Mardi Gras FREEBIE!

I am working on my Mardi Gras unit and wanted to share with all of you a little freebie :)

Using the colors purple, green, and yellow, the students should write the sight words listed next to the line. The first handout are words used from the Journeys reading series that we use at my school (which I LOVE by the way!). The other handout uses words from Fry's list of 100 Words.

This will be in my Mardi Gras unit as well as 30 more pages of other fun material. Be sure to check it out when I upload it in a few days :)

Have a great day!

Play Doh Numeral Formation FREEBIE and pics of our bats :)

We finally finished up our bats and hung them up on our windows today. They were made "extra spooky" by our real life GIGANTIC spider that made a web outside our window. We love watching him to see if he has caught any bugs in his web. I am just happy that the kids can watch all the exciting cool things about a spider without having to have one INSIDE our room- phew! Spiders creep me the heck out!! Here are our bats on our windows:

 

And here is our real life spider friend outside our window... he is so big!!

Also, this week in math we have been working on our numeral formations and in centers we made our numbers with play doh and then showed them on ten frames. 

I slipped these papers into sheet protectors for quick and easy "laminating" and presto chango- we had a new center within 5 minutes! I uploaded the play doh ten frames to my TPT store as a freebie so head on over and grab them!!

Hope you're all having a great week!

Spiders and Bats- Finally!

My Spiders and Bats Unit is finally posted- woohoo! In this unit there are several reading and writing activities, as well as 5 math activities. My pumpkins unit will be coming within the next week or so. The first two people to comment below telling me ONE thing you would like to see in the pumpkin unit AND leave their e-mail addresses will get Spiders and Bats for free!

Happy Monday!

Spider and Bat FREEBIES!

It is almost time for the Spider and Bat unit! Can you tell I'm excited?? In order to kick it off I am giving away two freebies! These two pages can both be found in my Spiders and Bats unit that is 30+ pages of science, math, and literacy fun. Click on the pictures to be taken to my TPT store where they are free!

Behavior Management Linky and Back-to-School Night Handout

When I saw this Behavior Management Linky I knew I just couldn't pass it up! My behavior management systems help with promoting good behavior in a positive way AND they are educational!! WOOHOO! In our class we have two behavior management systems: one for each individual student and one for each table. The individual student behavior management is our "Hopping in the right direction" system with magnetic frogs on our chalkboard (covered with bulletin board paper).

Each student has a frog with their number labeled on it. Every day each frog starts on the blue lily pad (the middle one). As the day goes on, if a students makes a good choice they get to "hop" their frog. When they hop, they move one lily pad to the left (this also helps with teaching left and right-- which can be so tricky!!) When they get told to "hop" enough times that they reach the purple flowered lily pad, they earn a sticker for their monthly sticker chart. The object is to get as many stickers on your monthly sticker chart as possible. When a student breaks a rule or is not following teacher directions, they have to "drop" their frog. A "dropped" frog makes it harder for them to get to purple and earn stickers, but it is still possible. If a student makes it all the way to the lily pad that is the furthest on the right, they have to pull a sticker off their monthly sticker chart (remember, the object is to have as many stickers on that monthly chart as possible... you'll read why below!!).

The table behavior management is a little different. This is to mostly reward tables who are consistently following directions and working at an appropriate noise level. When a table is following directions, they earn a tally. When the table earns 5 tallies they get an automatic sticker on their monthly chart for every tally afterwards. So 5 tallies = 1 sticker, 6 tallies = 2 stickers, 7 tallies= 3 stickers and so on. This helps my little kinders become VERY familiar with making tallies.

 

It is kind of hard to see in this picture but this is an old picture of monthly sticker charts up under our Smartboard. This was March and there are Shamrocks on the sticker charts.

Now you're probably wondering why it is so important to have all these stickers on our monthly sticker chart right?? Well on the last school day of each month, we count up how many stickers each child has earned. For every sticker a child has earned, they get one pretend penny to go shopping in our class "PENNY STORE". The prizes are usually items from the Dollar Store, dollar section of Target, etc. The students get so excited about this and it teaches them about the value of different coins because we trade out their pennies for higher coins. 

Now it's your turn to go link up!! 

But before I go, I wanted to upload pics of my Back-to-School Night handout I am giving the parents in case anyone wants to take a peek. If you want me to e-mail you a copy that you can edit, leave me your email address in a comment below. 

Hopefully this can be of some use to a few of you!

Apples, Apples, and more Apples! Oh... and a Freebie too! :)

This week we have been learning all about apples- one of my favorite things to teach about! Tomorrow we are making our class applesauce and I am so excited I can already taste the cinnamon! So far this week we have read Apples by Gail Gibbons, Ten Apples Up On Top by Theo Lesieg, Ten Red Apples by Pat Hutchins, and The Story of Johnny Appleseed by Aliki. Today we graphed our favorite of those four books and Ten Red Apples won! This was funny to me because the copy we have in our school library looks about 50 years old and I was assuming my little kinders would judge the book by its cover (literally!) and not like it. They proved me wrong though!! Here is our graph:

 

I printed pictures of the covers of the books from the internet to put at the bottom of our graph. It took all of ten minutes but made our graph much cuter :)

Earlier in the week, after reading Ten Apples Up On Top, we used 10 apples to make an apple pattern on two large pieces of white construction paper. My wonderful assistant die cut 150 apples in red, green, and yellow for them to choose from while making their patterns. When they were done, I took pictures of them acting like they were balancing 10 apples on top of their heads. They had so much fun looking at their silly "balancing" pictures!

 

We also made the apple glyphs from my Full Year of Glyphs unit on TPT. I edited the directions a little bit for this one in order to fit our time limit that day and my students needs. Here they are below:

 

All week we have been tasting several foods that are apple flavored or are made from apples. We have been filling out the paper below as we go to document whether we liked the foods or not:

 

You can download this for FREE at my TPT store. Are any of ya'll teaching apples this week?? What are you doing to add a little extra fun into your lessons?

More Freebies

I feel like I have done nothing but sit at my computer and make cute little documents for my class with my new clip arts and fonts from KPM Doodles. I made another freebie that will be helpful for any Pre-K through 2nd grade teachers, especially if you teach a color unit.

They are free at my TPT store so head on over and pick them up!! I hope you are all enjoying your long weekend!!

Cute Fonts and Clip Arts

Are any of ya'll as obsessed with cute fonts as I am?? I love how much a cute font can jazz up whatever you are creating and I really love whenever someone I know finds a new cute one and shares. Some of my favorites are from Kevin and Amanda and the best part about the K&A ones is that they are free!! I am probably the last blogger on earth to stumble across the adorable fonts and clip arts on Etsy but just in case I am not, I wanted to share my new favorite with all of you! My newest font/clip art obsession is from KPMDoodles on Etsy. I love her large selection of images and fonts and how reasonably priced they are! So I have been playing around with my new fonts and created a little freebie for you! I have been wanting to buy some number word signs on TPT and figured I would just make my own. Here they are :)

Teacher Week- A Little Bit (Ok a LOT Bit!) Late!!

Ok so I don't know about ya'll, but this week just completely got away from me. I literally feel like it should still be Monday- but don't get me wrong, I am NOT complaining about it being the weekend! Between all of our long back to school meetings, Meet the Teacher Night, having my class list changed every single day (how are you supposed to write their names on their supplies?!? My Mr. Clean Magic Eraser came in handy this week a LOT!) and starting school on Wednesday. This week was wonderful but CRAZYYYY! 

Let me start by saying that I have just died and gone to kindergarten heaven this year with my class. Last year I had a wonderful but very challenging class and this year I have a wonderful not-so-challenging class!! My assistant and I decided God must be rewarding us this year for all of the extra extra hard work we had to put in last year and let me tell you, I am perfectly fine with that!!!!

The only complaint I have is that I was too busy this week to participate in Teacher Week through Blog Hoppin'. As I was complaining to my boyfriend about how wonderful Teacher Week is and how I wish I had been able to join in on all the fun he said "Lauren, really?? Who is going to stop you from joining in a little late? If you want to do it that badly- just do it!!!" So here I am! I could write one super long post about everything from the whole week but that would probably take up my whole morning so I will just do the last two days- Therapeutic Thursday and Freebie Friday. 

Therapeutic Thursday!

Between grad school, teaching, and now tutoring after school I am one very busy girl. But as the saying goes, work hard play hard, right?? I definitely make sure that I take some "me" time- even if it is as simple as taking my dog for a walk at a pretty park. This is Freedom Park in Charlotte, which is just a 5 minute drive from my apartment. It is one of my favorite places in Charlotte because it is so pretty! I love taking Tucker for a walk here on weeknights after a stressful day. 

Believe it or not, Freedom Park is walking distance to downtown Charlotte via the Sugar Creek Greenway. We also love to walk on the Sugar Creek Greenway which starts at the park and takes us here in about a 15 minute walk:

For those of you who already know me, I am slightly obsessed with yoga. It is another one of my favorite things to do after a stressful day at school because I have to keep my focus away from school or else I will fall on my butt in front of the whole class while trying to do one of those crazy poses!! I feel so much better after yoga.

I also love getting manicures and pedicures with my friends at our favorite salon on Wednesdays (when they give out free sangria while you get your nails done!), massages at least 2-3 times a year, cooking- especially making my own sushi, and blogging!! 

Freebie Friday!

Because this week is back to school week for many of you and you may want an extra little paper to hand out to your parents to help improve parent communication- I am making my Back to School ABC Pamphlet FREE until midnight tonight!! I am also putting my Year Full of Glyphs packet on sale 20% off! Head over to my TPT store to check them out!