Parent Teacher Conferences

This week I am running around like a crazy person with a million things to do which isn't too different from any other week, but it feels like a lot - we've got student council stuff going on almost every day, I'm leaving my class with a sub so I can attend a conference for the first time this year, progress reports go home on Friday, and we have parent teacher conferences next week. Ok, that is more than usual so I guess I am justified in feeling a little bit stressed but I can't complain because I am really looking forward to getting a little bit of extra sleep on my "day off" and I am excited about the training that I will be attending!

About those conferences...

I usually keep all of my student's assessments that I use to monitor their progress in binders for each subject meaning all reading assessments go in the reading binder, math in the math binder, writing in the writing binder, etc... This way I can easily take out one binder at a time to give new tests, check out a students progress in a specific subject area, and enter grades for that subject. However, this is not the most convenient method when it comes to preparing for parent teacher conferences. I think it would look silly if I sat down with parents and had a stack of binders on the table that I had to flip through to find their student's information. So, instead, this year I will be using this three page progress report that you can pick up at my TPT store here.

  

What's Included?

1. A Reading Progress sheet: this can be used to test students on letter recognition, recognizing and producing rhymes, counting syllables, isolating beginning sounds, and identifying the parts of a book. 
2. A Math Progress sheet: this can be used to assess number recognition, ability to count to 20, one-to-one correspondence up to 20, ability to write numerals 0-20, recognition of basic shapes, and knowledge of the days of the week and months of the year.
3. A Checklist of important Kindergarten motor skills, work habits, and behavior for success!

This little packet is what I will use to let each parent know how their child is doing in Kindergarten so far, the areas of strength that I have already observed, and the skills or subject matter with which their child may be struggling. I will also show them writing samples from the first day of school and from this week so that they can see how much their child has already improved!

I hope you can put this to use and save yourself some time and stress while preparing for conferences!

3D Shapes

This week we are going to be learning all about 3D shapes in Math. I always have a hard time making this topic interesting and fun, so this year I've rounded up some great resources from pinterest and some of my favorite teacher bloggers.

To introduce the 3D's I found this cute poem on pinterest. I couldn't find the source, so I'm not sure who the original author of the poem is, but here's a copy I made that you can cut and use in a pocket chart or however you want!

While reciting the poem, I will give the students manipulatives so that they can see and touch these shapes and understand that they truly are "fat, not flat". 

Next we'll listen and sing along to Harry Kindergarten's song: 3D Shapes I Know.

I will also use this awesome powerpoint by Mrs. Ricca to look at real life objects and figure out what 3D shape they are.

Finally, we will work together to sort objects by their shape in a pocket chart using yet another freebie from Mrs. Ricca. 

Here are some more fabulous freebies to help you teach 3D shapes!

3D Shapes Worksheet

3D Shapes Free Printables

3D or Flat Shape Sort

First Day of Fall

Happy belated first day of Fall! I did not realize that that was yesterday until I got to work in the morning and saw Google's cute little ad. I panicked! What kind of Kindergarten doesn't know the date of the first day of fall and prepare crafts and fun activities well in advance?! This kind. But you know what, I did a great job of winging it and the kids had no clue that it was all planned last minute! Hooray! Thanks to a few other wonderful teachers who shared their ideas, we were able to celebrate the change of season all day.

First, we used a few worksheets from this awesome packet by This Reading Mama to practice math skills such as counting and sorting pumpkins, scarecrows, leaves and more by different attributes.

Next, because we are working on reading color words and drawing detailed pictures, we completed the coloring sheet that you can see on the bottom, right of the picture above. After coloring in the tree and leaves, I asked everyone to add at least five details to the background.

Then we reviewed letter sounds using this fun activity from Miss Kindergarten that you can pick up here.

That's about all I was able to squeeze in today, but I wanted to share this fabulous list of 50 Free Fall Printables for Kids that saved my life today!

Synonyms

Are you teaching synonyms this week? I am, and I'm pretty excited about it because my students always love synonyms!

I always start out by having a student volunteer toss me a ball, I hand it back and ask them to throw it to me (cue laughter - they are so easily entertained) and then I ask, "did he or she do anything different the second time?". They all shout in unison, "NO!", and I say, "those two words: toss and throw mean the same thing so we call them SYNONYMS. Say it with me now! SY-NO-NYMS". I repeat this exact same thing about ten times with synonyms like jump and hop, smile and grin, push and shove, etc... We go over lots of synonyms, they get to move around, they laugh, and most of the time they get it!

Of course, I always end up having one student who raises his hand a few days later and says, "You just said 'whatever' and 'whatever' and I know those are cinnamons!!!". Oh, so close! This always makes me smile and I figure as long as they've got the basic concept down I am a happy teacher.

I put together this mini lesson to help you teach your little ones about synonyms. You can pick it up at my TPT store, print, and enjoy! Happy teaching :)

Morning Work

Good morning and happy Monday everyone! This weekend was very relaxing especially thanks to the "fall" weather that we got here in Southern California. I may have indulged in some pumpkin ice cream, a pumpkin spice latte, and some fall nail polish colors even though it is not even close to being time/weather for that yet. Whoops.

Anyways, I wanted to post about morning work today! During my first year of teaching, I developed an aversion to morning work. At my school parents are welcome to wait outside your classroom door and bombard (sorry I'm not sorry for being dramatic) teachers with questions, requests, information about their children, etc... I was SO frustrated with this because I wasn't confident enough at the time to stop them or ask them to leave, and while I was busy talking to them my students were running wild in the classroom. My principal suggested that I give them some morning work to keep them occupied while I dealt with their parents and I, being the stubborn person that I am, thought, "why should I have to waste precious time that could be spent on instruction and prepare more materials just so I have time to talk to parents when they should know that teaching my class is my priority over talking to them". And that's how morning work and I got off on the wrong foot. 

This year, I have let go of the past and made amends with morning work. I might even call it my new best friend. I still meet with my students to do our morning meeting first, and if parents try to interrupt I let them know that we are busy and will answer their questions after school or via email if they so wish to write it down. But as soon as we have sang good morning to each other, talked all about today, and updated our calendar, I send my kids to their tables to do morning work quietly for about fifteen minutes. During that precious, quiet time I am able to check their homework, take attendance, send things to the office, gather myself and everything I need for the day and, on some, very special days, drink my coffee.

I have created a 26 page morning work packet that you can grab here. Each day students can use these worksheets to review important beginning of the year skills such as handwriting, letter recognition, counting and cardinality, continuing patterns, and more. This product can also be used as homework!

Check it out and please be sure to leave me some feedback so I can continue to improve my products in order to best suit your needs! 

Happy Saturday!

I have finally decided to start trying my hand at selling products for TpT (TeachersPayTeachers).

I just opened my store, and you can get my first product FREE.

Please check it out and leave me some feedback! Thanks!

Our Classroom Rules

During the first week of school, we read a book about a character who is not very good at following the rules and discuss the consequences of such behavior. There are a few books that work really well for this topic, but I usually choose one of these three:

After reading the book, we talk about the importance of having and following rules and then I introduce our very own classroom rules. The rules that I use came from Mrs. Ricca's Kindergarten Classroom Management Freebies. Thanks to this wonderful resource I was able to create this cute little display.

Just like Mrs. Ricca, I like to use the Whole Brain Teaching Method to help the students memorize our classroom rules. They think that these are hilarious which is great because they end up having all of our rules memorized by the end of the first week. Unfortunately I can't find a video of this method right now, but it is pretty much a series of hand motions that go along with the rules. We say each line together while doing these motions:

Rule Number One (hold up one finger) 

Listen (Cup hands around ears)

When someone is speaking (make chatting mouths with hands)

Rule number two (hold up two fingers)

Follow directions (Make a fish swimming motion with hands)

Quickly (shoot pointer finger up in the air as fast as you can)

Rule number three (hold up three fingers)

Raise your hand (raise hand)

to speak (make chatting mouths with hands)

Rule number four (hold up four fingers)

Be a caring friend (give yourself a hug)

Rule number five (hold up five fingers)

Always do your best work (Make a muscle with your arm)

We ended our discussion by sorting good vs. poor choices which you can read more about in my First Week of School post!