Daily 5 Choice Cards

Update: Here is a more diverse set of daily 5 cards! Thanks for the idea, Emily!

I love reading everyone's comments! Someone suggested making those Daily 5 posters I blogged about here smaller so that each child gets a set to use as a way to choose their Daily 5 session on a pocket chart. Great idea, Cassie!

Update: Cassie, I LOVE the idea of having a teacher choice card! It was no problem at all to make. I made three different versions (different teacher clipart) so you have a choice! I hope you don't mind that I shortened "time with teacher" to "teacher time"!

UPDATE: Due to the size of this Teacher Time file, there is no preview available on Google Docs. When you click the "Download" button, it will bring you to a page where you will see the following. CLICK DOWNLOAD ANYWAY. Sorry for the confusion!! 

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!

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!

Writing Stickers

I use these stickers for when I am conferencing individually with the students. I call them stickers but I just cut them up and tape it on their writing pages (you can always print them out on a full page label paper). The first one says "Way to cut up your words!" A lot of people usually call it "stretching out" your words but my students had a hard time understanding that concept one year so I introduced cutting up your words (just another way of getting students thinking about phoneme segmentation.)

Other stickers say:

Love your word wall words!

Nice sentence stopper!

Awesome finger spaces!

Super color details! (we talk about using a lot of colors to make our drawings look real)

Great picture details!

Wow! 2 or more sentences!

FANTASTIC JOB with everything!

Alphabet Flashcards

Click to download lowercase letters flashcards.

Click to download capital letters flashcards.

I made these flashcards to go along with our alphabet chant we do every morning (A, /a/, apple, B, /b/, bear, etc.) We usually point to the letter on a chart and say that chant but these flashcards helped tremendously with my students who had a hard time focusing on an individual letter when looking at the alphabet chart. At first I would put the letters in order, some days doing capitals, some days lowercase and then eventually I would mix up the letters. It got to where we made a game out of it to see how quickly they could name the letters out of order (I mixed the capitals and lowercase letters together). 

I gave each student their own set of flashcards (see below) to practice at home. I told them the real challenge is knowing the letter without having to look at the picture, which is why I made the puzzle lines separating the picture from the letter. They could even play a game at home matching the correct picture to the corresponding initial sound letter.

I put this in the students' take-home folders.

 

All the pictures for these letter flashcards correspond with this alphabet chart I bought:

Math Manipulatives Labels

3/15/18 UPDATE!! 

I'm so sorry it took a few years, but it seems like people are having a hard time downloading the word format with pictures SO...I recreated the original document to now include FIVE pages of math manipulatives, and made it a powerpoint document as well as PDF. If you would like to change it up, the fonts I used are KG Sorry Not Sorry, and KG Always a Good Time. Again, this is a FREEBIE, and you can find it on my Teachers Pay Teachers site here.

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Summer's the best time to get organized! I have 3 pages of labels like the image above. Click on it to download. For some reason the pictures look a little grainy when you are viewing it through Google Docs. The quality is much better when you download it. Please leave a comment and let me know if you would like the word document for these labels so you can change it around and add what you need. The font is called tweed and can be found here. Happy organizing! :)

8/11/13 UPDATE: I have uploaded the .pdf file of the Math Manipulatives to my TPT store for free. Sorry for all the inconvenience! You can find it here.

Update: Here is the link to the Math Manipulatives Labels Word document. I hope it comes out ok.
@Martha-Carol - I have a hard time finding borders I like as well, so the easiest thing to do is create your own! The border you see here is actually just a word document shape. I made a rounded rectangular shape and when you format the object, here's what it looks like:

Hope that helps!

Daily 5 Posters

Click on the image to download these posters. Thanks to the fabulous Deanna Jump for the font and inspiration to create these posters. I have also incorporated the clipart from Tammy's Blog so I am calling these posters a mash-up of great ideas.

I am thinking about putting these posters up along with the corresponding anchor chart so the students will have a picture icon to go with each. Another idea is to have the students' names on clothespins so they can clip their name on the daily 5 station of their choice. This is a bit difficult for me because I have 4 Daily 5 sessions in a day and the students are not allowed to go to the same one twice in a day. I would love to hear how you guys let your kiddos choose their daily 5 stations!