I don't know about you, but for me January means penguins and polar bears and all things polar. I don't combine them all into one theme, oh no! I can get at least 3 weeks of fun and learning out of it. This week I thought I'd focus on penguins. This post contains affiliate links. I earn a small commission each time someone makes a purchase using one of my links, which helps to support the blog. All opinions are my own and I only promote brands and products that I have used myself and truly love. I'm really excited by all the new (and new to me) books I've found about them! There are so many I've broken them out into categories (insert a happy book dance right here)! These are my current picks for the youngest crowd: 10 Little Penguins is too darned cute! I love the thicker pages - this book is going to be read over and over again, so I'm glad it's sturdy! Kate Toms has done an awesome job with the simple rhyming text, but what blows me away is the illustrations. Every picture is a fabric collage, with a little ribbon and felt thrown in for good measure. I found myself running my hands over each page as if to touch the fabric. Add in the counting down element of the story, and you have a winning book for young children! I had a delightful surprise when I opened Flora and the Penguin by Molly Idle - it's a wordless picture book with flaps on each page, and it is wonderful! Readers (children!) must narrate the story for themselves by reading the pictures - and that makes my teacher heart sing. By looking closely at the pictures and talking about what they see, children learn that good readers use the clues in the pictures as they read, and they gain confidence in their ability to enjoy books, even before they can read them for themselves. Wordless books are so good for building narrative skills - story telling - and for promoting book talk between parent and child. If you love this one, be sure to check out the rest of the series too! Cuddle up with your favorite little ones to read I Am Small by Emma Dodd. The lovely illustrations and simple text make it clear what all the adjectives mean (deep, long, far, high, etc.) and the touch of silver on most pages will enchant both adults and children. If your children aren't already in your lap when you start this book, they will be when you read the last page, snuggles are required! There's always room on the bookshelf for a sweet getting ready for bed book! While the focus of this book is not on the penguins - there are animal parents and babies on each page - you're not likely to make it through this one without a few snuggles, kisses, belly rubs and other loving gestures. Save Maybe, My Baby for last if you're looking to calm your little ones down for sleep. Of all the books so far, this one is my favorite! Britta Teckentrup includes flaps on each page to illustrate all the opposites in the book - pause and let your children predict what's behind each flap as you journey with little penguin to see his friend. This one is perfect for a classroom or story time setting - pair the book with colorful scarves so children can act out the opposite pairs. Don't have scarves? Try giving students a piece of tissue paper or even a tissue - these quiet props won't interrupt the story, but will let children move about and act out the concepts in Up & Down. If you're looking for some simple penguin activities to follow up these books, you may like this rhyme, book and finger puppets I put together - you can check it out here or watch the song on youtube.com here! I also found lots of books for slightly older children, the preschool and kindergarten crowd: If you're looking for some silliness (and when are preschoolers not?) I'd like to introduce you to Chongo Chingi the penguin in Penguin Dreams. He dreams about flying, but doesn't limit himself to flying like other birds do, he dreams higher and higher to outer space! The illustrations are bright and busy, with lots to keep your little ones interested. I'd recommend this for a parent or caregiver rather than a large group, so children can be close and see the pictures. Penguin Problems by Jory John and illustrated by Lane Smith is cute and fun! Did you spot the odd penguin out on the cover? Can you imagine what kind of problems penguins might have ? The narrator of this book is a little penguin with some big problems! Everyone looks the same to him, there are things in the ocean, he can't fly. He's pretty sure his life is rough. If your children are having a rough day and need a little attitude adjustment, they're going to love this book! This is a cute story about friendship, a toy penguin, and a lion, and I found the ending quite unexpected. Penguin by Polly Dunbar is not too long, not too short, and will appeal to adults almost as much as their children. If you're like me and always looking for an excuse to read children's books, grab a child and read this one - you're almost guaranteed to hear, "Read it again!" Do you love the Pebble books for young children? Oh my goodness! They combine simple text and beautiful close up photographs to teach children, and I can't recommend them highly enough! Every primary classroom should have some of these books, I haven't yet met one I wasn't impressed with! The true story of two male chinstrap penguins living in the Central Park Zoo, and tango makes three explains how Roy and Silo became dads when a zookeeper gave them an egg that would not have otherwise been hatched. You could use this book to talk about non-traditional families, or just enjoy the sweet story. A Penguin Story is about Edna, a penguin who thinks there has to be more to the world than the black, white and blue she's used to seeing. This book lends itself to a color story time, but I included it for slightly older children because it also lends itself to learning about scientists learning about penguins. If you're teaching and learning about penguins, do your students ever wonder how we know about arctic and antarctic animals? If you have any deep thinkers in your group, they're going to appreciate this book in ways the rest of the class might not, and the same can be said for your young artists. To extend the learning for this slightly older group of students, I like to get out my polar animal tangram puzzles. I've written about tangrams before - they're a really fun open ended puzzle made up of 7 simple shapes that turn out to be not so simple. To make it easy to differentiate for my students, I've made tangram puzzles that include both the shape outlines (for matching size, shape and orientation), and more challenging finished pictures. We use plastic, wooden and paper tangrams depending upon what my goals are. Exploring with a group of children at school or the library? Inexpensive plastic sets are great. For a gift or at home? I have a lovely wooden set my husband gave me. For showing our parents what we've learned by gluing down and taking home, paper is the answer. One of my favorite all time penguin activities is to have students take care of an "egg" or "chick" on their feet - you can see the blog post about that here, along with even more book recommendations. What are YOUR favorite penguin books and activities? I'd love to know! Paula

data:blog.metaDescription

teacher hacks, back to school, back to school ideas, classroom tips, classroom hacks, classrooms tricks, classroom organization

Children will work on descriptions as well as practice on numbers, body parts, emotions, adjectives and colours vocabulary. Besides, they will have fun using their imagination for creating a new monster. Please, notice that the worksheet has a blank space to write each child's name. E.g. Maribel's Monsters Club! - ESL worksheets

Paula's Preschool and Kindergarten is a blog about learning and teaching with young children.

Taking the time at the beginning of the year to shape your classroom learning environment pays off for the rest of the year. The best way we do this is with guided discovery. This is the 6 step procedure we use to introduce and teach procedures of use for every classroom material at the beginning of the year.

I spent last week teaching my students how to be a kindergartener and next week I will meet with all of their moms and dads to teach them how to be a kindergarten parent. There is just SO much informa

Explore Paul+Paula's 10243 photos on Flickr!

We all know that every child's journey to become a reader is different. What is simple for one may be incredibly difficult for another, some are great with phonics instruction, others seem to sail right through sight words, and others yet can read the words, but have a hard time with understanding what they're reading. How on earth are you supposed to teach a room full of children who are all unique and at different points on their reading journey? You differentiate. You may have 3-4 reading groups, you may have 6-7 reading groups (yes, I did that), you may pull students for 1-1 instruction, or small group instruction with a group that needs to work on a particular concept. Today I thought I'd show you some simple ways to use a single reading resource many ways, that is, to differentiate. I'm going to focus today on emergent readers. UNC defines an emergent reader as: "Child on the path to fluent literacy, before conventional reading and writing skills emerge. Emergent readers demonstrate alphabet knowledge, a concept of what a word is, a sense of story (beginning, middle, end), listening and retelling skills, phonemic awareness, and verbal expression." Here's an example of some text you might use with an emergent reader. It has a limited number of words, uses mostly sight words, and has pictures that clearly match the sentences. You'll notice the text has a repeating pattern, in this case, "I see a red __" The book I took this from has 6 sentences with this pattern, one to a page, plus a final page without the last word on it, for the children to add in their own word and picture. Once children are familiar with the text pattern from the book, you can have them match the sentences and pictures. Start with just a couple, and work your way up. You can also separate the words in a sentence and have students pay close attention to each word in order to put the words in the correct order. This is a great time to point out that sentences start with capital letters (so the word "This" must be first) and end with punctuation (so the word yellow must be last). Children will look at the first letter in each word to help them decode the word, and need to think about what makes sense. They may notice that the first word in each sentence is the same, or point out the pattern the sentences are based on. If they struggle with one of these words, you might want to point out other instances of the word - preferably in a sentence they've already read. I find that children are much more likely to engage with the text if they have the opportunity to "play" with it, so I make word and picture cards large enough for students to manipulate easily. I usually use mine in a pocket chart. Just think of the fun children can have putting the words in the wrong order to create crazy "sentences" - and the reading and thinking about the words necessary to do so! If you are working on skills like this with more than one child, challenge them to work together to make the sentences, or to scramble them up for each other. My students LOVED taking turns scrambling and decoding sentences. You can even have them dictate and illustrate additional sentences that fit the pattern, and let them scramble and decode those! As students gain skills and confidence, you can challenge them with more text at once... ... including multiple scrambled sentences. Here I've combined both of these techniques: several sentences need to be unscrambled, and then the matching picture can be found and placed with each one. Notice that these are still predictable sentences that follow a pattern, and that the pictures still correlate closely to the text. By varying the number of sentences children are working with, whether the words are in order or scrambled, and whether the pictures are with the sentence or scrambled separately, you can manage the difficulty level for different children - or the same child, on different days. This is the most challenging level I've come up with for this kind of text. I've scrambled both the pictures and the words for multiple sentences, and have provided the text in book form for students to refer to as they put everything in order. Look how much more challenging this is than the other ways of differentiating listed above! By the time students can work with the text at this level, they've most likely mastered the sight words used in the text, and will be able to identify those words in other places. (In other words, they're really reading!) When working with children like this, it's important to look at what they CAN do, and to build on the skills already in place. A child who already knows the sight words in a text probably doesn't need to match pictures to sentences, just as a child who is working to put a single sentence in order will only be frustrated if you scramble several at once. You want them to enjoy the experience of working with words, as well as to learn new things! These techniques will work with almost any emergent reader text, but if you are interested in the texts I've used in this post, they are all part of this resource, including the word and picture cards for children to manipulate: I'd love to hear how you differentiate for your emergent readers - share your tips in the comment section below!

We began this week by pulling items that start with Hh out of a heart bag left over from Valentines, and then wore hats and rode hobby horses. The kiddos always love this activity! I also made a new sensory bin with a Halloween theme. I used black, orange, green and purple pompons, plastic spiders and rats, the eucalyptus pasta that I wrote about last week, and Halloween favors that I picked up cheaply last year on November 1st. This bin has been played with almost constantly all week, the children enjoy picking out their favorite items (the baby rats are very popular). This is a lovely, calming activity for many of them, and develops their fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination as they play. They're also practicing classification and sorting skills when they collect similar items, and there is a lot of language development as they talk about what they are doing, and Halloween in general. They all have a lot to say about Halloween! Another fun way to work on math skills this week was sorting Halloween themed foam shapes. I've made up some game boards to facilitate this play: sorting big and little... ...sorting by color... ... and recognizing and continuing patterns. One of the wonderful things about these activities is that once I made them, they are ready to use for many years, by many many kiddos. We don't need work sheets to learn skills! Hands on activities are better, more engaging, and far more developmentally appropriate for young children. We work with patterns and sorting in a lot of different ways, and almost every day, so the kiddos were able to complete these activities independently, and feel successful with a new and exciting activity. It was very stormy for most of Monday, but in the afternoon the rain slowed to a drizzle, and we were all ready to get outside and burn off some energy. We had a nature treasure hunt. I gave each child a small sack, and we walked through my yard and along the street to search for pretty leaves, fallen flowers, and acorns. Several children told me it was the best day ever! It got even better when we went back inside and used home made dough to hold our treasures! I added some mini pumpkins to the mix, which made cool impressions in the dough. A logical extension of this activity for the kindergarteners, was to sort the treasures I had collected for them (they took their own treasures home). Next, we looked at photos of madalas made with natural materials, which I found with a web search. They were beautiful, and full of math too. We noticed that mandalas have repeating patterns, and that we needed greater amounts of small items to go around the circle than of larger items. As we continue working with these, we'll see how we use multiples of the same number as we arrange them. Can you imagine the careful work the children did to make these, the fine motor skills they worked on, and the conversations about shape and size and color of these beautiful materials? By noticing where to find different shaped leaves and acorns, the children are building an ecological identity too - coming to know their school and neighborhood better, learning to value their piece of the world. This activity encompasses art too, and provided amazing sensory experiences. Another art experience for another rainy day, was to thread foam shapes and beads onto pipe cleaners, and to stick those firmly into a recycled styrofoam base. Once again, fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination was practiced. You can see more of our art work here. Thursday was "hat day". We read some books about hats, played with my collection of hats, and made our own party hats. The kiddos decorated the hat while it was still flat. This is how to make one, if you'd like to try it too. I showed the children how to curl a pipe cleaner around and around their finger, to make a swirl that sticks up, and they chose curling ribbon to hang down. I stapled those in before rolling the hat into a cone shape. You can also see our Haunted House H craft in the background of this photo! The windows flap open, and there are spooky stickers hiding behind them. One of our friends turned 4 this week, so she chose two friends to help her bake her birthday cupcakes. This friend had never cracked an egg before. Look at her focus! I took another group of kiddos to Green's Produce, on Arkansas Lane in Arlington, to check out the gourds and pumpkins, and of course, to take some cute fall photos. Green's is definitely my favorite pumpkin patch! The kindergarteners also had a field trip one afternoon, to the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth. Their website is http://www.cartermuseum.org/. It is a beautiful museum, and free, so even if the kiddos can only handle a short visit, it is well worth it. This group managed to walk through almost all the exhibits, and learned some fantastic art vocabulary. We started with landscape, portrait and still life, noticed drawing, painting, photography and sculpture. We saw a short video about how brass sculptures are made, and saw busts, abstract art, and mobiles. While we were there, I bought a beautiful children's book, I Spy Shapes In Art, by Lucy Micklethwait, in the gift shop. By the time we left, the skies were clearing, and we ran and ran in the grass outside, and admired this sculpture before heading home. The following day I had the children read the book to me - which they could all do - and we learned some 3D shape words as we looked for shapes in the famous art works. Hmmm... that would be reading, art and math, all in one "lesson", and disguised as fun. One more awesome project for this week: hand prints in the style of Andy Warhol. I found the idea via Pinterest, but the original source is createartwithme.blogspot.com. When I first saw these, I thought they were fantastic, but doing them with the kiddos, and seeing them all lined up? WOW! I will definitely be doing this project again in the future! Earlier this week Ms. Julie and I traced each child's hand, and cut out 4 copies of them in colors of the children's choice. We pulled rectangles of matching color, so everything was ready for the kiddos to assemble, and then we looked at some of Warhol's repeating images of soup cans and Marilyn Monroe. We noticed the vibrant colors, and talked about contrasting colors that pop off the page in this "pop"ular art. The kiddos did a great job of assembling their work, choosing where to place each background rectangle, which color hand to place on each contrasting background, gluing around the perimeter of each piece, determining which hand they needed to paint in order to match the paint to the cut out hand print, and finally rubbing their hands in a tray of paint and printing on the colorful hand prints. Check out the finished products!

This has been something I have been doing for a while. Teacher judgments and data from a tool called OnDemand are easy to see in this way. This is a great way to see which cohorts across the school are sitting at the same level and need the same strategies, skills or content. By exporting the data into an excel spreadsheet and using the vlookup tool to attach student data and then colour code allows you to see all year levels. We copy them and display for staff/teams to use and also they are used to have conversations with parents when we are looking at trends. We do hide the names when using with parents though.

"Possibly The Best Math Chart Ever Created" But really, it is pretty cool. #math #functions

Arts and crafts for kids - Take a look at this roundup of easy crafts for kids, including toilet roll cardboard characters, cirlce weaving and more!

Well, we needed to take notes about magnets, and what better way to do it than with Mr. Manny Magnet. I made this cute foldable for my kidd...

Et les voici enfin ici également ! Un dossier avec trois niveaux de Sudoku pour un centre de mathématiques progressif, ou des ateliers dès le cycle 2 Le premier niveau comporte une grille par semaine de classe environ, car c'est un niveau d'initiation, et si les élèves buguent, on peut rester dessus. Le second niveau est plus court : un élève qui s'en sort bien, s'en sortira avec des vrais sudokus. Le troisième niveau est encore plus court, car il s'agit des grilles "normales", qu'on peut recréer ou copier à l'envie ! J'en ai mis quelques unes le temps d'habituer les élèves, en conservant la mise en page des niveaux précédents mais on peut en créer tant qu'on veut... (dans le dossier, un fichier modifiable)

Present simple : affirmative form - ESL worksheets

Explore different materials and their properties with this engaging unit. Activities and printables for the Foundation and Prep Year chemistry strand.

Novel Brochure - Pamphlet for Google Classroom Freebie! This resource allows students to create a pamphlet that can be edited for ANY novel! The file contains a Google Drive link that can be used for Google Classroom. **Be sure to MAKE A COPY of the link and save to your own Google Drive Enjoy! Ratings on freebies are greatly appreciated! :) YOU MAY ALSO ENJOY: 5th Grade Novel Studies Bundle (5 Novels) Wonder Novel Study Holes Novel Study Number the Stars Novel Study Esperanza Rising Novel Study Bridge to Terabithia Novel Study ______________________________________________________________________ Tips for Savvy TpT Shoppers: How to receive credit on TpT to use for future purchases: • Go to your My Purchases page. Under each purchase you'll see a Provide Feedback button. Simply click it and you will be taken to a page where you can give a quick rating and leave a short comment for the product. I value your feedback greatly as it helps me determine which products are most valuable for your classroom so I can create more for you. Be the first to know about my new discounts, FREEBIES, and products: • Look for a green star near the top of any page within my store and click it to become a follower. You will now be able to see FREEBIES and customized emails from my store! ©2017 StudentSavvy All rights reserved by author. Permission to copy for single classroom use only. Electronic distribution limited to single classroom use only. (unless you purchase the multiple license)

Projected based learning using quadrilateral robots to engage and teacher students about quadrilaterals while they invent their own robot.

Whether you're looking for a first day ice breaker or games to play at a back to school bash, this list has something for everyone!

Cultivating a postive classroom community is such an important part of teaching, and I've learned that little things go a long way. The Best Part of Me writing activity is a great community builder!

At the end of last year, I said I was going to take it easy on the beginning-of-year mayhem and NOT touch my bulletin boards for Spanish class. I was going to leave them as they were this year. Did that happen? Nope! I was bitten with the Spanish teacher bulletin board ideas bug again. I decided to modify a Yo Vi Espanol bulletin board after seeing an 'I See Spanish' idea on Pinterest. Spanish Teacher Bulletin Board Ideas with Authentic Realia On this Yo Vi Espanol bulletin board, the kids have brought in authentic items from daily life. These

As secondary teachers, when it comes to decorating we often don’t know where to start. Sometimes, we just don’t have the time or energy to devote to another long project with possible m…

Teaching kids about our world, geography, maps, and more. Kindergarten Social Studies Lessons made easy #kindergarten #socialstudies

During our recent move, I found all kinds of things that had been tucked away safely, only to be forgotten. If you have ever moved, you know what I'm talking about! If you haven't ever moved, you're in for all kinds of surprises when you eventually do! While many of the things I found were junk, I came across this little treasure too, and wanted to share. I can't take credit for the idea, it's something my first grade team did during spring time almost 20 years ago. I can't credit the right person either, I simply don't remember who suggested it, or where they got the idea. What I can tell you for sure, is that it was a sweet little project, and that the parents loved it! You may not be able to tell from this picture, but it is actually a quilted rectangle with several layers to it. It will take some adult preparation, plus 2 days of student work to complete. To make it, you need: -plain white cotton fabric -plain blue cotton fabric -iron-on 2-sided adhesive -a layer of batting -white, green, and blue fabric paint -fine brush -pretty scraps of a contrasting color -embroidery thread -a needle. Cut the white cotton fabric, blue cotton fabric, and batting into equal sized pieces. Ours were 8.5 x 11". Set aside. The next step needs to be completed for ALL the copies you will make at once. If you're going to make one project, only do it once. If you plan to make a class set of 22, you need to prep them all before you cut! Follow the directions for your iron on adhesive, attaching it to another piece of white cotton fabric - not the one you already set aside, another piece. After it is fused, cut a smaller rectangle. Ours was 5 x 8". This will be the part that gets painted. You want this piece to look perfect, so trim very carefully! When you are satisfied, center it on the plain blue cotton rectangle, and fuse it in place. You will now have all the pieces shown above, ready for your student artists. On the first student work day for this project, the children will paint their bluebonnets. They'll paint some small leaves, and a long stem with the green paint and the brush. Then it's finger print time! If you can show your students real bluebonnets, or at least closeup photos of them, you'll see that the color isn't consistent over the whole flower. There are usually more white petals towards the top, and more blue ones toward the bottom. We had the children paint the blue fingerprints first, then added white ones in another layer. Our children were delighted with the results! The second student work day is for sewing. I strongly recommend having a bunch of prethreaded needles ready, or you will spend the entire time rethreading while the students wait! Young children can usually "get" the idea of the needle going down on one stitch, then up on the next, it's a pattern, so you're incorporating some mathematical thinking as well as a lot of fine motor skills as you do this. Keep the threads no more than 18" long to start, it isn't enough to go all the way around, but it seems to be as much as little hands can manage without tangling. Layer your pieces: white backing, batting, blue painted piece, and safety pin in place so it isn't going to slip while the children work. Students sew the embroidery thread around the edge. It won't look picture perfect, but they and their families will think it is beautiful! Finish it off by hot gluing a small bow or some buttons in one corner. (Our bows were tied in fabric scraps 1" x 12".) If you've read this far, you are a brave teacher/parent, bravo! Yes, this project does take a lot of adult supervision and guidance. If you can get some volunteers to help you do this, take all the help that is offered. The reason we did this, even with all the time and effort involved, is that it is a beautiful memento of those little hands working. Children are proud of the results, mommies hung them up to display, and everyone remembered what bluebonnets look like, and that they are the state flower of Texas. These make fantastic Mother's Day gifts a few weeks after the bluebonnets are finished blooming! Some of you are thinking about all the pretty fabrics you could use instead of the plain blue one behind the painting. I know I thought it would look fantastic with a nice gingham. Here's why we used a solid color: the background shows through and distracts from the painting. I know posting this in July is absolutely the wrong time of year for bluebonnets, but if I wait until late March, this project will have found its way back into a cupboard, only to be forgotten all over again. Here's another Texas learning activity I want to share too. This is my Texas bingo game, for reviewing 12 different symbols of Texas: armadillo, the Lone Star, pecans, the Texas Flag, longhorn cattle, cowboys, The Alamo, the Seal of the State of Texas, prickly pear cactus, bluebonnets, Texas, and mockingbirds. Children love to make games out of everything - it's just more fun that way - so I put this social studies learning into a bingo format. There are 24 game boards with the colorful outlines, and 24 in a printer friendly format. I used some cool star buttons as playing pieces, but you could use any kind of small manipulative that's handy. Thanks for stopping by my blog, bye y'all!

Have you had a chance to see the new Inside Out movie yet? Disney teamed up with Pixar to produce another fantastic story. We were lucky to see it a few weeks ago as a family and it is a lot of fun. My kids thought the ...

This goes way beyond messy handwriting.