Desiree blogs about issues of interest to elementary educators. Her passion is reading and all skills relevant to being able to read a book. Resources from the page can be found in her storefront on the Teachers Pay Teachers Marketplace.
Elementary Track in our district starts from ages 7 and up, so that leaves the Kindergarten, first and a few 2nd graders out of the competition. Instead of having our classes doing regular work all day, we had our own fun day.
1. Soccer
2. Bubbles and Chalk
3. Parachute and Hula Hoops
4. Playground
5. Colouring
6. Just dance
Heres a Cute Earth one of the girls in my group drew while we were at the chalk station.
Do you have a snack day and Schedule at your school?
I took my name off the list for this season for a few reasons.
One major one is snack is always my duty day and I never get to enjoy the snack as it's gone usually by the time I go to the staff room. Another is that certain staff who are not participating always seem to be snacking on it..... it's a pet peeve.
Last year we used plain paper and supported it with only a bit of folded paper in the back. This year we glued the buildings to construction paper to make the paper stronger, and they did stand up a bit better and longer on their own.
Last year the kids drew their own houses, this year we coloured ones I found online.
I LOVE my legend and Compass Rose much better this year. Next year I have big plans for a product I know will stand up better. I'll work on that over the summer.
Some lovely staff member wrote this on our staff room board, and there was a breakfast provided on Friday morning. That about sums up the week here this year. I'm touched by the note.
This year for Mothers Day my kiddos made their moms these hugs.
We took a piece of sentence strip each, and printed on it "I love you this much"
We then traced and cut out two of our hands and glued or stapled them to the ends.
I think the moms loved them, at least I imagine they did.
I also recorded the kiddos singing Skinamarinky Dinky Do and posted in to a local community Facebook Group as their present to go with these hug cards.
One of the most popular math centres in my classroom this year were my number sense trees which I introduced in the early fall for practice. The only problem was that they were only good for 1-10 review, which was fine in September, but in October/November we were studying 1-20, and they didn't help reinforce the same skills for the higher numbers. So, I've fixed up the set, now offering 1-20, but also individual sets for the original 1-10, and 11-20 as a stand alone set, depending on your students skill sets, and the sequence you teach math skills. I've also included a few more types of cards to sort on to the matching trees. Dice Dominoes Tallies Ten-frames Words NEW: Tens and Ones NEW: Fingers The font has been changed to a much more child friendly font as well. I LOVED my previous choice, but this is better for this product. Here's a student trying to sort the cards onto the original version: Get your set now, click on the appropriate cover: I'm thinking of making an additional set for numbers to 100, but have the trees be tens instead of individual numbers, what do you think? I don't think I've seen anything like that available else where.
I wish someone had started this initiative earlier in the year, but this past month they started posting the birthdays of the week by the library. Awesome. Kids love being recognized for something, even if it's only being born.
Well, here is a display in our hallway of the pink hearts filled out by the teachers and the purple hearts filled out by the families. My kiddos LOVE looking at their hearts and having their compliments read to them.
I HIGHLY recommend this project for your next parent teacher night.
I'm much more in love with my bulletin board this year than what I did last year, even though last year we won a prize for it.
This is my classes contribution to the contest. Each student coloured a germ and I stapled all to the giant mouth. The mouth has 20 teeth, which is the number 5 year olds typically have.
As proud of mine as I am, I ADORE the contribution of the other grade one class. Their teacher took a picture of each student brushing their teeth, and printed in the middle the lyrics for a cute little tooth brushing song.
I found this awesome freebie online from A Wellspring on Teachers Pay Teachers.
I like to save paper as much as possible, so I printed in two to a page instead of the full page in the freebie file. I also changed to black ink since I used red card stock.
The first day we used them, we used these blocks as our markers, but students were building towels and swords with them, so we've since returned to using beans.
This is just one part of our regular Sight word practice.
We also usually watch this video on YouTube, repeating the words after the dude.
On top of these, during our morning message I include the weeks five words and have students raise their hands to circle the words on the smart board, and to point to on our word wall. The love using my Finger pointers to find words.
Do a search for sight words or Dolch to find my popular slap hands and my worksheets we use for bellwork.
