Monthly Archives: May 2012
New Bookcase
Sometimes I get tired of having too much stuff! Has that ever happened to any of you? This picture is a nice picture of what my desk area looked like at the beginning of the school year. See that table and bookshelf in the middle of the screen? That table helped me to collect lots of stuff I didn’t want to deal with and then last week, it drove me crazy, so I decided to ditch the table for a different means of organizing!
My husband knew that this was driving me crazy, so he got me a new bookshelf and helped me put it together:
A little more room to walk and if I was { } this skinny, I could walk through the wall divider into the K classroom next door. We keep the divider open so we can chat after school and compare notes throughout the day.
Kristen 🙂
A “new” way to Morning Message!
I found this great idea to change up my Morning Message a bit. I wanted to make it more engaging and since we’d been doing the same tasks for awhile now, I thought I needed to find something new. I came across it on Pintrest and then found this blog (Growing Kinders) that had some great ideas for changing it up! I liked the ideas and wanted to make sure everyone had a chance “to do” something, so I changed a few things and ended up with this:
and this:
This could be done as the children come in each day, but I like to do this as a shared activity so that I can observe who is having trouble with what skills. The kids REALLY like it and are having fun with each of the tasks I ask them to do each day.
So far, we’ve worked on these skills:
punctuation
addition
subtraction
word families
sight words
fill in the missing words
patterns (letter and shape patterns)
As I shared in a previous post, I have pictures of the children’s faces on large popscicle sticks and have written their names on them as well. I choose one student each day to be the “stick person”. They pick two names at a time and those children come up and fill in something on our Morning Message, when they sit back down, two more are chosen.
Let me know if you think of anymore skills we could practice! I have a few new ones coming up this week, and I’ll be sharing those soon!
Kristen 🙂
Seeds 2012
We’ve been doing a lot with seeds in the last few weeks.
First up, we had to fill our wonderful new greenhouse with seedlings!
These are the beginnings of our pumpkin seeds. We wanted to recycle our cardboard egg cartons and reuse some egg shells one of my students brought in, so we put the egg shells in the carton and planted seeds in them. The seedlings are 5 times bigger now and they have roots growing through and out of the sides and bottom of the egg carton.
Here are the same seeds a week later! 🙂
We also created a schema chart so that we could see what we already knew about seeds and so I could see the direction in which we needed to guide our learning:
After that we looked at seeds and drew our observations in our science journals.
We then created a chart where we placed questions that we wondered about seeds:
Kristen 🙂
Kristen's Kindergarten 