School has officially started for us! We are several days into the school year and I am loving my new class! It's a big group but they are a great group of kids! We are *for-sure* crammed into the classroom this year... nice and cozy. To build confidence and review, we have been working on letter identification, sounds and letter formation. Students have been sorting upper and lower case letters.... They have been working on each letter as they trace, write, identify the beginning sound and locate the letter... They have been sorting beginning sound pictures... They have been "spinning a letter" and then tracing the letter they spin. (This also works on graphing skills, YEAH!) Hands on students can stamp letters... Students are matching upper case to lower case.... You can grab up this packet (which is 120 pages of goodness!!) in my TpT store by clicking below! It's marked down so grab it up! We have also been doing a student of the day writing paper. Part of our writing assessment includes details in the picture so we are concentrating on hands and fingers, no "floating" people, facial features and backgrounds. We start with the sentences "I can see ______." I model my drawing of what a person should look like and then they draw their own version... each day they get better! Click below to get the super simple printable page that we use. I have included a traceable version for kiddos that need a little help. I have also included an editable version of the cover page for the books. I bind all of the pages together and then send it home so each kiddo has their own book with pictures of them drawn by the whole class. Here is a sample of what I send home... Stephanie has started off the year using Sherri's Alphabet Practice Chant with her kindergarten class. Using it daily all year is a great way to learn letter sounds while having fun! I plan on purchasing it to use with some kiddos that still need some letter/sound reinforcement in first! I have a recorder so I plan on recording the chant as a group and then putting it with the slide show so that students can listen to it at the listening station. I will have to update later to let you know how that worked out! It is going to be an awesome year! We have a lot of ground to cover but I think this group is up for a challenge! Endless Possibilities, Stephany
The most important activity students can do to develop scissor skills is to cut with scissors. Young learners should cut a variety of things-repeatedly-and perform cutting activities frequently! Teacher friends,...
We had a special guest come and bring their worm composting container. The kids all had a lot of fun using magnifying glasses to check out ...
Here are a few photos of the documentation showing others of our journey as we inquired about color and shades.
Lemon juice secret writing! Make DIY invisible ink and sen secret messages. Plus learn the science behind how these messages are made!
Find the answers to all questions you have about triptych photography.
As promised I am back to share my newest 3D shape product. WOW! I feel like I have been working on this packet FOREVER! One reason this took so long to create was because I took my first leap into creating clip art because I was not able to find any cute 3D shape clip art. This resource has TONS of cute stuff and I am so excited to share it with you! This 36 page 3D Shape Fun packet includes 6 posters to teach 3D shapes and one 3D shape attribute poster to help students with the vocabulary terms. A 3D Shape/Color BINGO game with calling cards and 7 different BINGO boards. A student book to learn about the 6 3D shapes, concentration game, 3D Shape Sort with Data Analysis and an "I Have, Who Has 3D Shape Game" WHEW! Stop by my shop to check out this fun packet!
Name Name ActivityHave students write their name on the line.Then give students art supplies to decorate the letter of their 1st name.
Your child will be using their heavy thinking skills to manipulate and construct a picture using the different shapes and sizes of pattern blocks.
A Teaching blog about Secondary English and Speech.
Free Kindergarten Writing Worksheets! Students trace, build, and write their own sentences with our free printable worksheets. Differentiated to help with multiple student levels and abilities. You'll find writing prompts, fill in the blanks, word bank activities, tracing pages, draw and write prompts and more!
Ta-Dah! I have finally finished and listed my newest ready-to-go math station for Geoboards! (thank you, Heather for the great suggestion!) I had such great feedback with my pattern block sight word station, I thought adding a new math pack was the perfect choice. Geoboards are usually those things that the teacher who had the...
20 SHARES Share This! Save This! When you’re looking for arts and crafts activities for your All About Me preschool theme, you don’t need hundreds of amazing ideas. You just need five amazing ideas that you can take into your preschool classroom and immediately put into action. You only need one art and craft per …
'Print rich' is a lovely phrase, but it is one that is easily mis-interpreted and can cause practitioners a great deal of angst not to mention headaches for children! So, what is a print …
window.addEventListener('LPLeadboxesReady',function(){LPLeadboxes.addDelayedLeadbox('w5B9CVVpZM3VM42aCMGWwh',{delay:'5s',views:0,dontShowFor:'3d',domain:'thescienceduo.lpages.co'});}); Let’s get right down to business. As a teacher, you are constantly searching for tools to help engage ALL of your students within your daily lessons. Unfortunately, many of you are also often faced
This has been such a glorious first month where we have developed new skills and shared many special moments together! We have learned to: Play, think, wonder, and learn Interact safely within our classroom and with our classmates (share, cooperate, solve social conflicts, etc.) Clean up after ourselves Listen attentively to the person who is speaking Follow simple instructions Load and unload our backpacks (take out our agendas and library books) Line up to visit the library, gym, or music room Listen to a new story read to us and respond with our thoughts about it Dress for the outdoors (zipping our coats, putting on our shoes) Explore our Natural Learning Environment Eat our snack and our lunch Complete our daily writing during "Thinking and Learning Time" Walk with a partner on the sidewalk toward our nature trail Our photos showcase the special moments that we have shared: Please note, we now have permission from some families to show their child's face on the blog. Celebrating our blog's second birthday! Drawing and writing while engaged in play-based learning. Finding our photo on the "Daily Writing Wall." Hanging up our daily writing during Thinking and Learning Time. Feeling proud of showing our personal best writing each day! Adding numbers to our dramatic play learning area. Building with a variety of open-ended materials, including big blocks, rocks, tin cans, and pine cones. Wondering about the leaves that we collected on the light table. Painting with water colour paints. Exploring with our magnetic tiles on the overhead projector. Creating with magnets. Learning our success criteria. Noticing our Documentation Portfolios. Reading books in our book nook. Adding wonders to our Wonder Wall. Reflecting on previous learning. Sketching with charcoal and sketch pencils at our drawing table. Working together to achieve a common goal! Using our senses to help us learn. Making masterpieces in the sand. Writing with the support of our sentence starters. Improving our fine motor skills by picking up marbles with spoons and putting them into a tin can. While all of this wonderful learning was unfolding, Mrs. Ham and Ms. Babalis were trying to get to know each of the students better by finding out about their interests, literacy skills, and mathematics knowledge. All of the students participated in these interviews, so that the educators could get a sense of their strengths, needs, and next steps. This important information will help them to plan differentiated mini lessons and intreguing inquiries. Mrs. Ham completes a fine motor cutting interview. Ms. Babalis completes a math interview. Stay tuned for more about our outdoor learning! Parents and blog followers, we invite you to post your comments, connections, or questions below.
"In any environment, both the degree of inventiveness and creativity, and the possibility of discovery, are directly proportional to the nu...
Every child who has ever watched Finding Nemo has heard of ocean currents. Seriously educational stuff there, folks! While Finding Nemo is definitely not the most educational movie of all time, it can really spark curiosity in kids to find out more about ocean currents, like the East Australian Current, and how they are formed. This ocean current experiment is a fun way to see currents form right before your eyes!
It is amazing to me how many teachers use Teachers Pay Teachers . I know it really has changed my life and way of teaching. Resources are ...
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Enhance your child's writing skills with our engaging worksheets designed to practice writing their names. Our carefully-crafted exercises provide an enjoyable learning experience that focuses on the entity (your child) and subject (writing their names). Join us on this journey to improve your child's penmanship and boost their confidence in a fun and interactive way.
I absolutely LOVE IKEA and even though the closest one to me is about 3 hours away, I always make a point to go a couple of times a year. A few years ago, I did a post on items from IKEA that teacher
Is it about that time for you? Time to get ready for those parent-teacher conferences? Luckily, I had mine about two weeks ago. I have the same system I follow each year to prep for conferences and it honestly makes life super easy and stress free! When I prep for conferences, I pull out a file folder where I keep student work for the year. I keep things like math tests, sight word data, writing examples and reading assessments. When I am doing a conference I simply pull that stuff out to show progress and help parents understand where we need to go next in order to help their child grow. I also like to have a conference outline. I have 15 minutes per conference, so I need to stay on track! I also let parents take this outline home as reminders of things we are working on at school and ways they can help at home. When I fill out the conference outline, I use my little prompters to help jog my brain. Let's face it, preparing for these things can make the brain go a little foggy! When it is time for the actual conferences. I put a sticky note on the outside of the student's folder with their name and the time of their conference. I lay them out in order, so when parents come in, I can just grab their folder and we can get started right away! There you have it! Super simple, but effective! Feel free to grab more conference stuff from me by clicking the product image below! It's full of FREE conference goodies!! Inlinkz coding: An InLinkz Link-up
Planting lifelong foundations in early childhood
We learned that all motion is either caused by two kinds of force. Pushing or pulling. I set out clay and let them explore by using the forc...
I have recently moved to WordPress and I am still learning how to use my blog. This is going to be my first post 😉 I want to share our end of the year with you. We have had a great end of second grade. I had a great group and I will miss them... Read More
Here's an easy science experiment that will get kids' hands burning, their minds racing, and learning something new in the process.
As an interest based learning teacher, I usually start out with something most children have some experience and interest in until I get to know them better. Color is something they always enjoy exploring! I set out paint at the easel and asked, what can you wonder and discover about color here? As they explore, I constantly model for them the growth mindset, language and vocabulary often used in an inquiry based classroom: What do you see? What do you think? What do you wonder? What do you notice? What did you discover? Did you learn something new? Did this change your thinking? These are questions I want them to ask themselves as they explore new things this year! I set up experiences for them to explore colors. They quickly on their own started focusing mostly on different shades of colors. Here are some pictures showing the invitations to explore and the children exploring and discovering things about color. They were also noticing shades of colors of objects in our room! When they discovered them, they would share what they noticed with the class. They noticed we could mix colors to make different shades of colors and that adding white made lighter shades and black or darker colors mixed in made darker shades. I wondered out loud if it was possible to create 100 different shades of colors? We looked at a book called Pantone Coors that you see in many of these pictures that showed there were lots of shades! The kids took it as a challenge and a project was born! We wanted to see if we could create 100 different shades! We did one color each day. We did it! Not only did we make 100 different shades, we made 120 different shades of colors! They were so excited to beat their goal and create that many colors! They also discovered that black was black but we could make different whites! I told them that I wanted to display their colors to show people what what they learned. We debated how to display them. Group them by colors separately? Group them by light or dark? Like a rainbow? I thought they would prefer that one but they surprised me. They agreed on a circle with all of the color together. I couldn’t fit the browns and grays/white/black in so those were separate. The kids helped label and write out some of the things we did and noticed for our display to document our learning. Here is the finished display! This was a fun way to get started with how we will learn in our classroom! As they learn more about letters/sounds and writing they will be recording their own observations of what they see, think, wonder and discover! As the year goes on, you will notice them using their writing and reading skills more and more in natural, authentic ways! This is one of our big goals! Now that we have finished, I have started to notice some common interests to start our next inquiry and take all of our learning further! Stay tuned! Here are some other things that have been going on in our classroom! Learning to identify letters and sounds. We start the year learning one letter a day through our Journeys curriculum and how to write the capital letter properly using our Handwriting without tears curriculum. Here are some of the experiences set out for them during this time. The kids have learned how to partner read with letter books contains predictable text. They are learning letters, letter sounds, and the first three reading strategies: 1) Use your pointer finger to touch each word. 2) Look at the picture. It is a clue to figure out harder words. 3) Look at the first letter and say it’s sound when trying to figure out a word you don’t know. They are also learning to help each other and encourage each other as they read together. Here they try to create the letter by putting the lines down in the order they should make them when writing. Here, if they can name the letter and/sound, they are allowed to use it to build a castle. Of course they can ask friends for help if they don’t know it! More ways to practice proper formation of letters and develop fine motor skills to help with writing. Pebble crayons to encourage their pincher grip, texture to feel themselves making the letter on both the the grid and the chalkboard (both provide resistance. A whiteboard does not so does not work as well. We learned about Mat Man to help us with drawing people. We draw his parts and then add details to turn him into somebody. We keep writing at a minimum for now so that we don’t continue the bad writing habits they have developed. We focus on creating stories through pictures and telling oral stories. We read these books to help us. It helped us realize if we don’t know how to draw something, we can draw it “ish!” Dog-ish, violin-ish, etc. it gives them the freedom to try and helps those perfectionists not throw away every drawing they don't feel is perfect. We also read Beautiful Oops and Oomph! These taught us to work through mistakes and to add the destabilization a picture needs to tell a story in itself! These books really helped them learn to tell stories through pictures. Good Dog Carl is a good example of a story told through pictures. A lot of literacy learning has been happening and it’s only just beginning!
Ocean themed movement cards give you a fun and engaging way to add movement with an ocean theme. With your purchase you will receive a downloadable PDF file. You will not receive a physical product.
