I know it's been a long time since I've done any posting. I mean a LOOOOOOOOONG time. We've legitimately been quite busy. Good busy. Produc...

Vocabulary instruction is so critical in today’s classroom! A vast vocabulary will help students to become better readers and writers. Vocabulary is also essential to their performance on standardized tests. Helping kids to develop their vocabulary is time that is well spent in a busy classroom. I have developed a routine to teach new vocabulary

Discover why learning through play is the secret to joyful education. Dive into the magic of hands-on learning for young minds!

Are you looking to add even more sensory play to your kids' line up? Check out these sensory balloons. They are so fun and relaxing to squish, smoosh and manipulate. As an adult, I love using them too. They are a great stress reliever for us, too.

Household rhythms consist of all the activities and routines that each member of the family performs every day, week, month, season, or year. Establishing consistent household routines can help you care for your children, manage your household, and get things done. Use the power of routine in your household!

Test your engineering skills with this easy gumdrop bridge STEM challenge. Gumdrops and toothpicks are great fun for bridge building.

One of my favorite things about working with a center-based district preschool is the ability to do push-in classroom based services. Those services come in different formats including joining the students in their play areas,

Moeen Ali, the England allrounder, has announced his retirement from all internationals."I'm 37 years old and didn't get picked for this month's Australia series," Moeen said in a Daily Mail interview. "I've played a lot

Grocery Store I set up a grocery store for the girls to pretend shop!! They loved it. Giving me money for her purchase. Bridget really liked the cake mixes and candy....lol. Bridget giving her money to me who checked them out!! Smile. Emerson is getting so BIG...starting to take a few steps here in there on her own!! What a big 9 month old. Emerson playing peek a boo with me and the girls in the playhouse. Today was a fun day. The girls had so much fun grocery shopping and playing babies today. Bridget loves to dress the babies up. Emerson was super super happy and enjoys watching the girls do so much...she can't wait till she is that big!!

Looking for fun and easy activities to do at home with your kids? Look no further! Our latest blog post is packed with creative ideas for indoor and outdoor play, using items you probably already have at home. Don't let boredom get the best of you - check out our post now and start having fun with your kids today!

I’m sharing some ideas and thoughts about encouraging vocal awareness in children. These activities are probably best done by Preschool to Primary grade children-but some could be easily adapted for older students who are new to singing. Hopefully, I’ll give you some new ways to encourage vocal play to help children find their singing voices. DRAMA […]

I believe concerts should be engaging, entertaining, with the highest possible caliber of playing...even for beginners. I had my holiday concert a couple of days ago and we did one of the coolest things ever. I needed to fill an entire concert with just my beginners because my audiences get too large to fit when I try to combine all my students into one concert. All of their pieces were quite short, and I wanted to add some length (and some fun) to the program. I found a play along video on YouTube for 'Let it Snow' and created very simple sheet music so my students could play along: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEr8XCf68P4 I used some money from my school budget to purchase mini flashlights - one for each of my students, and a whole bunch of snowflake holiday specs. If you've never experienced Christmas lights through a pair of holiday specs, you have to check it out! Super cool and fun. They turn every beam of light into a shape. Because we were performing 'Let it Snow,' I chose to purchase only the snowflake shape. To perform the piece (students memorized it), all the lights were turned off in the auditorium. Students waved their flashlights around in the air and the audience wore their snazzy 3D holiday specs - which turned all those little flashlight beams into snowflakes. It was SO FUN and it looked AMAZING. MINI FLASHLIGHTS HOLIDAY SPECS Here a short video of what it looked like when the flashlights were being waved around on stage (it looks WAY cooler through the glasses) Here's a pic taken through the glasses when I had the audience turn on their phone lights and wave them around during a different piece in the program:

I’ve done a couple inner child tarot spreads in the past, but I felt like creating a shorter and more gentle tarot spread this time to do some inner child work. I’ve found many of the deeper inner child lessons come up when simply acknowledging the inner child and spending time appreciating them (

Thank you again to @kimbasprite for these incredible graphics! I love how they turned out🥰

It’s expected that every morning I drink a cup of coffee. If I don’t have coffee, that’s unexpected. It’s expected that when it’s time for dinner, everyone comes in and sits at the table. It’s unexpected if one family member gets up from the table and starts dancing in the middle of the kitchen whil

Thanksgiving is coming soon. what are YOU thankful for. I, personally, am thankful that my theory teacher is at a conference and we missed two days of theory class. Ha ha! Just kidding... So here are a few Thanksgiving-oriented activities for your classes. If anyone knows the origin of this song, please let me know. To be honest, I can't remember from whom or where I learned it. The next song is obviously based on the tune of Zum Gali Gali. The change in text and the accompanying plate game I learned from my good friend, Dr. Michele Paise who is now a professor at Cumberland University in Tennessee. So all kudos for this one go to her. Thanks, Michele! Another extension could be the typical Orff idea of using word chains to create a larger rondo form. So small groups of children could create food word chains (Example: Turkey, mashed potatoes, hot biscuits, corn) to perform with body percussion and then with un-pitched percussion as small group compositions. The word chains are short, so they would have to repeat the chain at least 4 times to make it more substantial. So for instance a group could perform the chain twice with words and body percussion sounds, and then twice with only un-pitched percussion playing the rhythm of the word chain. Or they could layer in their words perhaps. One student could say and play corn over and over, then the person playing turkey could join in, then mashed potatoes, then hot biscuits. Let students be creative and come up with unique ways of performing their words chains. Don't insist that every group must do it exactly the same way. In what other subject in school can students be creative and make their own choices? The final performance would alternate singing the song with group 1 performing their word chain, then the song, then group 2 performing their word chain, and so on. Have a great week!

I've always done something similar to strewing, but I never knew it had a term, nor did I realize it was a common practice in homeschooling, especially the unschooling community. We fall more under t

One of the hardest things to figure out as a homeschooler is whether or not we've done enough. I hope the questions in my last post helped you to evaluate the environment you are providing and the subjects you are covering. But what happens if I know it's a worthy subject and I've missed days

Thank you again to @kimbasprite for these incredible graphics! I love how they turned out🥰

Greeting my students at the door is my favorite part of the day. I love seeing their smiling faces as they unpack their bags and greet me back at the door. I hear lovely things like, "I missed you Mrs. Langley"..... "I made this for you Mrs. Langley"......and "My dog is missing and we haven't found him Mrs. Langley"...... I learn important things about my students through this one simple interaction each day and I wouldn't start my day any other way. I shake their hands and hug them tightly even though it means I will probably get sick... (I suspect that is how I got the cold I am fighting!) Of course after I spend all of this time greeting and waiting for the SLOW POKES they are all sitting at the rug waiting for me like this..... Well. Not Exactly. We start our day with a solid morning meeting which means we need to go right to the rug but I've been plagued with this problem for years. How do I allow for valuable greeting time at the door, and give my SLOW POKES time (seriously I love them dearly but how long can it take to hang up a backpack?) AND allow for the fast kiddos who go right to the rug and proceed to cause pandemonium because we are taking too long getting there? Can you relate? Enter Heidi Songs! We love Heidi in our classroom and use her daily for sight words, alphabet, math, and just plain fun. Parents even email me to ask me who Heidi is because their children request Heidi Songs at home for entertainment. Seriously! Well last week I thought enough is enough with kiddos rolling around on the rug while I try to happily greet my children at the door so I started our alphabet video right before they started walking in. IT. WAS. MAGIC. Magic I tell ya! Everyone went right in and started dancing and singing because it's our FAVORITE and the slow pokes? They hurried it up so they could participate too! Why haven't I thought of this before? You can see all of Heidi's DVD's HERE. This is an affiliate link which means I get a small portion if you buy through this link at no additional cost to you. Thanks for supporting my blog! My top favorite Heidi DVD's are the Animated Alphabet, Musical Math Volume 1, and Sight Words aligned with Reading Street. The sight words aligned with RS are probably my number one favorite because they go in order and we can sing 2 or 3 songs each week and really cover our Reading Street words. We have great results using these songs. Want to remember this tip for later? Pin it here!

Science experiments for kids can be a real hassle during the school year. Yeah, they're fun, but they're also a big mess. What better reason to do summer science experiments with your kids. Summer is

Today's post is about easy sing, move, play along activities! Sing, Move, Play activities can be done easily using the echo teaching method.

Learn how to write a screenplay the right way with this script writing example and screenwriting tips! You'll also find the best software for writers and more.

There are so many resources available online these days. I've collected a bunch of free mental health, social-emotional learning, behavioral health, and wellness resources to share with you here. At the time of writing this blog post, the following social emotional learning SEL and mental health programs, curriculum, lesson plans, and resources are all free. Please note that this may change over time. This blog post is packed with information on free resources that you can use in your classro

Pruvit's Keto Reboot is a 60 hour fast using products containing exogenous ketones that resets your metabolism and catapults you into ketosis to burn fat!

Welcome to this week’s long edition of the Steam Deck Weekly. I’ve been playing quite a few games on Steam Deck over the last few weeks, and...

This past week I subbed in the same 3rd grade class all week. I love week long assignments because I can teach something from beginning to end and see the results of my teaching efforts. On Monday we were supposed to go out for PE but it was 95 degrees so we couldn't go out. I had to come up with something for those 50 minutes so I decided to have the kids come up with their own PE games. I knew the rest of the week was going to be much cooler, so I knew I had time to play the games they came up with. I had the student get into groups of 3 to 4, groups of their own choosing. The groups needed to talk about and agree upon what they were going to do, here are the requirements they needed to follow: Name of the game - could be a variation of an existing game or a completely made up game. Number of players - would it be teams, groups or individual? The play area or boundaries - they needed to think of our playground area and decide where their game was going to be played. Materials Needed - their game could only be played with whatever balls or PE equipment we had available to us in the classroom. Rules: They needed to come up with all the rules for the game. The rules were much harder for them to write out. They had a hard time thinking through the whole game and what rules needed to be stated. As the students worked on this I walked around asking questions like: What do they do if they are tagged - sit, go out, become one of the taggers, etc.? Is there a free space? What does that mean? How long can they be free? How is the winner determined? How does the game restart? These questions helped guide them in their rule writing. Throughout the week I picked 2 games a day to play. I broke the class into 2 groups and 1/2 way through switched the kids so they got a chance to play each game. I only had to intervene a few times when the game managers lost control of their players. Each day we ended with a debriefing on what worked and what didn't. How game managers needed to maintain control and how players needed to be more respectful and cooperative. Overall, it was very successful and ALL the kids had a great time! They loved all the different games and struggled with, but liked being the game managers. Here are a few pictures of the games being played with their papers and drawings. I just love the names they came up with for the games. I created a PE Challenge worksheet if you would like to try this out with your class, I highly recommend it!! You can pick this up from either one of my stores - for FREE! Happy Playing!