Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes!

Wow, almost 6 months without posting, and what a crazy 6 months it has been!  Full of adventure and changes, both personally and professionally.

I graduated my last class of kinders!

And next year I will be teaching 4th grade!

This past year I spent quite a bit of time with the intermediate kids doing after school clubs, and I really rediscovered how much I love working with the older grades.  I am so excited to make this move, and I can't wait to work with my new teammates!

My school is moving forward with a STEM initiative, and I was accepted into a STEM Certificate program in conjunction with the Space Foundation.  We will be focusing on integrating space-related STEM content across the curriculum with an emphasis on impacting English language learners.  We had a one day seminar in April, and classes start next week!

I'm not quite sure what to do with my blog, do I keep it, start a new one, just change the look?  Any thoughts?  
For the time being I will continue to posting here, but either way, I need to find a fabulous designer to do a little blog design makeover magic!  Any suggestions would be welcomed!

It's Gingerbread Time! {Fabulous Follower Freebie}

We are beginning our gingerbread unit this week, and I am so excited!  This is one of my favorite units to teach.  I will have more gingerbread goodies to post later in the week!  

I want to thank everyone who supported my Teachers Pay Teachers store during the Cyber Monday + Tuesday Sale!  I purchased some fabulous products that I will share in a later post!  

For all of my fabulous followers of my little blog and my Teachers Pay Teachers store, I have a sweet little freebie to say thanks!  We will be using it during our gingerbread unit.  Click on any of the pictures below to download.

Thanks to Pink Cat Studio for the adorable gingerbread clip art!

Cyber Monday (and Tuesday) on Teachers Pay Teachers

Cyber Monday is here! Everything in my Teachers Pay Teachers store will be 20% off and if you use the promo code: CMT12 you can get a whopping 28% off!

Happy Shopping!

Beginning Sounds Baby!

I just realized that I had posted some beginning sound activities on Teachers Pay Teachers and never posted about them!  We are hitting beginning sounds hard!  Not all of my little lovelies know all of their letters yet, but they are getting there.  We have been using our Itty Bitty Beginning Sound Books as we have learned the letters during our literacy workstations.

Itty Bitty Beginning Sound Books on TPT

We have also been using activities from my Beginning Sounds Bundle during literacy workstations and in small groups.

Beginning Sounds Bundle on TPT

As with everything I post on TPT, I have to give a few away.  If you would like a copy of Itty Bitty Beginning Sound Books and Beginning Sounds Bundle, enter below.  I will pick two winners on Monday morning!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Saturday Snapshot...Apples, Pumpkins and Fall

A Peek at Quite a Few Weeks...

We began by reading Apple Farmer Annie.

Each day we were studying apples, we tasted an apple food and graphed our results.  We tasted red, green, and yellow apples and graphed our favorite.

For the remainder of apple tasting, students showed their response with a thumbs up or down.  

If you would like to download printable thumbs, you can grab them by clicking on the pic.



We also added an apple poem in our Poetry Journal, circled the letter A, and added a cute torn paper apple.  

The poem and torn apple came from Mrs. Meacham's site.  You can find it here.

We also made individual "apple pies."  I have tried mamy different ways to make apple pies in the classroom, but this is by far my favorite!  I saw the idea online a year or two ago, but I can't remember where.  If you know whose fabulous idea this was, let me know so I can give them credit!

Begin by peeling and coring the apples.

Next, give each student 1/4 of a pie crust.  They make a small pile of apple pieces in the center of their pie crust.

Sprinkle a small spoonful of sugar over the apples and top with a dusting of cinnamon.

Pull up the edges of the pie crust to the center and pinch closed.  Place on parchment paper on a baking sheet and bake at 350 degrees for about 20 minutes or until browned. Cool and enjoy!

While one group was peeling their apples and making their individual apple pies, the rest of the kids were rotating through apple investigation stations.  We used Mrs. Lee's Apple Investigation Sheet.  

We did lots of activities with pumpkins, most of which I didn't get pictures of.  We made our annual trek to the pumpkin farm and did our pumpkin investigations with our pumpkins when we returned. You can find an investigation sheet that we have used the last few years here.

Growing pumpkins in a pumpkin has been my absolutely favorite pumpkin activity EVER!  The idea came from Growing in Pre-K.  It has been absolutely amazing to watch.  Here are a few photos of our experiment in action!

Our first signs of growth, about a week after adding the soil.

About 2-1/2 weeks after adding the soil.

3-1/2 weeks later!

The kids are having a blast watching it grow and recording their observations in their science notebook.  I am even more amazed that it's doing so well in the florescent lighting.  I don't have any windows, and we aren't very good about remembering to put it outside for some natural light on the warmer days.  I'm hoping that we can keep it going indoors throughout the winter months and then plant it outside in the spring!  I'll let you know how it goes!

One last little fall project to share...

Inspired by this pin

By Style Unveiled on Pinterest via Adventures in Kindergarten

It was designed to be a fingerprint tree for wedding guests, but with a bit of twist, it was a perfectly simple fall project.  I printed the tree and then instead of fingerprints, we dipped the eraser end of a pencil in tempra paint and dotted our fall trees.  I love how they turned out!

Thinking Technologically...Wordle

After school, I am running a Tech Club for 3rd-5th graders at my school, along with our fabulous library technology educator.  We meet once a week for an hour.  At our first meeting, I wanted to assess the kids basic tech skills and have an easy project that they could complete in the first session.  Our focus in tech club is to have fun, while secretly building their tech skills.  Unbeknownst to my little techies, we may even sneak in a few Common Core Standards to support their regular classroom instruction as well :)

Believe it or not, none of the kids had ever used Wordle before! We started by typing our list in Word, and then we copied and pasted into Wordle.  After a quick tutorial, they were off and running.  The idea was for them to create a Wordle that represented people and things that were important to them.  This was an excellent way for me to get to know the kids and find out about what is important to them.  

I scanned all of their Wordles and saved them as png files.  Then I opened up a PowerPoint, inserted their Wordles, resized them, and arranged them to create a mock Wordle.

Ignore the gray blobs...just wanted to cover last names!

Did you know you can create your own graphics and images in PowerPoint that you can save as jpeg or png files?  It's super easy to do. If anyone is interested let me know and I will create a quick tutorial.

There are so many uses for word clouds in the classroom.

Here are 10 Ideas For Using Wordle into your classroom:
1.  Create All About Me Wordles.  Create one at the beginning of the year and include student names.  Create one mid-year or at the end of the year without student names.  How well do you know your students and how well do they know each other?

2.  Create a Wordle with students' anonymous compliments to one another.

3.  Create a Wordle with the text you are going to read.  Use the Wordle to preview/review high frequency words before reading the text.

Text of The Cat in the Hat

Text of Green Eggs and Ham

4.  Create Wordles to display key vocabulary for a content area or within a text.

5.  Create synonym Wordles for tired, overused words like "said" and "love."  Brainstorm as a class and then post as a reference for students.

Synonyms for said

6.  Create character trait Wordles.  You could also create Wordles that compare or contrast 2 characters within a story or from different stories by using the advanced settings to color code each character's traits.

7.  Create sight word Wordles to play I Spy.

Dolch Pre-K Wordle

8.  Create word family Wordles.  Have students sort the words into the correct word family.  This idea would also work with concept or category sorts.

Word Family Wordle

9. Create root word Wordles to study and reinforce the meaning of the root.

10. Use Wordle as an alternative way to display data or survey results.

Results of class graph

Results of a class survey

If you're not using Wordle, I hope you try it out.  If you're already using wordle, maybe this will give you a new idea to try out in your classroom.  I would love to hear how you are using Wordle or other word cloud tools in your classroom!

Sunday Funnies!

A few of the appropriate things that made me laugh this week...

Source

Source

Have you ever noticed, in traffic, anybody going slower than you is an idiot, 

and anyone going faster than you is a maniac! 

-George Carlin

Please tell me you have this problem too...

Source

Thanks to technology rocks. seriously. for a long, hard, desperately needed laugh!


Here's to a week with a few good funnies!