Animal Arithmetic

For the sake of alliteration my students had to learn a new word - arithmetic! This is a fun activity where the students will have to "read it, draw it, solve it!" My kiddos had a lot of fun last year learning how to draw each animal and then solving the question. I had them number the animal parts to help with 1-1 correspondence. Just copy (make it 2 sided), fold in half and staple! Hope you enjoy this freebie!

The cute raccoon clipart was designed by my good friend Monica Chow.

Linked up at love2learn2day. Get some great math ideas!

Get organized! - cords

       


I have a mess of cords under my table that I try to forget about. Geniuses up at unplgged thought of an excellent way of organizing and all you need are bread tags! Can't wait to get started :)

Classroom Library baskets and labels

I decided to completely reorganize my classroom library last year and I am so glad I did. The baskets were $1 at Target and they are selling them again right now. I labeled the inside of every book with the same label that is on the book basket so the students know EXACTLY where each book belongs. This was especially helpful because the students "shopped" for books every Monday to put in their individual book boxes for daily 5. These baskets are the perfect size for *most* picture books. The only books that didn't fit just right are Froggy books but they are only bent a tad and I didn't have any problems with them all year.  

I have uploaded the labels below as .pdf files. Be careful when printing directly from .pdf files to the label sheets though because the dimensions come out a little off.

            


Here are the word documents if you need to add/change anything. The fonts I used are Chinacat-thin and tweed. Click to download the free fonts!

Classroom Library Book Basket labels
Book labels

Happy organizing!

My book is ripped!!! It's the end of the world!!!

Or you can calmly remind the screaming child to put the book in the book hospital. I think this idea came from the Daily 5 book but I love it and made a label to put on a basket (Target is selling baskets for $1!).

Sight Word Bingo

Wow, I didn't know the Sight Word Journals would be such a big hit! Thanks for all the encouraging comments. To thank you guys for following my blog (I went from 5 followers to 52 in a day!) I'm sharing the Sight Word Bingo game I made. They are from the Kindergarten Fry List but I have blank templates in the back if you needed to make more words/boards. Thanks again everyone!

There are 24 boards + 1 template in back so 25 pages total.

Sight Word Journal

I saw these journals at lakeshore and fell in love with them! Due to their limited amount of sight words I decided to create my own sight word journal with the high frequency words from our class. I've used them for the past 2 years and the students were very successful with them. The pictures are helpful and they are able to read it independently to themselves and a friend! I think most or all of these words are from the Dolch list. I have broken them down into 3 files because there are a lot of pages. Enjoy!

Sight words: can, get, good, look, like, out, our, play, will, want

Sight words: read, am, boy, big, do, did, friend, go, girl, has, had, if, love, me, my, not, nice,  see, we, little, here, help, now, your

Sight words: dad, mom, no, or, she, us, up, yes, said, come, went, but, into, make, because, saw, so, there, too, what, who, when, where, why

Classroom Management Linky Party

Miss Kindergarten is hosting a classroom management linky party and at our school we also have something similar to the volume control she mentions, except ours go from levels 0-4. Our Kindergarten team got together to take pictures of ourselves modeling the voice level (kind of hard to do!) and made a little poster out of it. We hang it in our rooms and use a clothespin to clip it to the level we want the students to be using during that time/activity. The kids responded really well to it and they got used to the language really quickly ("Show me a voice level zero!")

The hardest one to model was voice level 1 whisper. A lot of students come to Kindergarten not really knowing what a whisper is so we do a simple experiment. They touch their throats while talking in a regular voice to feel the vibrations. Then I tell them to whisper while touching their throats. They'll know they are whispering correctly if they don't feel any vibrations at all. So in the Voice Level 1 picture we have a teacher "checking her throat" to make sure she is whispering.

Another classroom management tool I use is having pictures on popsicle sticks. All I have to do is hold up a picture and students need to follow exactly what it says. It's handy because I can pull it out and not even have to interrupt my lesson!