a 50 pack of these for $10, but since we have a Sam's Club membership it is more economical to get them there.

Here are some of the products that I have created this summer that coordinate with my Bright Polka Dot classroom décor.  I am a little OCD when it comes to school décor and like all of my things to match, so I started making my own things.  You can get any of my products by clicking on the pictures, which will take you to my TPT store.  I will post pictures this week of these things hanging up in my classroom, with my classroom tour once I can get back into my room this week.

These are color word posters for my kinders to learn their color words.  I chose not to put these on the polka dot backgrounds, in order to not confuse them.

These are number cards from 1-20 that I also hang up in my room.  There is pictorial representation using 10 Frames.



These are the cards that I use for my literacy station rotations.  I print off two sets of these, as the
students go to two stations a day.




I use these numbers to label my student cubbies.  You could use these for numerous things though...and since you made it to this post they are FREE!!!!

 

These are my alphabet posters which I will put on the table side of my room to help with ABC order, letter sound association, and spelling.



Be sure to check back next week to see these products in action in my classroom!

Dr. Seuss Weekly Activities

It's been another month and I apologize.  I am now 34 weeks pregnant and it is taking its toll.  I am trying to prep for a sub and a new baby all at the same time.  Here is what I am looking like now-a-days:

 

I wanted to give you all a peek into what we did over Dr. Seuss week last week.  As his birthday was Saturday, we celebrated all week long in preparation for this great author's birthday.  Some activities included: 

A special snack each day to go with a book. 
One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish - colored goldfish
If I Ran the Zoo - animal crackers
Green Eggs and Ham - scrambled green eggs and ham cubes (of course ;)
The Cat in the Hat - Jello and whipped cream Thing 1 and Thing 2 cups that I made.  Here is a pic:

We also made 2 class books, one related to The Cat in the Hat where they wrote about what they would do on a rainy day and another one related to If I Ran the Zoo where they wrote about what animal they would be and why.  I compile these into class books that I rotate through until everyone has had it, then it goes into the classroom library.

We also made colored people with liquid watercolors to go with My Many Colored Days.  We then wrote a sentence stating which color we would be and how it makes us feel.  Here is how they turned out:

 

We also made Thing 1 or Thing 2 paintings.  These turned out sooo cute!

100th Day Fun!

On Monday we celebrated our 100th day of school.  It is hard to believe that we are already in February.  As my baby bump grows, it is amazing how my students respond to me with being helpful and better behavior (for the most part).  Here are some of the fun things we did for our 100th day celebration:

I asked each student to bring in 100 edible items to add to our special snack mix for the day.  It was an interesting mix of things for sure!  Here are 2 of my kiddos adding their baggie to the mix.   They loved this special snack and asked if we could do something like this again.

Eating our snack...

 I bought these 100th day posters that the students got to personalize.  They had a counting by 2's connect-the-dots, a list of things they have 100 or more of in their house, I wish I had 100 ...., and a 100 balloon pattern of their choosing.  They loved having free rein on this project and the posters turned out great, with every one being different.

Another thing that I always do is ask the students to bring in 100 small items to glue down onto a grid.  I then hung these collections up in the hallway (sorry, forgot to take a pic of this).

Some other things that we did were putting 100 small stickers onto a gumball machine to practice fine motor skills, a "If I had 100 dollars I would buy..." writing activities, and a number grid fill in to 100.  I always enjoy this special day of school and I think my firsties had a good time this year too!

American Education Week Revisited and New Happenings

Well, I didn't quite make my goal of one post per day for American Education Week.  Here is what we did the rest of the week as a school:

Monday - Whole school read for 15 minutes
Tuesday - Thank you notes to someone who works at a school
Wednesday - Reading round-up ( we dressed up like cowboys/cowgirls)
Thursday - Volunteer Read-A-Loud in classrooms
Friday - My favorite book writing assignment

Here is a pic of our great guest reader and another pic of Ava dressed in her cowgirl gear.

 

Other happenings in our classroom have included our most recent inquiry project, which we did Friday.  The students came up with our question, "What can neighbors do to have fun in the park?" and they had to put together a puppet show to answer that question. They worked together in groups of 4 or 5.  Here is them working hard on their puppets:

Next we went to work practicing our parts. Then came the fun part, putting on the show.  I put some desks together and put coats over them to help "hide" the students. Their plays were a-dor-a-ble.  Some had stage fright at first, but they were so cute.  Next time I will have to take some video to post!  This group was playing basketball in the park.

 This group was playing on the playground equipment.  I love the slide and swings!

 This group was walking their dogs in the park.

Onto other news in my life....I am excited to tell everyone that we are expecting a baby boy mid-April.  I was so thrilled when we found out on Wednesday.  Everything was great on the sonogram, with no abnormalities that they could see.  Our little boy has some long legs, which explains why his foot was in my ribs all of Thursday afternoon ;) 

American Education Week: Day 2

Happy Tuesday everyone!  Today for American Education Week the students got to design their own bookmarks to help promote reading.  Here are my kiddos at work on their bookmarks:

 

Last week on Thursday, our school had Reading Night. This is where families come in the evening for games, information, and a book fair.  First grade was in charge of the sight word fishing pond.  Here is one of my students getting ready to fish and another student enjoying a cookie while at the sight word walk:



 

 

Teacher Tip of the Day:  If you see Ava's shirt in the picture above, you will notice that those are self-portrait t-shirts that we made this year.  I order the shirts from Rocky Mountain Shirt Company and they are only $10 for a youth and $12 for an adult shirt.  You have to have a minimum of 18 shirts, but shipping is totally free!  I have made these the past 2 years with my preschoolers, and I have found that my firsties love them just as much.  I love to see their drawings of themselves on the t-shirts all year long.  Be sure to check out their website here.

 

American Education Week

In honor of American Education Week, I am going to try to post every night with our special activity of the day and something that has been happening in the classroom recently, along with a teacher tip!  To kick off our "Reading Round-Up" was a whole school 15 minute read this morning.  The teachers knew it was today, just wasn't told at what time.  That just keeps us on our toes!  Here are my firsties reading their books in the hallway:

They just love to look at their library books and were super excited that we got to do it in the hallway!

Another activity that we did today was writing postcards to adults in the school to thank them for all that they do for us on a daily basis.  The students got to pick who they wrote their card to.  We had lots who picked the principal, some who even picked me, and some people that I was so proud of them to think of (cafeteria workers, Title 1 Staff, the janitor, etc).  We will deliver these cards to the appropriate recipients tomorrow.

 

 

On Friday we completed our inquiry project for Lead 21 (our Language Arts curriculum).  The question that the students came up with was, "Who works in the community?"  I was super happy that they came up with such a great question.  So, on Friday each table group made two community buildings and then we combined them together to make a mural.  Then they drew on the community workers that work in those buildings, along with adding other details like cars, clouds, and trees.  I think that they turned out fabo!



 

Teacher Tip of the Day:  Glue a pom-pom onto the end of your dry erase markers.  I used hot glue to adhere the pom-pom to the end of the marker, it eliminates the need for erasers!  The students love the cool erasers and get to pick what color they get.  They also like to use the lid as a prop up for their dry erase board, which in turn improves their handwriting.  A win - win!

 

October Art Image

Okay, okay.  I know that it has been a month since my last post, but things have been hectic! The first quarter is done and I had to do grades for the first time.  The last two years in preschool have not prepared me for the horror that is doing grade cards.  Don't get me wrong, they are beneficial and a good measuring tool, but it is hard to pass judgement on young six year olds.  I was soooo proud of my babies, as their knowledge of sight words when way up from where they were in August.  Yeah!  The daily drill during guided reading groups is paying off.  I am ready to move one of my intensive groups up to the first grade list.  This makes me uber happy.

On to fun art projects; we had our second Art Image project last week.  In the spirit of Halloween, we made oil pastel paint resist with jack-o-lanterns in the night sky.  The sky turned out purple instead of black, but I like that they now look eerie and creepy instead of just dark.  A big thanks again to Cori's mom for organizing and setting up this art project.  Here are some pictures of the project in progress and our finished products.  They look so cute hung up in the windows in the hallway.

 

I love how hard they are concentrating on their pictures!

 

Our finished products:

 

 

Hopefully, tomorrow I will post about our visitor for Fire Safety Week and later this week on how I run my Literacy Workstations.  Being pregnant is tiring, but I vow to be better on posting more often.  I am looking forward to seeing all my parents this week for conferences.