Sunday, November 16, 2014

Upper and Lower Case Matching

We have been working really hard on letter matching this year!  We have plenty of letter puzzles and alphabet videos and songs, but since so many of my kinders were having issues matching their letters, I made a quick little set of matching cards.



My kinders LOVE them!  The pictures are cute and colorful, but they don't take away from the letters.  This is a great, simple activity to help little learners discover which letters go together.  I have put this activity on my TpT store for free.  You can grab it here!  Thanks for visiting!

Sunday, November 9, 2014

Pie Tasting Activity for Thanksgiving

I love Thanksgiving!  We have so many great Thanksgiving Centers and projects!  It really is a fun month.  One of my favorite Thanksgiving activities is the Pie Tasting.  Every year some of the kinder classes get together and we sample lots of different pies.  (Taking allergies into consideration first of course!).  We move all the tables in one of the classrooms over to the sides, leaving one table out to lay all the pies on.  Each student gets to sample 2 pies at first, if there is enough pie, the students may have seconds when they finish.  A great addition to this activity is friendship mix!  Simply have the students bring in different snacks like M&Ms, pretzels, cheese balls, raisins, etc.  Mix them all together.  It represents the mixing of the Pilgrims and Indians and how they became friends.  Also - you can totally graph the favorite pies of the students as a math activity, or use the Friendship Mix as a sorting math activity!

Need some help getting through Thanksgiving?  Check out these products in my TpT store!













Sunday, November 2, 2014

Finally November!!

It's November!!  This year has started out awesome!  I have a great group of kids, a new TA,  new administration (which was a bit scary at first), a new house, and a super busy few months!  The year has started out very smooth.  I've decided that it's either because I'm becoming a better teacher as the years go by or I just have a smaller class this year....  maybe a bit of both?  I could also credit it to this AMAZING guided reading book that I purchased over the summer.  It has been my teacher bible!  It is called Guided Reading by Jan Richardson.


This book is SOOOO detailed!  It includes step by step directions on how to get your centers started.  My kinders have been working in centers since the second week of school!!  And they are really doing awesome!  This book not only explains how to start up centers for young age groups, but it gives you tons of different activities you can do with them, and it breaks down how to conduct leveled reading groups.  I LOVE the examples and I LOVE the detail!!  I wish I had a book like this my first couple of years teaching!  If you want to have a better look at the book, you can find it here on Amazon for about $18.  Great price too, right?  Have fun!