Staying Busy During the Summer

Hi Friends!

I hope you are enjoying your summer so far & (if you're as crazy as I am) planning for next school year. I'm not going to lie - I spend all year long thinking of a million different ideas for TPT products that I would love to make if I had the time and now that I have the time I can't remember any of them! I'm seriously stumped. So if you have any suggestions, feel free to comment and share them with me.

Goal for next year: keep all ideas in one place and don't lose them! (I started a running list and I'm pretty sure it was thrown away during the big move out of my classroom).

Right now I am working on a Back to School Survival kit for you all :) It is not even close to being done, but I did finish the classroom organization section and thought I would go ahead and share some ideas with you now.

I made some Rainbow Labels for those of you who are interested in getting started on organizing your own classroom. Good luck! And please share pictures if you use them - I would love to see how you put these labels to use :)

Makeover Madness Continued

Alright, I'm obsessed. I made over one product and now I want to make them all over! 

Here is my new & improved Kindergarten Progress Report:

*I updated the cover to make it more inviting & to provide more information about the product

*I edited the page layout to make it easier for teachers to use and parents to understand

*I add some important content that students need to master in Kindergarten

Here's my before and after picture:

TPT Seller Challenge Week 1: Makeover Madness

It's finally Summer!!!!!!

I have been on vacation for almost a week now but, as I mentioned in a previous post, I had to jet set to the East Coast for my brother's wedding on our last day of school. The entire wedding weekend was a blast and I didn't have a single second to stop and accept the fact that the school year is really over!

I am feeling excited, relieved, sad, and nervous for many reasons - It's always a relief to finish another school year, however this year I packed up my Kindergarten classroom that I have been working in for the last three years, turned in my keys and said goodbye because I won't be returning to my school next year. I am excited for what lies ahead as I make the move from California to Maryland, but I always hate to leave anywhere that has become a home to me. Of course I had to get one last picture of me and my classroom door that is no longer mine and I won't be walking through every day *sniff*:

To keep myself busy and not feeling sad about leaving some people that I have really learned to love (students, coworkers, families, friends, etc..) I have decided to take part in the TPT Seller Challenge! I started today with a product makeover that you can check out in my TPT store.

I not only updated the cover, but also edited the layout and content of many of the pages. Click on the picture if you want to grab a copy for yourself :)

Memory Books

Wow. I have been meaning to post about so many different things these past few weeks and have just been way too busy to sit down and actually do it! We are down to three days of school left which in itself is crazy, hectic, and exhausting, but on top of that I am moving from beautiful California back to (also beautiful in a different way) Maryland this summer.

I have been a crazy person trying to get my classroom completely packed up and ready to be handed over on our last day of school because I am leaving that night on a red eye flight for Maryland to make it there in time for my brother's rehearsal dinner and wedding!!! Unfortunately I can't share everything that we've ben up to you with you right now, but I can share our End of the Year Memory Books because I finally (*almost) got them done!

My brilliant Room Mom suggested that we make photo albums for the students for the end of the year and I loved the idea but then started imagining all the money we would spend on albums, pictures, and didn't like the fact that their writing and thoughts would not be included. SO I decided to create a Memory Book that the kids could write in about things from this year like: their teacher, buddy, favorite memories, favorite things, and more but that ALSO included room for them to put photos from this year!

Now, this was a big project so don't think that you can just print and have the kids do the entire thing on their own. This took a lot of careful planning and one-on-one help but I will say that the results have turned out to be so worth it!

In case you don't know this yet, I have a slight case of OCD, so to prepare for this activity I printed out every page of the book for each student and placed the pages in large Ziploc bags - 1 bag for each kid with all pages inside. Then my room mom and I printed photos for each child (I only have 13 so it wasn't too expensive) and organized them into envelopes labeled with each student's name.

In class I had each them take the cover page out of their bag and decorate it as beautifully as they possibly could. We traced their names in black marker and then I cut and glued them on to neon cardstock because I am too controlling to let them do these things themselves.

Next I showed them how to complete every page of the book and then allowed them to work independently as I walked around and helped them along the way. I told them that they were only allowed to take out one page at a time to avoid having everyone mix up pages.

Once everyone finished every page, I laminated all of them (I think they would look fine without laminating but figure they will last longer this way), made sure they were in the correct order, and three hole punched all of them.

Tomorrow, if all goes as planned, I will tie them all together with ribbons and will finally be done :)

If you want to make the same Memory Books as we did, you can head on over to my TPT store and pick up a copy for yourself! I made different covers for grades K-8 so you can use this product even if you don't teach Kinder. Enjoy!

Teaching Writing in Kindergarten

Hello friends!

It has been a busy, busy week in Kindergarten. We are finishing up our last Language Arts unit, doing so many tests that I can't even see straight, and trying to have fun with pre-summer activities. Today we finished up our last writing sample of the year and I wanted to share a little bit about how I teach writing in Kindergarten.

When I first started teaching I thought that Five and Six year olds would only be able to write about one or two sentences by the end of the year. Boy, was I wrong. I soon discovered that many of them quickly learned to do much more than what I expected and I decided that I needed to have higher expectations for them.

I purchased this fantastic book and it changed my life (or maybe just the way I teach writing which sometimes feels like it is my life).

Anyways, Randee Bergen is my hero! She has suggestions and resources for starting to incorporate daily writing time from day 1 and helping students continue to improve throughout the year. I read the entire book in about two days and followed her directions step by step the next school year and I have to say, I was blown away by the results. My little ones came in barely able to write their names legibly and left writing me full pages of sentences with capitals at the beginning, punctuation in the right place, proper spacing, sight words spelled correctly, etc...AND they made sense!

I realized that year that (most) Kindergartners love writing and that I love seeing them do so well. I was so excited that I wanted to tell everyone about their amazing progress and I started keeping a writing portfolio that I'm going to share it with you now! :)

Every year I have the kids do a writing sample on the first day of school. I explain that I know they haven't had a lot of practice writing journals yet, but that I would like them to do their very best to draw a picture of themselves and write a little bit about themselves even if all they can write is their name. Here is what the samples usually look like on that first day:

From that day on, we dedicate at least thirty minutes a day to writing time. At the beginning of the year we do a lot of directed drawing and labeling pictures, and as time goes on they each get their own composition journal for primary grades and start doing daily journal entries. I try to take a writing sample every trimester and I show them how much they have improved. They love seeing how great their writing is compared to the last sample and many of them try to go back and fix the mistakes in their old ones so I have to keep an eye out for that!

Here are some mid-year/close to end of the year samples:

And here are some of the end of year samples that we did today:

Here are the pictures of one of my students' work throughout the school year:

here's a closer look at that End of Trimester 3 writing:

The beginning of year writing templates and ideas for keeping a writing portfolio came from Heidi's blog and you can get a copy for yourself here.

SIGHT WORDS

Hi there!

Today I want to share with you the way that I have been teaching Sight Words in Kindergarten for the past few years.

So far in my teaching career I have worked with two different reading programs - Open Court and Journey's Common Core. Both of these programs only require Kindergartners to learn about 40 words by the end of the year which I quickly realized is not enough to help them become fluent readers! So, I took the Journey's word list and combined it with some of the star words that our First Grade teacher uses and created my own sight word curriculum for the year.

By the end of the year I expect students to be able to read 95 words by sight (no sounding out, no guessing, they just have to have them memorized). You may be thinking that this is too much for such little learners, but trust me it is not! My kids get so excited each time they pass a color set that they beg their parents to practice with them and they speed right through the words. This year more than half of my class had the entire word list memorized by February and they have all started working on the first few sets of words that our First Grade teacher uses. (Three of my boys had them done by Christmas and are reading at a second grade level now!!!!)

Of course, there are a few students who still have a set or two to work on and I tell them and their parents that that is OK - everyone learns at a different pace, and as long as they have the rainbow done by the end of the year they will have mastered all of the Kindergarten words and the first few sets of First Grade words. Plus they have all summer to review :)

At back to school night I explain this whole thing to parents and give them the first set of words to start working on and a letter that explains how to get started.

A few weeks later I start the first round of testing and anyone who passes takes home their orange set of words and gets to color in the red line of their rainbow that I display in the classroom.

From then on I do scheduled testing once a month and they don't just test on their new set - they have to be able to read all of the sets that they already passed and the new one. I keep track on a progress monitoring sheet that I keep in my reading binder, and if they miss any old words I send home a note that looks like this:

When they pass all of their rainbow words I make a huge deal out of it because, well, it is a big deal! (And it doesn't hurt that the other kids get jealous and want to do the same!) I got permission from my principal to give them a free dress day, they get their face on a rainbow up on my sight word superstar board, and I give them the first page of First Grade words to get started on.

If you like what you see and want to try out my Rainbow Sight Words in your classroom then head on over to my TPT store and pick up your own copy by clicking on the picture below!

Mother's Day

It's almost Mother's day & this year I made my own craft for the kids to do but then found an adorable activity on the blog Teaching with Love and Laughter and I just had to do both.

First we read My Mother is So Smart! by Tomie DePaola. If you don't have a copy of this book you can read it for free on www.wegivebooks.com!

We talked about what is special about our Moms and then completed a super cute directed drawing activity from Heidi's blog and writing activity from Teaching with Love and Laughter that you can read more about here. The finished products were so cute that I just had to share!

Then, we did the very simple (and seemingly boring in comparison to the first one) craft that you can buy at my TPT store by clicking on the picture below.

Have a great weekend!