Number Sense Winners and Some Insect Station Freebies

Ok, a day late, but hopefully not a dollar short! 

     

The winners of my Number Sense Giveaway are:

  

   

  

Congratulations Ladies! 

Erin, email me so I can send your goodies to you!

(ofprimaryimportance @ gmail.com)

Iraines, I have emailed your goodies!

And now some goodies for my all of my wonderful followers.. we are still need to wrap up our plant unit on Monday, but then we are headed straight into insects, another one of my favorite themes.


Here are the two Write the Room activities we will be using next week.

Click here to download this freebie from TPT.

Click here to download this freebie from TPT.

If you download either, please leave me some feedback and let me know what you think!  Happy Saturday!

Plants and Some Word Work

We have had a crazy week! We did our final round of MAP testing this week and I'm so proud of my kiddos!  It was amazing to see how hard they were working!  Some of my high kids were presented with multiplication and division during the math portion, and their little pencils were just flying all over their scratch paper trying to figure out what to do!  This was our first year of MAP testing with kindergarten, and at the beginning of the year I thought the whole thing was going to be a complete fiasco, winter was a little better, but watching them take their spring tests, I am blown away.  We also started our spring benchmarking for DIBELS.  
 
With all of the testing going on, we have had a hard time getting to our learning about plants, but here is some of what we have done so far...
We observed dry kidney beans and then wet kidney beans.  After our observations we disected them, drew them, and labeled the parts.

We talked about what seeds need to grow. We also began our bean sprouting experiment.  

Wetting our paper towels to provide water for our bean.

Fitting that wet paper towel into a sandwich bag is trickier than it looks!

Hung in a hallway window to provide sunlight  for our beans.

We also started our observation journals.

"My seed is shaped like a rainbow. It's a wet bean."

"The seed looks like a banana."

"Takes the seed 8 days." (One of my ELLs predicting that it will take 8 days to sprout.)

Here is the cover that will go on our journals when we assemble them tomorrow. Simple, but it gets the job done!

We also started our Plant People today.  Awhile back I found this picture on pinterest...

Source: Pinterest via Carolyn from The Teacher Wife

When I followed the link, I was bummed to find out that the download was no longer available :(  With all the copyright craziness going on, maybe Mr. Potato Head had to come down, but I was in love with the idea, so here's what I created to use instead...

We didn't put shoes on, and I'm not sure if we will add them or not, but they are there if anyone wants them.

Adding our seeds.

Gently watering our newly planted grass seed.

In all of our planting fun, I forgot to take pictures of their plant people with the parts on.  I'll try to remember to snap a few tomorrow.


And finally a bit of word work.

I wanted a bit more practice with our color words after our rainbow words, so I created Can You Build It?  This one is just color words and has a recording sheet to practice writing their words after they build them. We did rainbow writing with ours.

You can find this freebie at TPT. 

If you download it, I would love some feedback!  I am thinking about creating some more for number words and our end of the year sight words.  If you think these or other versions would be useful in your classrooms, leave me a comment and let me know.  Also, if you have other ideas to extend this idea, let me know!

Long Time No Blog, Plant Freebies, and a Giveaway!

Wow, spring break was fabulous, but it feels like everything has been moving at mach 3 since we started back!  We wrapped up our weather unit practicing color words and incorporating a bit of poetry with our 3-D rainbows.  I have to give my kids kudos for this one because they largely completed this activity independently during our literacy work stations.  They turned out pretty cute, and they just make me smile!

We started work on our plants unit.  The kids are loving it, and I have to admit it is one of my favorite units to teach.

I will post some more pictures (and freebies) of our fun later this week, but in the meantime, here is a sight word game that we are using in our literacy work stations.

Click here to download this freebie from TPT.

I have been trying to create some free choice activities for our math stations.  I wanted activities that focused on number sense and could remain in our free choice baskets for an extended period of time.  Here's what I came up with to add last week.

This game is played just like traditional dominoes, but instead of the traditional dot patterns, students must find a match with various representations of the number (numerals, number words, objects, tally marks, dice ten frames, base ten blocks, addition, subtraction, and coins).  My kids absolutely love them.  And I love that they are practicing so many skills!

You can find them here at my TPT store.

Our second addition was Bingo Bonanza.

You can find this pack on TPT.

Again, the focus is on number sense.  Bingo is always a hit, and this pack includes bingo games that can be used throughout the year as students build number sense.  There are 8 bingo cards and caller cards for 11 different versions of bingo.  

Versions include:

Number Bingo

Ten Frame Bingo

Tally Mark Bingo

Addition to 5 Bingo

Subtraction within 5 Bingo

Mixed Addition and Subtraction 0-5 Bingo

Number Word Bingo

Addition to 10 Bingo

Subtraction within 10 Bingo

Mixed Addition and Subtraction 0-10 Bingo

Number Words

Bonanza Bingo (includes representations from all versions)

I have used these in small groups, and they are also out in our free choice baskets.  Since students will be self selecting versions during work stations, and to avoid a potential management nightmare, I printed each version on a different color.  

So far it has worked beautifully!

I would like to giveaway a copy of my Number Representation Dominoes and a copy of my Bingo Bonanza Mega Pack to 2 people.  

Here's how to enter:

*Follow my blog & leave me a comment

*Follow my TPT store & leave me a comment

*Blog about the giveaway for 2 additional entries

Easy peasy, right?  I will pick 2 winners on Friday night, April 20th.

I will have more plant ideas, pictures and freebies later in the week!  Wishing everyone a fabulous week!

Giveaway Winners

Drum roll please.... And the winners are...

Ladies, I have emailed you!

And to everyone else who entered, check your email too.  I just couldn't help but say thank you for visiting my TPT store and taking the time to rate and leave feedback on one of my products!  I truly appreciate it!

I'm off to have some spring break fun with my kiddos!  The weather has been absolutely gorgeous this week.  My creative juices flowing, so I will have more gardening goodies to share later in the week! 

Spring Break, Finally! And a Giveaway!

Whew! I'm so happy to be on Spring Break this coming week!  I am looking forward to sleeping in, naps, a little reading, painting a few rooms, and working on some projects for my classroom!  My kids are working on a Spring Break Bucket List, so I'm sure my list will be growing!

Last week I started putting together some activities for our gardening and plants unit, but I didn't have much time to work on it during the week.  I finished my Green Thumb Math Work Stations, and just uploaded it to TPT!  It has 5 days worth of math journal prompts with manipulatives and 5 math work stations.  I absolutely love KMP Doodles Veggie Garden Clip Art!

Here's a peek at what's inside:

I would love to give away 3 copies of Green Thumb Math Work Stations!  Here's how to enter (3 chances):

          1. Follow my blog.

          2. Follow me on TPT.

          3. Download one of my free products on TPT and rate it.

Leave me a comment for each one.  Giveaway closes Monday night.

Yippy! I Won! And an Award

I was so excited to find out that I won the giveaway at Little Priorities! 

I won her new If You Give A... Books by Laura Numeroff Unit!  I love Laura Numeroff and I was thinking about adding her to our author studies for this last quarter!  It's a definite now!  If you haven't already seen her unit you must go check it out, and it's on sale right now!  Thank you Lori!

Also, Jessica at A Turn to Learn awarded me with 

Jessica has a great blog!  Thank you so much for the award! I'm truly honored!  She's a new blogger, so if you haven't visited her blog yet, pop on over and say "Hi," and follow her while you're there! You won't be disappointed!

I was previously awarded here, (the award seems to have disappeared from my sidebar - I'm not sure how long I can blame things on those sneaky leprechauns, but it's still March, so leprechaun shenanigans it is!)  So I'm not sure what the rules are in this instance, LOL! I'm sticking by the 15 lovely ladies that I previously passed this on to, and lots of them are newer bloggers too, so please, go check them out!

1. Joyul Learning in KC

2. A Differentiated Kindergarten

3. Ketchen's Kindergarten

4. Kinder Friendly

5. Primary Princesses

6. Wild About Teaching

7. Young & Lively Kindergarten

8. The Teacher Tattles

9. Klassy Kinders

10. Little Minds at Work

11. Learning with a Happy Heart

12. Kinder Creations

13. Kindergarten at Heart

14. Kindergarten Days

15. Peterson's Primary Peeps

I'm so looking forward to Spring Break!  All I can think about is sleep!  For those of you who haven't had break yet, hang in there!

Weather Activities (with feebies)

Our theme for the week is wild, wacky, wonderful weather. I wasn't going to make anything new for this week.  I have tons of weather related things, but when I started looking back through them there were a few skills that I really wanted to hit again before spring break.  For some of my little lovelies digraphs are finally starting to click, others can put the correct sound with the digraph, but they are only identifying the digraph when it's the initial sound.

Thus, the Rainy Day Digraph Sort was born.

Download this freebie from TPT

And some more freebies...

Download this freebie from TPT store

A simple write the room with weather words.  There is one set of words, but the cards are slightly different.  The blue cards have the entire word, and the red cards have blanks that they must fill in when writing the word. I am planning to hang both sets and then let the kids know which color cards they are looking for.  There is also a recording sheet that will work for either set of cards.

Due to the size of our school and the need to give us all plan time our kids have science as a special.  I miss teaching science and incorporating it with the rest of the learning that goes on in our room.  It has been ridiculously windy here lately, so I thought it would be fun to do something with the wind.  I saw a wind sort on Little Giraffes and decided to set it up as a station this week.

Download this freebie from TPT

I have just opened my TPT store.  Everything is free, so if you download any of these freebies I would really love for you to rate them and leave me feedback!  Pretty, pretty please!  You could even follow my store while you're there!  I have also uploaded some of the other freebies from my blog, and will try to get the rest uploaded this week.