TGIF

  

{1} School Spirit!

Each Friday we're all encouraged to wear our school colors.  I bet you can guess what my school colors are by looking at these cuties!

{2}  1,2, Buckle My Shoe

We finished up nursery rhymes this week.  Gotta love YouTube for bringing some of our favorite rhymes to life.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INyHLYfasTU

{3}  Hickety, Pickety, My Black Hen

We did this adorable project to go with this classic rhyme.  You can find it here at TLC Lessons.  What I love about TLC is they emphasize really important skills such as following oral and visual directions
and awareness of spatial relationships.  As a bonus the projects do not involve any photocopying or pattern making.  Everything is cut freehand from shapes that have been cut to size beforehand.

{4}  Glitter Fun!!!

Fun for The Itsy Bitsy Spider or your fall spider theme days!  First, I directed my kinders in drawing a web. Then the fun with glue and glitter began.  Last, we made an eight-legged spider from a folded piece of black paper by tracing our hand with our thumb tucked under.  The eyes are just self-adhesive reinforcements.

{5}  Stamp a Letter

Love this, and my kinders did too!  It's from Kristen's Kindergarten.  You can get it here.

Five for Friday/Fabulous Finds Friday/Spark Saturdays

Okay, here's my Five for Friday with Doodle Bugs Teaching, Spark Saturdays at Head Over Heels for Teaching and 1 Fabulous Find for Hoots n' Hollers!

{1} Spin * Read * Graph

Using most of our beginning of the year sight words, I made this activity for my kinders.














{2} Nursery Rhymes

We did Humpty Dumpty and...


{3} Hickory Dickory Dock


The actual moveable mouse is so fun!












{4} The Apple Story

We finished our apple unit with this poem/sequencing book.  They love gluing on the real apple seed!

{5} Beat the Clock/A Fabulous Find

We have been using this stopwatch to race with the clock.  This week we used it for class sorting by size, shape or color.  The stopwatch keeps some of the kinders a bit more focused until it is their turn:)  Record time:  00:01:56!
www.online-stopwatch.com

Five for Friday with a FREEBIE

Linking up here again...

                                     ...and here!

{1}  FREEBIE!  So, next Saturday is the last day of summer.  To end my favorite season, I am offering this no-prep printable freebie.  I will be using it on Friday to say good-bye to summer!  Click here to download.

My students have been working on color words for three and a half weeks now.  For many of them that still means "matching" color words to the word on their nametags (below).  I love that most can do this! The printable (above) would also be appropriate for firsties at this time of year.

{2} Apples, Apples, Apples!

The students brought apples in, we created a floor graph, then we transferred the information to a "take-home" graph.

{3} Ten Apples Up On Top

This was my first time trying this and it was a huge success!  The students loved it, were so engaged and as a bonus for me, it was a "no effort" assessment on who could count objects to 10!  Assessment results:  Perfection: 20 students!,    almost perfection (9 apples): 3 students, and just 1 student had 6 apples.  When I told this sweetie to go count again,  he/she came back with 14 apples glued on... something to work on:)

   
I'm not sure how this could be done on this scale unless you have a die-cut machine at your school for the apples.  I am sooooo grateful for ours.  There is quite a bit of prep involved, so use those volunteers if you attempt this.   Oh, and of course, read the classic book first:)





{4} Fun Friday!  

That's what I tell them anyway:)  It's really "enrichment" when they make their own choices from choice activities on our chart, then learn through play and creativity.  This is what we do at the end of the day on Fridays, if we have all of our other work done.

{5} Sentence Flip Books/Here is the ___.

Create, read (with lots of tracking emphasis), take home and read again. These little books use the first of our sight words in our Open Court program.

Fabulous Finds Friday and Five for Friday

I'm linking up with Hoots N' Hollers and Doodle Bugs Teaching to share today. 

  
{1} Color Words
I found these creative, cute and classy color word activities at Doodle Bugs Teaching.

{2} Wikki Stix
My kinders tried these out this week. Check out the creativity, including the  ... wait for it... DNA on the right!  After this explore time we will move onto using them to form CVC  and sight words.  Wikki Stix can be found at www.wikkistix.com or educational websites.

{3} Living Letters 
I find this to be a great tool for teaching handwriting. Story summary: Some letters live in the dirt (g,j,p,q and y), some like the sky (all capitals and h,f,b etc.) and all letters like to live in the grass. EduCLIME is the source for this.  I also use the poster, and whiteboards (which are really not white, but look just like the paper).

{4} A Matching Game
This is the matching game that we start the year with.  After we learn the game we play a variety of memory games with words, numbers, math skills etc. Find this cute multicultural game here at eeBoo.

{5} Domestic Engineering

This furniture set is from Pottery Barn Kids, but I found it for a bargain on Craigslist. It's so much sturdier than other playhouse furniture.  At this time of the year my kinders love to exercise their domestic engineering and role play skills.  Last year at the end of the year they turned the area into a restaurant and named it "Love Cafe".  They could not get enough of making Men Yous (menus), writing long lists of food names.  Can you guess what the most popular item was??  If you guessed "friz", you got it!