Back to school

It's almost that time of year again!  I'm having very mixed feelings about going back after spending all day, every day with my sweet Rae.  A huge part of me just wants to stay at home with her and, not going to lie, homeschooling her through kindergarten has crossed my mind.  I'm so in love with showing her new things, making her nutritious breakfasts and lunches, reading whichever books she hands me, and just watching her grow up in front of me.  This summer has been so rewarding and I don't want it to stop.

But I know that I love teaching kindergarten.  I remember being so thankful for a career that I love and being surrounded with children that I love even more.  I remember the times that I laughed so hard my principal peaked her head in to see what was so funny.  I remember feeling the love from heartfelt "thank you's" from parents and former students.  Teaching really is the most rewarding career I could have chosen and I am forever grateful for the opportunity to touch so many lives.

I decided to take a walk down memory lane today to try to bring all of those great memories to the forefront again.  Trying to help myself prepare for the weeks coming up ever so soon.  These are a few of my favorite moments from my classroom...

This is one of my very favorite back to school activities where the kids listen to No David then write about what David can do in the classroom.  This student thought that David can play and listen to the teacher.  Precious!

These are a beautiful way of teaching the children about community.  Each layer is a different part, starting with "self" and ending with "state".

Experimental play is so crucial in kindergarten!  I like putting magnets out in the beginning of the year.

Real world objects are fun and what can be more fun than comparing and contrasting pumpkins at Halloween!?

I loved watching my students complete my first worksheet that I ever made for Teachers Pay Teachers.

My favorite graph of all time!  I still have this folded up in a cabinet.

 Fostering a love of books is one of my main goals as a teacher of young children.  Here, they are drawing the covers of their favorite books in preparation for book reviews.

This is my all time favorite bulletin board display.  We started off our Spring unit on plants with a reading of the book Tops and Bottoms and made our own garden with descriptions of what each plant is, like "flower", "root", or "stem".

 This was a Pinterest victory!  Sight words scroll by on a digital picture frame. 

 These chick glyphs are so silly, what's not to love?

 I love to listen to students working cooperatively.  Here, they are writing about their favorite part of Bear Snores On.

Our countdown to the last day of school is legendary with a small strip of paper inside each balloon detailing a quick and fun activity for the day.  

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Prepping for long-term sub

Not only have I been busy nesting at home, I have been very busy preparing my classroom for a long term sub.  No easy feat and especially cumbersome when you are as OCD as me!

I started prepping my filing cabinets by organizing all of my papers, trashing obsolete ones, and making copies.  My kindergarten team is seriously ready for the first 9 weeks with all of our copies! I made 25 copies of each paper since I don't know my class size.  You can see the large labels in the picture above, I like these because it makes things so much easier to find than the normal sized file labels.  Plus my brain is kind of funny in that it remembers colors associated with certain titles, might be a little freaky but sure makes it easy to find that orange-colored Pete the Cat file.  I also attached sticky notes to certain worksheets if I tend to do something differently than the directions or if I know a book that goes particularly well with it.  I'm going to be honest, there are a bunch of sticky notes in my files!  I have a problem with relinquishing control... there I said it!

I placed my learning centers in my filing cabinets as well.  This is new for me, normally they are just in a plastic crate in the order that I use them.  However, I want my sub to know exactly when the appropriate time is to use each learning center which is why I placed them within my chronologically ordered filing cabinet.  I made hot pink label papers for all of my centers, you can see them evenly spaced in my cabinet picture above.  I glued the title page to the outside of the file and placed all of the papers and materials inside like so...

Each paper has been copied and clipped to a baggie with the contents for that activity inside.  By the way, I adore Julie Lee's centers!

I then went through and labeled my bins where I place the students' extra school supplies.  I never labeled them before because this was my kingdom and I already knew where to look for supplies, no sweat.  But imagine how frustrating it would be to have to look high and low for an extra glue stick because the sub placed them somewhere else.  Hmmm, maybe that's just my own personal nightmare. =P

I went completely nuts with documenting where things go, even the students' things like writing tablets and math workbooks.  If you have a system figured out that works for you I think it would be nice to come back to that same system already established in your classroom.

The documentation continued with my schedule.  I know that schedules look nothing alike from year to year but this will give my sub something to go off of.  This is probably one of the most time consuming parts of beginning a year and I want to make it as easy as I can for my sub.

Finally, I went around my entire classroom taking pictures of where furniture is located.  Each August I come back to tables piled up in a corner, cabinets turned around against a wall, and chairs stacked to the ceiling.  It is a crazy few days rearranging my classroom each year!  I might spend hours tweaking the location of a freaking bookshelf because it affects the location of my computers 20 feet away.  So this year, I got up close and personal with the location of everything in my room so that things can just be rolled, carted, and pushed back to where they should be.  No more guessing and moving 10 times.

So that's how I have prepared my classroom for a long term sub starting at the beginning of the year.  I've come to terms with this small amount of control over a situation where I seem to have none whatsoever.  

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Teachers Pay Teachers

I have recently started making my own units to sell on www.TeachersPayTeachers.com.  If you are a teacher and have never heard of this website you need to go to it right now!  Teachers Pay Teachers is the best thing to happen to my teaching career; it is full of beautiful units made by teachers and sold to teachers.  What I love the most is that sellers are just normal teachers and are easily reached if anything needs to be tweaked in their units.  No more white out and crooked copies!  

Go check it out and, while you're there, please go to my store too.  Look at what I have so far, become a 'follower' of my store and you'll also receive notifications when I post new items for sale or freebies.  

Falling for Numbers

A Handful of Love [FREE]

Turkey, Turkey punctuation book [FREE]

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My Kindergarten Classroom 2012

I am officially in school mode and busy nearly every day with making things for my kindergarten classroom.  As much as I love to blog during the summer, I love to make my classroom the best it can be during the school year.  It's crazy how much my focus shifts as soon as school starts!  This poor blog just seems to fall by the wayside.

Here are a few of the amazing things that I have done with my classroom this year.  Seriously, I couldn't be happier with the results of all my effort.

 I redid all of my walls and added new places for work to be displayed. I still LOVE my eInstruction clicker storage next to my word wall, it's a shoe organizer cut in half for the little darlings to grab their own clicker.

 We all got new whiteboards over the summer.  Yay for magnetic space!  You can also see the coloring books that I give to every student, they are amazing for the few minutes that students need to do something at their seats while others are finishing up work.  Those coloring books will last all year, boom!

 This is my calendar area and reading/word study center area.  More details about that iHelp chart and birthday bags further down.

This is what you see as you enter my classroom, math center work table from Ikea, and my favorite piece of furniture which is my rolling file organizer from The Container Store.  

Can you spot our "Tattle Telephone" on the light colored cabinet by my desk?  It cracks me up!  One day a boy was about to tell me a tattle and I told him, "Is it important for me to hear right now, or can you leave me a message?" He then scratched his chin, picked up the phone and mumbled to himself, "How should I put this..." and proceeded with his tattle.  I just about fell off my chair I was laughing so hard.  Of course it's just an old phone that I screwed onto the cabinet but it works like a charm!

 I stapled these white paper bags to the wall and filled them with tissue paper.  I then wrote the students' birthdays on the cupcakes and put a birthday pencil in the bag for them.  Easy way to see the birthdays coming up and ensure that I have their gift ready.

  I LOVE this job chart!  The "apps" are made from library card pockets (free from the librarian) with clip art pictures of the jobs.  I then print off small pictures of each student and glue those onto popsicle sticks.  I place the popsicle sticks in the pockets and, viola, everyone knows their job.

This is the cutest way to keep track of table rewards and I am constantly getting compliments on it.  Every time I catch the students all working together, or all following the directions, they get a monkey.  They get to choose a prize from the prize box when they get 10 monkeys dangling above their table.

 This is yet another change that I made this year and it is working so much better!  I switched out stapling student work all year to clipping it on the clothesline.  The clothes line is the only part that is stapled into the boards, genius!

 This is my favorite center.  I typed the sight words into Google Docs and saved them as JPEG, dragged the JPEG files onto a USB drive and hooked it into my digital picture frame.  The sight words appear for about 10 seconds and the students write them down.  

Our classroom gnome, Gnorman (hehehehe), is still an active member of our room.  He left this note and a bag with Mr. Potato Head inside.  Mr. Potato head taught us about listening ears, watching eyes, quiet mouth, puzzle hands, and thinking cap.  

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Check out my room!

My last post was started last week and I lost track of time.... imagine that.  Sorry.  I'm trying as hard as I can to keep on top of this little blog and I thoroughly enjoy having this little outlet to share about my move from fourth grade to kindergarten.  Thanks for staying with me through all this mess!

Now on to some pics of my new room.  It's just 2 weeks old and already looking SO cute... I'm obnoxiously proud of it.

 Everyone keeps coming in my room to check out the lanterns.  Found them in the $1 bins at Michael's.  

 Significantly smaller Word Wall than my word wall in fourth grade.  Yatsee!

 

 Mailboxes, play area, and reading rug.

 Free stuff from the other kindergarten teachers.  I LOVE my team!

 I'm the first at my school to bring this idea to the table.  These are E-Instruction clickers which are assigned to specific students for testing purposes.  I cut a shoe organizer in half (so the little ones could reach on their own) and numbered each pocket.  Pretty nifty, right?

 

 My little bitty desk area in the far corner.  I'm never at it... seriously, I've never even sat there.

 Reading rug.  I traded lots of stuff with the teacher who took over my last room.  This rug, rocking chair, and little reading pillows were hers.  Aren't they the sweetest things?

 My carnivorous plant.

 Look what it caught!!!!  

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First Weeks of School

What a great first two weeks of school!  Everything is unbelievably busy but I'm actually still alive and doing well.  I'm so glad that my second week was better than my first week... if we keep up this pace, I should be sitting very pretty by the end of the year!  So proud of my kids.

I am also very proud of this board outside my classroom!  I made the tree leaves out of sheets of foam in two shades of green.  The sheets of foam come in large, rectangular sheets and I cut them out in random, wavy cloud shapes.  I then glued them together on the ground and, when they were FINALLY dry, I stapled them up on the wall.  The trunk is made from brown paper and the picket fence is made from white foam sheets.  I'm a huge fan of foam sheets!!!

I love having groups, although the kids have to search for their desk every morning because I'm still playing around with their seating arrangements.  I'll get it figured out soon.

My desk!  So happy I could hang my "Welcome Friends" flag, it used to be hanging outside the front door of our old home. 

Every day I place extra copies of papers in these folders.  Makes taking care of make-up work easy!

I love these pens, so easy to make and they look so pretty.  Plus, I get them back every time!

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Classroom ideas

Please pardon my absence, my mind has been very far away from making a cute little house and has instead been intent on making a cute little classroom.  I can hardly believe how many followers I've gained since my off and on hiatus began!  I just sat down for the first time in weeks to peruse through blogland, looking for ideas to share with all my new followers and was completely stumped still.  I could share recipes which I haven't tried (nah), I could show you skirts I'm infatuated with (boring), I could even share photos of drool worthy jewelry (been there, done that).  But, truly, this blog is about what I'm in love with NOW and can't stop thinking about, it's about my passions.  So..... I've decided to share with youwhat has really been on my mind.  MY NEW CLASSROOM!

I'm going to warn you now, this blog may take on a whole different feel.  What I really feel like sharing with the world is my passion for fourth grade and all that elementary school ensues.  However, I'm still very hopeful for being able to cook the occasional new dish which I, of course, will share with you!  Not to mention, my new career will make home ownership possible once again for my husband and I.  So stay tuned!

Here are two picks of my newest wave of inspiration for my math and science classroom.... I'm thinking GO GREEN.   This idea unabashedly comes directly from my alma mater, the kids in Texas are just going to have to deal.

I love the look of this large-scale tree idea which is made out of paper, found here.  Wouldn't it be fun to change out the leaves with the seasons?  Every student can make their own leaf/flower for the tree.

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