Category Archives: August
New Pictures
Here are some more new pictures from my classroom:
Our Meal worms…
Meal worms are really easy to keep and you get to watch the life cycle happen over and over again. I just put corn meal in the bottom and some apple slices and carrots. You also will need to add some water in a dish that the meal worms cannot get in to keep the humidity up.
I got the 2 tanks, lids, a gram scale (for weighing the meal worms), 2 microscopes, and a hand held microscope from a Donors Choose grant in May.
Here are some new pictures of my Literacy Work Stations.
This is the ABC/Word Work Station.
Right now, we have letter cards on a ring in the bag with Wikki Stix. The children make the letters with the Wikki Stix.
The children also have the opportunity to put Wikki Stix on each others names at the ABC/Word Work Station. These are laminated.
Here is our Listening Station. The black and white bags hold the books and CD. The headphones are stored in a cleaning tote. I am using the head headphones from my non-working leap pads.
I also have several books and their CD’s available on the ledge just above the books. I try to put the newest titles on the ledge and the older ones in the bags.
The is our Pocket Chart Station. Last year, I used a full size chart, but this year, I decided to make it more kid-sized and used these pocket charts from the Dollar Spot at Target.
I took all of my kids pictures and glued them on sentence strips next to their names and then laminated them. The children sort the names by “Boy/Girl” or Alphabetical order. I’ve also added a poem about Pets (you can find it in the Interactive Charts Book that goes along with Building Blocks).
This is my Drama Work Station with the Chicka Chicka Tree in the top bag. Two other bags also now hold the drama props for Brown Bear, Brown Bear and Mouse Paint (I got them all through a Donors Choose grant).
A look inside the Chicka Chicka Bag. There is the large tree, the velcro letters, and an copy of the book.
The Brown Bear, Brown Bear bag. The book is missing…! 😉
Overhead Work Station
These are the overhead transparencies I made to go along with Brown Bear and Chicka Chicka. The children use the pictures of them I printed on transparency sheets (see two posts ago) and put them in the blanks. They then read the words and then put a new child’s picture in.
I also made some to go along with Cookie’s Week and I’ll post those soon.
Big Book Work Station
I found these cute pointers in the Dollar Spot at Target and we use them for pointing to words in Big Books and for reading the names and words at Pocket Chart Station.
Now for a few random things! 🙂
I got these puzzles at Wal-Mart for $3.00 each. They show the life cycle of a frog and a butterfly. We’ll be using the butterfly puzzle next week, when we learn about Monarchs. I’ll have it in my Science Work Station.
I also found these cute signs in the Target Dollar Spot. They are great for using signals rather than trying to talk over all the children! 🙂 I use them as reminders when we are sitting on the floor. They work really well!
I had a few questions about the kind of hooks I use to hang all the bags up around my room in my Work Stations. Here is a picture of them.
Here’s a close up of them.
I’ll be updating with more pictures in a little while! Enjoy your Labor Day weekend! 😉
Kristen 🙂
2010-2011 LWS Progress
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.
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 🙂
Classroom Photos 2009-2010, Long Post! :)
I charged my batteries in the camera and took some pictures. I’ll take you on a tour and you can also check out my photos from last year here to see the differences.
Everything is mostly in the same place, but a few things were changed. First, I’ll start with some general views:
This is a look at my new computer area; last year the table was perpendicular to where it is now and there was a tall white cabinet in front of the back half of the blue bulletin board you see there.
Looking at my Listening Center Work Station (it’s on the backside of my writing station)
Library Work Station–I moved the book cases around and added my light up palm tree for some fun
Calendar area, bench where I sit, my Big Book teaching cart
The back of my big book cart, this is where Drama Work Station will go–tentatively, I may move it
A view of the mess that is my room! 🙂 The house, loft, my desk and a few tables
My desk, this year I stacked my filing cabinets and moved a table next to my desk.
We moved my son’s train table from home to school and it’s up in the loft now.
Here’s a view of the rest of the loft
My pocket chart stand my hubby built last year–I’ve come up with some new ideas how to use it! 🙂
I use this pencil pouch to store what ever the children are working on at Pocket Chart Work Station
Here’s the new part: I’m using the back of the chart for Magnetic Work Station during LWS. Below is an explanation…
Here’s an upclose view. I just hung it on the 2nd rung down with some of those metal binding rings.
I put magnetic letters in these pencil pouches and velcro-ed them to the stand…
Here’s the velcro
Sometimes, the children will not be using the board with the spaces I’ve defined. Instead, they will use these sheets I made last year.
I put magnetic strips on the back to hold them on.
Here’s the desk where my student teacher will sit–do you think she has enough prizes from me?!?!
Binders–waiting for my classlist to arrive so I can write names on them and put their sheet inside for practicing their name
I signed my classroom up through TerraCycle so we can recycle our snack and Capri Sun containers. These are some I purchased from Target to show my children.
After our first round of Getting to Know you, we will put beads into plastic water bottles with sand so the children can find the letters in their name.
This is how I’ve organized them.
Some birthday certificates I got from the Target dollar spot to recognize birthdays.
A game called Whiz Kids from Discovery Toys I will use with my kids this year. You pick a letter and a category and then get the number of points on the letter card if you can name something starting with that letter in that category.
This shelf sits next to my bench and will be home to several Literacy Work Stations.
My small group area, parent volunteer area, and where the wonderful, amazing Pam will work!! 🙂
Listening Work Station
The tape recorder sits on top of the cart and the tapes and head phones are stored in the drawers
My basket of things for Pam (yeah!! Pam!!) to copy and pass out to the kids for me.
There it is…I’m going back tomorrow to clean up some more and work on pulling things out for my Math Work Stations and figuring out where they will go! 🙂
Kristen 🙂
Kristen's Kindergarten 