Hello Everyone!

I’ve had the craziest two weeks I can remember at the beginning of the school year!  You’re all probably experiencing or about to experience the same thing.  I can’t put my finger on what it was, but all of it together had tired me out! 🙂

I’m slowly introducing Literacy Work Stations in my classroom.  We haven’t officially used any of them yet (except for the library work station), but I hope to get them going later this week.  I still have 3-4 more to introduce and then we’ll be ready to go.

I did add/change a few things this year and some I can show you and some I cannot not (I want to not post the names of my students on my blog), but I can take pictures of things without names and explain them in detail.

Management:

You can search for LWS on my blog and see how I managed them in the past.  I’m sticking with something similar, however this year, in the interest of KISS (keeping it simple silly!), I printed all the names on pre-purchased business cards.  I don’t have to write all the names out and when a new student comes in, I just print out one new card at a time.  I also copied the work station labels and chart labels right from the back of Debbie Diller’s book (Literacy Work Stations).  This made everything for uniform and the labels all have the names of the stations in English and Spanish! 🙂

Overall:

I would stop what you’re doing right now and go hit up your Target Dollar Spot for the fabulous re-usable bags they have for sale for a dollar each (I got lucky one day and got ten of them for .50 each!!).  I am using them for everything this year!  I’ve purchased all I can find.  They have had them out since the holiday season last year (I used them for stockings for my extended family and Easter baskets).  There are always new designs.  The ones now are black and white and are near the gift giving items.  Anyway, buy lots of those (haven’t ripped one yet) and use them in place of baskets and buckets to stow all your goodies in!  I have them in my Word Work station, Listening Station, Pocket Chart Station, Drama Station, and somewhere else I can’t think of right now! 🙂  I hang them on the wall with those 3M hooks that can be removed later and not take the paint off, but they stick almost anywhere (I haven’t ever had any fall off).  You just buy refill packs of the sticky tabs when you need more. I thought I took pictures of them but I can’t find them on my camera, so I’ll take some tomorrow at school.

Overhead Work Station:

I’m introducing this one tomorrow and have been busy typing up parts of books that we have read (Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?) and printing them on transparency sheets.

chickachickatransparency

brownbeartransparency

I will use these on the overhead along with pictures of all my kids that I printed on transparency sheets.  I printed them in black and white using iPhoto on my Mac.  I will cut the pictures apart and the kids can put pictures of each other in the blank spots and read the words.  I printed them using the “contact sheet” option, so there are 12 kids on a sheet.

Pocket Chart Station:

I wrote everyone’s name on a sentence strip and attached a color photo of them to the end of the strip (again using the “contact sheet” layout in iPhoto), and laminated them all.  I showed the kids how to sort them by boy/girl (I wrote the boys on blue strips and the girls on pink strips) and how to sort them alphabetically.

Drama Station:

I’ve added the props for Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and Brown Bear (you can purchase them from Lakeshore) to the dollar spot bags I got at Target and hung them on the wall using those 3M hooks.  You can see pictures a few posts down of my Drama area.

Listening Station:

Also using the dollar spot bags (I promise to take pictures of them!!), I placed a copy of Brown Bear and Chicka Chicka 123 along with their CD read-alongs in the bags.  My old tape player quit working last year and all our media specialist had was a CD player (which I’m excited about!!), so I’m switching everything over to CD!! 🙂  This week, we will be reading Mouse Paint and I don’t have a CD for that, so I just made my own!! 😉  I opened Garage Band (on the Mac) and read the book slowly into the mic.  I left spaces for the “turn the page sound” and added those in later.  I also added subtle background music in so it would help hide the fact that it sounds like I was reading inside of a tin can! 🙂  I burned it to a CD and now we have Mouse Paint on CD for our listening station! 🙂  I might be open to adding them to my Kristen’s Kindergarten store if there is enough interest (I’ll be doing this with lots of other stories!).  It was easy to do and took me about 20 minutes from the time I read to burning the CD.

I’ll get some pictures taken this week of those things and get them posted.  Hope this was enough to tide you over! 😉  Today is my grandmas 91st birthday, so I’m off to bring her some birthday cheer! 🙂  Grad school starts tomorrow (8/23)…nervous!!! 🙂

Kristen 🙂