Who am I?

Inferring is a tough skill especially for kinders since they don't do so good with the abstract. I created a lesson where I first the book "Whose tail is this?" by Peg Hall and Ken Landmark. They have a bunch of books Whose nose, whose eyes, etc.

 

We read and talk about how when we infer we put two things together. First we have clues in the book in the words and pictures and then we also have our schema (things we already know about in our brain) and when we read we have to put those things together.

These students said that the clues were the eyes and the whiskers so they wrote "I think is a cat"

So then I passed out pictures of close up images of animals and the pairs could write and draw on the sticky notes about what they were thinking.  Then each pair got to present what they thought and at the bottom I out the zoomed out picture.

Lessons Learned - Make sure there are enough clues in the pictures. Some of the pictures were too hard because they were too close up.

Check this out

Anyone teaching with the new Common Core Standards needs to check out this blog Kindergarten Kindergarten. I tried to use some of her problem solving activities with my students last year with fantastic results. The kids made these on their own during free play after this lesson.

Here is an anchor chart based off of one of her warm up ideas.

Out of the Pockets of Kindergarteners....

So usually I post funny things the kids say to me, but I stumbled on this gem while cleaning through photos. I remember this day. Once of my students kept going over to his cubby every couple of minutes while doing his morning work. Finally i went over to see what he was doing and this is what I found.

100 Days....A Little Late

So these were back in February here are a few things we did for the 100th day of school.

We finished our puzzle.

You'll notice it looks a little funky in the middle. I had a sub for a couple of days and I had trouble getting things to line up after that for a while. This is something that I will be doing again because the kids loved it.

We wrote 100 words. This was a good time filler for those early finishers. Many worked on and off throughout the day.

We found kisses hidden in the room and matched the numbers on the bottom to a hundreds chart. (Got this idea from mailbox magazine)

I know we made crowns but I have no pictures without kids faces :(

Don't be a Litterbug!

Fun idea for Earth Day. We always have a playground clean up complete with gloves because there are some yucky things they always manage to find. Then we do this craft. I will usually just use pieces of litter from our classroom so its not dirty :)

Blow off that hot air!

Here is an science and art lesson. One of our science units is about states of matter and we mostly talk about solids, liquids, and gases. In order to help students experience air I plopped down some paints and let them go to town and blow as hard as they could. I gave them very little instruction beyond blow the paint and keep it on the paper. Some of them really got into mixing the colors and it brought up such wonderful discussions.

A few tips.

Make sure your paint is watery so it will move around, but not too watery because then it will run off the page on onto your tables and floor...not that I would know anything about that. :)

Also try to get those little straws like they have a lunch for their milk. The thinner the straw the harder it is to blow. This is good because you want them to have to work at it.

Another handy tip I have is for how to dry painted paper. Since I have a limited amount of space I take a Styrofoam tray (I just used ones from the lunch room that the kids were done with) and cut paper to fit inside.

Depending on what you are doing you can have the kids paint with the paper already in the tray or place it in when they are done.

 Then just stack them up criss cross.

Sometimes a picture says it all.

The funny part about this is that I only had two students with blond hair and one was a boy. This same student had previously done some fashion design work with her scissors on her shirt...

Painting with Bubble Wrap

Long time no see...Long time no blog?

 It's been hard for me to post here lately and read anything kindergarten related because I just needed a break from school. I left my job of six years, which was a lot harder then I thought it would be. I need to be working closer to home and so right now I'm in between jobs.

It's been very nerve wracking because the county I want to work on has posted ZERO jobs in elementary ed for the past two months. I know this because I have been checking every day (multiple times) I know it is partly due to the fact that they are still going through transfers and all that jazz, but waiting is hard. It's hard to go through Target and see the sale on glue sticks and not buy any.

But anyway, I've been keeping myself busy at home cleaning out some areas of my house that desperately needed it and I was cleaning up my computer and found some pictures of things that I did over the spring with my students.

This is from Valentine's Day, but you could do this project anytime. Last year our art teacher, who we only see 3 times a year :( , did this more free form with the kids. I adapted it for hearts for a valentine measuring project, but you could really do any shape you wanted to.

1. Collect different sized bubble wrap (large bubbles, small bubbles, etc.) and cut them down to individual pieces for the kids. Roughly the size of a piece of 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper. Tape the bubble wrap to the table.

2. Have the students paint the bubble wrap and then make a print. I let them switch for different colors and different sized bubbles.

3. Let the paper dry and then have them trace their shape on the back. Then they can cut it out their shape. I purposely gave students different sized hearts since this was going to be a measuring activity. (Look its differentiated!)

4. I had my students measure with nonstandard units. I ended up putting these on the bulletin board put I have no pictures of that. They glued them to a sentence frame that said "I used _____  cubes to measure my heart." Some of my more advanced students got to pick their unit of measurement so their frame looked like this " I used ____   _______ to measure my heart."

Thinking back now you could do this with a shapes unit so you could review 2D shapes (K.G.2) and have them use a paper big enough that they could trace two object and then compare (K.MD.2).

Out of the Mouths of Kindergartners

Me: Oh B. you are just too funny.
Student: I know I was just born that way.

Don't you just love when they are hilarious without really knowing it.

Sorry I've neglected posting. I have some pictures of a bunch of things that maybe I'll get up this summer. I've been going through some personal stuff and its been a challenging end of the year.

I'm actually quitting my job mostly because my commute is an hour on a good day. I'm hoping to get a job in the district where I live, but I will probably have to sub next year. Next week once school is over I'll try to get some more of my projects from this year up and some reflections as well. Enjoy the rest of the school year to those who are not finished yet!

Reasons I love shaving cream

1. Easy clean up.

2. Cheap (especially when the teacher who had this room before me left 4 cans of it under the sink)

3. It makes my room smell clean.

4. It makes that last 30 minutes on a Friday when the kids can't sit still anymore because they have been stuck inside for the past few days and I've been giving them tons of busy work while testing for the end of the quarter just fly by.

5. Students can get that great sensory experience and fine motor practice ....(cough cough ok my principal is gone)...they get to play!

6. One of your students might say "This is my favoritest day ever!"

P is for Penguin

I started this post last month and then my laptop decided it didn't want to work. I know that everyone has moved on from winter but i thought i'd put the up anyway.

I saw these cute penguins on Keen on Kindergarten and since we happened to be studying P last week I thought it would be a fun project and a great assessment of motor skills.While making them a couple of kids kept asking about feet and so I just gave them some orange paper and let them go to town.

Reindeer Hats

A coworker made these with her kids and I took the idea. It made for good fine motor practice when they had to trace their hands and cut them out.

We did this project the last day before break so I only had a chance to grab a quick picture on my phone.

Can you feel it?

That Christmas itch?

Here's what happened around the K pod today (fortunately only one of these involved my students)...

The morning began with a student that glued their entire paper to the table. I mean full on 8.5 by 11 paper completely stuck to the table. They must have used an entire glue stick.







We got outside for recess (yay!)


Then during a bathroom break a student was climbing on the toilet and her foot "splashed in the water" according to another girl in the bathroom at the time.





Finally to cap off the day, two students decided that their white crayons should just be used on their blue paper but also on their blue chair seats.

Thank goodness tomorrow is Friday!

My heart is beating thump thump thump...

This is what a student said to me today when she moved her name up to blue on my behavior chart system.  But let me rewind since the above is probably confusing since I have not shared about my behavior management system.

 I (like many a K teacher before me) have found that students respond well when you give specific positive praise rather then just pointing out the things that the bad kids are doing....(cough cough...B. and A. not that I'm naming any names...). The positive praise makes the other kids (most of the time) sit up and pay attention because they want you to say their name. So over the summer while browsing the wonderful world of Pinterest. I noticed behavior charts like this one from The Clutter-Free Classroom

The students can move up for good behavior and down for poor choices. Even if they start a downward path they can improve and move back up. And for those who make more poor choices then others, I try to move them up in the morning so they have some wiggle room.

 I combined the clips system with another idea I saw around the blogosphere...behavior punch cards. I modeled mine after these from Mrs. Steberger's First Grade 

Mine have numbers 1 to 5. The kids get punches for good behavior and when they fill up the card they get to get a prize out of the prize box. If they stay on green on the behavior chart they get one punch, up to blue is two and purple is three. They are in charge of their card and they keep them in their pencil box.

Fridays used to be crazy when I had a system for Friday Prize Days. Now its only a few kids a day in the box. They know how to get it out and put it away and there is so much less management on my end.




The great part about today is that this student is not bad (I can't really call any kid bad)... she just makes poor choices at times and talks way too much...and so when I caught her being good today she was so excited that she was going to get extra punches on her punch card. Some days I feel like I'm doing something right.

Out of the Mouth of Kindergarteners

On the way out to recess...

Student: I like your new scarf.

Me: Thank you Ms. F (my sister who they have met since she subs for me on occasion) 's husband brought it all the way from Afghanistan very far away.

Student: Oh did you lose it?


Sometimes it is important to remember these kinds of days to help combat against the not so good days. I had my formal observation with my new administration this week and get the feedback tomorrow. I'm a little nervous because I need them on my side when I try and look for a job closer to home in the spring. I know I'm a good teacher, but this year it has been really a challenge to feel like I'm doing things right.

Here's hoping it will all work out.

Babies

"When are you gonna put a baby in your belly?"

This was a question asked of me by one of my students. I guess I should be happy that he said "when" and not "is."

When I told them I don't need any babies right now since I have two dogs they replied with a very matter of fact tone, "Dogs are not babies"

Then somehow the topic got turned into how the babies get in the tummies and I got to use my favorite line as a teacher "You know...I think you need to ask your mom about that one!"

These are the moments I have to think channel when I find three kids wrestling in the mountains of coats, hats, and gloves during the packing up transition time :)

Brain Dump - Fall Edition

So as much as I have been loving reading other blogs, I've really been neglecting my own. This school year has been really rough. Right now school is sucking the life out of me. So this is going to be a little bit of a brain dump... I promise I have some more positive posts with some of the cute things my kids have been doing soon.

My principal said in a our last staff meeting that we need to find balance in our lives so that we are not so stressed out....here are some of the reasons why I can't find balance right now...

- 28 students and one teacher

- My commute takes an hour each way on a good day...the weather has not been good lately.

- I have had at least one parent late (we are a walking school) and have had to call to find out when they are picking up their child almost every day for about 2 weeks. This cuts into my planning time, which is already limited because I have to leave at the end of the work day to go let out my dogs.

- The grading police sent me an email on Friday when we are suppose to have until Sunday to enter grades (Don't even get me started on the fact that I have to enter grades in the first place.)

- I had a parent approach me in the front hallway (We were doing a water/bathroom break and the other bathroom near my classroom has 3 other K classes using it) Anyway, this happened last week the conversation went as follows:

Mom: Are you T. teacher?
Me: Yes (Thinking in my head...We did meet on the first day of school)
Mom: I want to know why he was on the wall yesterday. Why is he being treated so unfair?
Me: Well I was not outside for recess duty yesterday, but if another teacher had a major incident that they would put him on the wall for then they would have told me.  T. come here. Did you go on the wall yesterday at recess?
T. : Um....no
Mom: Well he told me that he was on the wall.
Me: Look I can't really have a conference with you right now and we need to get back to our classroom.
Mom: But I want to know why my baby is being treated unfairly.
Me:  I would love to sit down and have a conference with you in fact I have sent a few notices home about meeting for a conference, but you never replied. What would be a good day to meet after school? I'm free most every day.
Mom: What about tomorrow?
Me: Tomorrow we don't have school because of the Thanksgiving break. (HOW CAN SHE NOT KNOW THAT!!!!!)
Mom: Well I have to look at my work schedule.

- Yesterday we had to split up another teacher's class because she got sick at school. It was 9:00. We thought especially since there was only two other teachers out that they could find someone for the afternoon. We find out today that they didn't really call anyone and instead our administration came down to check on us (in the chaos right before lunch with coats and lunch tags, plus 5 other kids who needed to track down their stuff) and what did one of them say...jokingly "Looks like you've got your hands full today" No appreciation for the fact that all four of us will have our day completely disrupted. How hard is a little thank you?

- GROSS ALERT! Poop. Yes you read that right poop. Chunks of poop all around my room. And there goes my planning time. I will spare you the rest of the details.

And on that note. I'm done with today...tomorrow is a new day.

Patterns

This is a favorite unit of mine since the students really get it and there are always a few creative ones that surprise me.

We start our unit by asking what is a pattern and what makes it a pattern. Then we practice making patterns with manipulatives. Here are some of the patterns my students made using some fun Target Dollar Section and Dollar Tree finds...

Target Fall Table Scatter

Puff Balls from the Dollar Tree

Erasers from the Target Dollar Section

Sometimes they use things in ways you never thought about.

Other students put beads (Dollar Tree) onto pipe cleaners. This is great because you do not have to tie a knot and it is good fine motor practice (I actually moved it into my fine motor center because the kids loved it so much even over the oh so popular playdough)

 The next day we did the same centers only this time they had to record their pattern (which we later glued into their math journals).

Though it isn't all unicorns and roses. I still have a couple giving me this when they work independently...

To be continued....

So...

Have you ever had a day like this...

because I did. Tomorrow is a new day. I have some good stuff on patterns I want to share this week.

Freebies

I found this great freebie while blog surfing tonight from Homeschool Creations

There are tons of things for fall both literacy and math printables. I know I'll be using some in my centers.