Caution: Picture Overload!

Oh my goodness, it feels like it has been FOREVER since I put anything up on here!! We had Spring Break and then I had my finals for grad school and had zero time for updating my little blog! Well I am happy to have all of that behind me (the finals at least, not Spring Break!) and I am back in the groove! Here is a little of what we have done so far this week:

This week we are learning all about caterpillars and butterflies. We were so lucky that our Science Lab teacher found caterpillars in her yard and gave them to us right before they went into their cocoons! Here they are in their cocoons inside the little home we made for them.


One of our craftivities we did this week was on caterpillars and butterflies, another glyph. Oh, how I love glyphs!

We even got to act out the story The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle.

One of my projects for my grad school finals was to write up a big 25 page long paper on some of the activities I do in my class that assist with reading. I took pictures of my students completing these activities and figured it might be nice to post them on my blog as well :)


This activity is something we do as a pre-assessment and a post-assessment on many of our units that we study. It is called a Graffiti Wall. For the Graffiti Wall, I have four big pieces of bulletin board paper and write four topics relating to our theme. Our theme for this particular lesson was Spring and the topics were Spring Weather, Spring Clothing, Spring Activities, and Plants and Animals in the Spring. Each table has four students at it and they get 5-7 minutes at each paper to write a sentence and draw a picture relating to the theme. When the 5-7 minutes is up, I have them rotate to the next station. This is always a big hit, you can literally hear a pin drop in my room when we do this (which in kindergarten is a big feat!). Here are the pics:

Another one of the strategies I used was the game boards found in Words Their Way and using educational games to track reading success. Throughout the year I put out a few game boards at a time and the students play these games during centers. These games can be geared towards whatever strategies I am trying to help my little ones develop at the time. We have games that focus on beginning sounds, middle sounds, ending sounds, sight words, decodable words, CVC words, etc. Once my kiddos have become very strong in a particular area of focus, I switch out the game for new one in order to keep it challenging. I must have about 15 of these game boards and keep making more, I can't get enough of them! Here are some pictures of a few of them: