Saturday, September 22, 2012

Brown Bear and Teddy Bears


 For the last 2 weeks we have been doing Brown Bear, Brown Bear activities and having fun with Teddy Bears.
The children brought in their favorite Teddy Bear to spend a couple weeks at school with them!  I love how this little sweetie did not bring a bear but instead brought his monkey!  Hey....he is an AMAZING MONKEY so why not?


We had a Teddy Bear picnic with treats brought by our parents.

We had Honey Combs, Honey Nut Cheerios, Honey Graham Teddy Grahams, Gummy Bears, and juice boxes.

It was super fun!  We watched the Teddy Bear Picnic Youtube, and the Gummy Bear song!!
We made our "bear bags".  Last year I called them "purses" and the boys did not like that much so this year they are bags!

Inside our bags were our Brown Bear Brown Bear sequencing strips so we could retell our parents the story!

We measured our teddy bears using this Exploring My Bear sheet I stole off of some cute blog!  Probably Julie Lee!



This is my favorite Baylor Bear!  
All of our math workstations for the past 2 weeks have been Julie Lee's Brown Bear centers and 
a Brown Bear unit I bought from KinderKids!  They both are fabulous!

 Roll the die and put that many bear counters on your mat.
Match the number to the correct Brown Bear animal and record.

This a pic of our work jobs.  I am using the format from Kim Adsit where we follow along all year!  
They start with me telling them a number and they had to put on that many fruit loops.
The actual mats and counters change with our theme but the concept and number they are working on
stays the same until they master it.  I started last year and it was AWESOME!

They roll the shape cube and trace the shape.

 They count the dots on the Brown Bear animal and record.
They roll the die and trace the number.

They read the ten frame and record.

They pull out a brown bear card and color a square above the correct animal the correct color until
one column reaches the top!

I had an idea to feature one section of our daily schedule in pictures and tell you in depth how we do our day in K.  If I can figure out how to host a linky party I will do that too!  We will see!

Have a great weekend!  The weather is awesome today in Texas!  To celebrate the season of Fall all of our TPT product prices have FALLEN 20 % !  For this weekend only!  Go grab our 
APPLE SMARTboard file or our OCTOBER calendar file while they are on sale!!
Peace & Love,
Heather






Thursday, September 20, 2012

Kindergarten......What's Going On?

Well......I am back to show you what has been going on these first few weeks of school!  We have been super busy and there just does NOT seem to be enough time!  Ya' Know??  We have a new principal, a new adopted curriculum (CSCOPE), and a new schedule.....actually there is NOT much that is NOT new!  It's taken a lot of getting used to...but I think I am finally getting into the groove!  Most of the changes (I have to say) are for the better and I am liking them and so are my kinder kiddos....so as Pete the Cat says, "It's all good!"
We did our rainbow names from Deanna Jump.

Here they are up on my door now.

These are our scrapbook pages.....inspired by Kim Adsit.  I handed these out on Meet The Teacher Night and they brought them with them the first day and shared about themselves.  I loved it!

Our buses with initials from Deanna Jump.
I took birthday pictures of the kids holding the number for their birthdate for my birthday door.
It turned out really cute but I don't have a pic of the finished product, yet.

Well....with our new schedule I don't have time for literacy centers so I am trying out Julie Lee's idea of morning baskets.  I have 4 literacy baskets and 4 different literacy centers (1 in each basket) I rotate the baskets through the tables (1 each morning) and on Friday we shop for our new books for our book boxes and do a quick sight word/alphabet/whatever paper....because we don't have time for that either!  Ha! :)  I am really enjoying the baskets and it's a great warm-up that is FUN for the kids so they hurry up and get all their stuff done so they can get busy "playing"!!   :)

As I briefly mentioned... one of the new things we are doing is Readers Workshop/Daily 5...we have blended and picked and pulled bits from each!  We are doing Kim Adsit's Readers Workshop units and then Daily 5 rotation.  Here is one of my sweeties practicing his stamina in Read to Self. They are doing really well!!!  We started our Daily 5 rotations this week and they are loving it!!

Those were a few more pics of them practicing Read to Self.

This is how I decorated their book boxes.


A few pics of them shopping for books last Friday....getting ready for rotations to start.  You can see the I Pick Good Fit Books signs for them to refer to.
Here are our "A My Name is Alice" kids from Deanna Jump! 

This is my new burlap pencil from ETSY! I could NOT find a monkey but this pencil is super cute and totally matches my color scheme!  

We had our first birthday!  This is my blog find.....Since we are the Amazing Monkeys...  this is their birthday bananna!!!  How cute is that???????? So cute!  I made the tag myself!  I can't remember where the original idea is from but I found the idea from a post on birthdays by First Grade Parade.

They also get a Pixi Stick Balloon!


WOW!  That was a lot!  I'll be back super soon to post on our bear stuff and more snapshots of our NEW schedule!!!!!

 Heather




Thursday, September 13, 2012

Pinterest Idea

I saw this idea on Pinterest a few weeks ago and knew the kids would HAVE to make it for my first bulletin board of the new school year.
The student wrote one letter of his/her name on each button.  I think they look GREAT! The bulletin board is covered with burlap.

 Each child wrote a letter of his/her name on paper.  Then, they cut the letters apart and reassembled their names.  More photos coming soon!


Saturday, September 1, 2012

FIrst Day Clips

Finally...finished with the first day photo clips!  I sprayed a clothespin and small piece of craft wood black. I glued a magnet to the back. Then, with a silver sharpie, wrote the child's name.
The rhyme says...I'm giving this to you, to hang all my work, the whole year through!