Category Archives: Promethian Board
New Center Activities
I went into school to work today (we are on Spring Break) and to check on the tadpoles. While I was there I copied A LOT of new pages we will be using to write, glue, and illustrate! I also laminated more than the law allows and brought it all home to cut out. 🙂 Here are some of the new things we will (and have been) using in our Math and Literacy Work Stations. I’m putting the link to where I got them (if there is one) underneath the picture.
Literacy Activities
We practiced subtraction last week using this song/poem and the kids loved it so much that they asked me to write it down and put it in Pocket Chart Work Station so they could “play” with it more.
Our chicken eggs arrive next week and I always like to add Humpty Dumpty to the egg mix when we learn about them. This rhyme will go in our Pocket Chart Station as well.
We used 5 Green and Speckled Frogs two weeks ago to introduce subtraction. The kids loved it…so it’s going into Pocket Chart Station as well…along with these guys:
The kids can retell the poem while acting it out. I’m going to add some velcro to the back of the frogs and the top of the log when I get them back to school. You can get the poem and the frogs in my Ponds and Plants pack. 🙂
This activity is also from my Ponds and Plants pack. This activity can be used in two ways. You can either show the children the words and have them practice reading them, or you can have the children sort them by middle vowel sound, put them under the correct letter, and then write the words on the included recording sheet.
Math Activities
I just made this this week and you can get them here. The children match up the sum with the math sentence and then write their work on the included recording sheet (it’s at school. 🙂 ).
How many more to get to 10? This activity helps children learn to see quantities quickly on a ten frame and to visually help see how many more they need to get to ten. After adding the green flowers, children record their work on the recording sheet. The recording sheet asks the child to record both the ten frame work and the math sentence that shows their work (ex: 3+7=10).
These awesome cards are part of a pack I purchased from my blogging friend Kathleen Pedersen from Growing Kinders! You MUST own this pack! In addition to these “I have, Who has” teen number cards, Kathleen has booklets for all the teen numbers (11-20) designed to help your kiddos master them! I printed off the entire pack and copied most of the activities…I’ll share those when they are in use. 🙂
Next up are these awesome cards by another blogging friend Greg from Kindergarten Smorgasboard! These are from Greg’s Snapping Numbers, Composing and Decomposing Numbers. These cards represent just two of the activities in this huge pack! I’ll be hitting up my favorite LEGO store later this weekend to score some of these bricks off the pick-a-brick wall (I love that wall!)
I’m a LEGO nerd at heart and it helps my obsession that my 8 year old is too! 🙂
This is one of our new Promethean Board activities for Math. It includes both addition and subtraction activities and the kids love them! I got this at Lakeshore down the street from my school, but I can’t remember right now what the name is…
Found it! It’s called Beginning Operations. Here is a shot from Lakeshore’s website.
This pond roll and cover sheet has funny story behind it. I set out to make something that resembled a lily pad and got that finished. Because I was so tired, I started adding cattails and grass around the edges to finish up my pond. Then I colored it green…still thinking that it was a lily pad, but also thinking it was a pond. So now it’s either a really big lily pad, or a pond pad, a mix of a pond and a lily pad! 🙂 The children roll the two dice and cover the sum with a cube. 🙂
This activity is also from Lakeshore (if anyone from Lakeshore is reading this, I LOVE your store and would LOVE to be a spokesperson for you or guinea pig some of your new products! 🙂 )
The children use two different colors of linking cubes (included) and then write all those combinations down on the opposite side of the card.
Here is our Frog Dice Toss activity. The children roll the two pocket dice and then write the two numbers down along with the sum.
This is Subtraction Bowling…the latest craze to hit our Kindergarten classroom!! The children set up the 10 pins and then roll the sphere at them. They count the number of pins (cups) that fall down and record that on their recording sheet. I found this activity through a pin on Pinterest, from a site called What the Teacher Wants. Click the words above to go there. 🙂
I thought they would throw the sphere everywhere, but with lots of careful modeling, they did an awesome job! 🙂 They were so engaged too! 🙂
These are our Domino Mats I got in my Math Swap last summer. I pinned the idea on Pinterest from Kindergarten, Kindergarten. 
We’ve been using the mats for about a month now, to get us warmed up to the idea of addition with the amounts on the dominoes. I decided to step it up a level by asking the kiddos to record their work on this recording sheet. It’s not available yet, but I’m working (slowly) on a pack of domino ideas and this will be in it> 🙂
This is Dunk it Dominoes again. I’ve shown it before in this post, but I wanted to show you that I also added the same recording sheet here in this station as well. The kids were getting done earlier than everyone else and they were truly trying to dunk the dominoes from far away, so I added this sheet. 🙂 They can now slow down, take their time, and show me they are working on mastering their addition facts. 🙂
This was a long post! 😉 If you’re still reading, thanks for sticking with me! 🙂
What are your favorite Literacy and Math Activities you can’t live without right now?
Kristen 🙂
Ladybugs
I’ve been using this book to help guide our Writer’s Workshop lessons:
Explorations in Non-fiction Writing
We are currently working on the “Informational” tab. The children and I have been working hard on collecting information through research about ladybugs! This book is wonderful because it not only comes with the teachers’ guide, but a Big Book of Mentor Texts, and CD and the bigger teachers’ manual.
The book suggests writing about crickets or some other insect. We chose to write about ladybugs because I had lots of books about them already. One of the first things we do is talk about features of great reports (title, lots of information, etc.). We then wrote on sticky notes to fill in our R.A.N. chart. We wrote down Things we Think We Knew about ladybugs in our research notebooks.
Next, we spent some time at our first research stations:
Here we are looking at books to gather important information about ladybugs. I modeled for a pretty good chunk of time what that looked like and how we just don’t copy words from the book. 🙂
We also observed some pictures to find out more information about ladybugs. These pictures did not have many words, so the children had to describe what they were seeing in the pictures to help them gather their information.
Our last research station was the Promethean Board. I pulled up the National Geographic kids site about ladybugs. The children tapped the arrows under the pictures to rotate through them as they collected information.
We will be rotating through these stations for at least 4 more days so that the children can collect information from each of the sources. We will then use that information to help us to write our larger class report. Once we have written our class report, the children will pick an insect of their own and use the same process to research their insect and write a report.
Kristen 🙂
We Give Books
I came across this great website sponsored by Pearson Education a few months ago and I thought I would share it with you. It’s a great resource if you don’t have enough copies of a book for your students or if you want to read a book on an interactive white board with your students.
These are some of the first titles that popped up when I log in. You will need to create an account to use the site, and you have the option to donate money on the site to Pearson so that they can give books to other children. Every once in awhile, I will donate some money after we’ve read a particularly fun book.
There are a WIDE variety of books on here, both fiction and non-fiction. Almost every DK reader or book they have written is available, and all the other Pearson imprints.
When you want to read a book, just click on the word, “READ” at the top of the page.
If you want to make the book full screen, you just click on the button with the four arrows on it above the book:
You then click on the left/right button to turn the pages. I like using these books on my Promethean Board when I do not have a big book copy for us to use and to make sure everyone can see. If you know how to drop out the ActiveInspire software, you can use your pen and write on or highlight pages in the books. My kids love it!! The only downside is that the site will not read the books to you, you have to be the one who reads them. It’s great for practicing fluency!!
You can also search for books for different ages, genres, and by author:
There are also books written in Spanish on this site. I am usually able to find a fiction and a non-fiction book that I can pair together and we read them over several days.
Let me know what you think!
Also, be sure to check out these sites for more online books:
Bookflix (To try this one out for 30 days, each of my colleagues entered their e-mail for a 30 days stretch, then another one would sign up for another 30 days, and so on…)
Tumblebooks (you will need to sign up to use this one, although our local library has it for free if the kids know their library card number)
Kristen 🙂
ELMO
My ELMO (visual presenter) was way across the room from my Promethean Board, which meant I had to run back and forth between showing my kids an activity and doing crowd control–not working so well! My husband came to visit one day two weeks ago and helped me move it and hook it up in a much better location:
Right next to my Promethean Board! I can sit in the blue chair (which is still a long way down even for my short self!), be right with the kids, and see the Promethean Board right next to me. MUCH better!!
Kristen 🙂
Sesame Street
We’ve been playing lots of the sorting games on Sesamestreet.org. We really like the “Elmo’s Laundry” game and “Bert’s Bottlecaps”.
Here is a picture of Elmo’s Laundry. Elmo gives the kids a description of how to sort the laundry (it keeps getting more difficult each round they play). It might say “pants with white stripes” and the kids tap the laundry that matches that description. It falls into Elmo’s laundry basket and then they tap the next one. It starts out with underwear, so they all get a kick out of that! See the tiny green button just to the right of the laundry game? If you tap/click that, it will make the game screen larger, helping us to reach on the Promethean Board. This game has been bookmarked on my student computers so they can all play it there during Math Work Stations.
Here is “Bert’s Bottlecaps”. The kids have to sort Bert’s bottlecaps based on the attributes he gives them. This one was red objects on the left, animals on the right, and red animals in the middle. This one is a little bit harder, but once the kids catch on, they really do well!
I also like that it’s free and there are no ads that pop up on this site! 🙂
Kristen 🙂
Promethean Board Work Station
I’ve purchased several (okay 9) of the Interactive Whiteboard CD’s they sell at Lakeshore. Here is one of them in use:
This is the Interactive Alphabet. The children tap on the letter or picture on the right side and then tap where they think it belongs on the right. The claw arm then picks it up and drops in in the column where they tapped. If it’s correct they get a message on the screen, but if it’s incorrect, the picture explodes and returns to the right side for the child to try again. After about two lessons on how to use it, my kiddos picked it up and can run the entire program by themselves. They love playing this game and sometimes we will play as a whole group, but I also use it as a Work Station. I really like this program because the kids have to listen to the sound or picture name when they tap the picture. It gives them a chance to hear the sound the letter makes and then they have to use the knowledge they have about the letter to place it correctly. I do have some kiddos who put the letter in the wrong column on purpose, but that seems to be happening less and less as the novelty of doing that wears off.
We are lucky to have a new Lakeshore store here, but if you don’t, you can get them online–or you could write a DonorsChoose.org grant and get them for your classroom! 🙂
Kristen 🙂
Sound System
When we got our new Promethean Boards, we also got a surround sound system installed, so the sound fills every corner of the room, meaning all students can hear the same thing!
We also got a voice amplifier (which I’m not sure how I ever taught without!) and now when I wear it, my voice is amplified through the speakers. It could be a microphone, but I’ve been told that if you hear yourself through the speakers when you are talking, you have the volume up too loud.
It’s been great this week since I have a cold, I don’t have to talk as loudly when talking with the kids. I love wearing it when reading a story. 🙂
Here is another way I’ve been using it:
(Amplifier on left, iPhone on right)
I’ve been hooking my iPhone into the amplifier with a double ended headphone cord. The music I play on my iPhone is then sent out through the speakers. What Kindergarten teacher doesn’t have a little Chicka Chicka Boom Boom music on her iPhone? 🙂
I just put the amplifier around my neck, pick music, the put my iPhone in my pocket. 🙂
Anyone else using a voice amplifier with their Promethean Board?
PB Technology
Here is a look at some of the activities we’ve used our Promethean Board for this week:
This is a writing mini-lesson we did on “Things We Can Write About”. This chart came with our new Writer’s Workshop resource.
During this Morning Message, we sequenced the animals in Brown Bear. The kiddos had to drag the animals from the bottom (where the white space is) up to boxes that were numbered 1-9.
In this Morning Message, the kids helped me to list all the animals in Brown Bear. I did all the writing (because it was the 13th day of school!).
This was the morning message where I introduced our first sight words. The children drug the words down into the sentences where we decided they made the most sense. 🙂
Morning Message Promethean Style
Here’s a look at our first morning message of the year on the Promethean Board:
Any ideas out there for beginning of year morning messages?
Kristen's Kindergarten 