Monthly Archives: January 2014
New Year…New Math and Literacy Work Stations!
Over the past two weeks, I’ve been introducing some new Math and Literacy Work Stations with more to come next week!
I added some more french fries and hotdogs to this station to help the kiddos spell our new sight words. 
Playing a Community Helpers game on the iPad. 
See it, Stamp it, Write it–anytime you have stamps–a big hit!!
Roll a sight word, snowflake style!
Add some Community Helpers together and clip the answer (we have subtraction and greater than/less than/equal to also! I’m working on getting these on Tpt soon. 🙂
Roll, Say, Keep Addition and Subtraction boards. The kids love seeing how many cards they get to “keep”! 🙂 This will also be on Tpt soon–just need to make some more cards to go with it!
I got this game from Marsha at A Differentiated Kindergarten here. It’s Community Helper Yatta! The kiddos just love saying “Yatta!” when they bump their partners cube off a number! We play by rolling two dice, adding the numbers together and then we place a cube on the sum. If your partner rolls the same number you have your cube on, they can bump you off! 
More new activities to come…including two new “Write the Room” activities!
Kristen 🙂
Catching Snowflakes
We’ve had more snow here this winter than I can remember having in my entire life of living in Indiana! We’ve almost had more snow than the Blizzard of ’78, a few more inches and we will beat it!
Even though I’ve lived here for over 35 years, I still can’t like the snow. At all. I don’t like driving in it even a little. So thankful that my hubby is nice enough to drive me to school. 🙂
I decided to take advantage of one day last week to get outside for 10 minutes and have my kids catch some snowflakes.
We tied it into our Community Helpers unit by studying Weathermen/women and Meteorologists. We read Snowflake Bentley and sorted different pictures of snowflakes to notice anything that was the same/different. Then we went outside to catch some…
The secret to catching them and watching them for a longer time is to put your black papers in the freezer for a couple of hours beforehand so they are nice and cold.
They loved it!
When we came back inside, we compared what we saw outside with the photographs and then wrote about how they were the same/different in our Science Notebooks.
Kristen 🙂
More Bakery Pictures
Here are a few more pictures from our classroom bakery:
In another week…it will become a Veterinarian’s office. And after that…a Pizza place!
The Open/Closed signs–they love to flip these over when the Bakery is open/closed! 🙂
Our “Menu”
The whole class got excited about ordering from the Bakery and lined up at the walk-up window. The kiddos inside got clipboards and started taking orders. A couple of them started working the line and taking names and orders and two others stayed inside and filled the orders. It was ADORABLE and so CREATIVE!! 🙂
Filling the orders…
“A 1/2 dozen to go please!” 🙂
Kristen 🙂
Fabric Cupcake Tutorial
Here is the tutorial I promised to show how I made my fabric cupcakes for our classroom bakery. 🙂
Kristen 🙂
Bakery
How much snow did you get from the recent snow storm that hit the midwest? We got 12 inches and -40 below wind chills! As a result, we were out of school for 5 days and my poor school had some burst water pipes that just kept making things worse. Teachers were called into work on Thursday and Friday last week and I got some time to turn our home living area into a Bakery to help kick off our new Community Helpers/Jobs unit. Here are some pictures from the transformation and I will have a tutorial later this week if you’d like to make your own cupcakes. 🙂
Brown pom-poms are “chocolate cake batter”. There is also a basket of vanilla. 🙂
The cupcakes I made. 🙂
I got the blue mixing bowls, strainer, measuring cups, and spoons in the Dollar Spot at Target. The paper cupcake liners and the brown, pink, and light blue rubber popover molds came from IKEA. I made the chocolate chip cookies with the help of my new Silhouette. 🙂 I picked it out for myself and bought it on Black Friday and then had my hubby give my Silhouette to me for Christmas. 🙂
This pocket chart will hold bakery themed word cards that I’ve made. 
I also got some pot holders at Target.
These table settings I also picked up at the Target Dollar Spot. 
You can’t have a bakery without baking pans–courtesy of Goodwill!
I made this banner with my new Silhouette. I used my sketch pens to draw some of the letters and then used the cutting blade to cut out some of the letters for variety. 
More pictures of the cupcakes. 🙂
Here’s the banner at my house right after I made it. 🙂
Some close-ups…
I have to take some pictures of a few more things I have added since these pictures. I’m also working on putting together a pack for TPT so you can turn a special space into a Bakery as well. 🙂
Kristen 🙂
Vacation
Happy New Year!
Hope you stayed warm during the holidays!
My family did…I took them (my hubby, son, sister, and niece, and nephew) to visit my mom in Florida and do the theme park vacation thing. Don’t be jealous, but it was 80 degrees the whole time we were there. 🙂
We went to Busch Gardens, Disney World, and Legoland (my personal favorite!).
I took 1,111 pictures–I love to take pictures!
There’s nothing better that Christmas Eve at the beach:
I love this sweet kangaroo at Busch Gardens who came up to my son to eat! He put his sweet paws/claws right around that cup of food and dug in!
Cinderella’s castle was all decked out for the holidays! My 4 year old niece got to meet Ariel at Disney World and I’m pretty sure that made her day (or the rest of her life!). She couldn’t believe that she was talking with Ariel! 🙂
I’m a big Lego geek, so my son and I had to go visit Legoland!
I could of stared at the buildings in Lego city all day! I still can’t believe that they are all made out of Legos!
Hope you stayed warm! We came home to this:
Yuck! 🙂
Kristen 🙂
Reindeer Games
One of the things we did on the last day of school was to learn more about Reindeer/Caribou. We watched the Polar Express later that afternoon, but I wanted the kiddos to learn more about these amazing animals!
We made a venn diagram to show the differences between Real and Fantasy Reindeer. I was very careful to define fantasy reindeer as all reindeer in movies and on tv, not Santa’s reindeer–a slippery slope I did not want to go down. 🙂
We also measured to see if we were taller or shorter than the average reindeer (4 feet tall). The kids were split about 50/50 tall/short wen we compared. I was just happy that I was taller. 🙂
We also wrote down what we knew about reindeer and then added new learning as we learned new things. 🙂
Kristen's Kindergarten 