My favorite holiday!

My favorite holiday is fast approaching...Thanksgiving! I just love everything about it, and I love teaching it in Kindergarten. There are so many fun and cute activities- handprint turkeys, how-to writing, so many fun stories, I could go on and on.

I've been doing a lot of work with my TpT store lately, so naturally I had to come up with a few turkey-themed activities. I think they turned out super cute! I've already tested them out on my own kinder babies, and they were a hit! See a few preview pics below and then check out my TpT store to get your own! 

Enjoy! 

TpT store update!

Hello everyone! Once again, I've been MIA. This school year has been crazy busy and it's already a quarter of the way over. I can't believe that! The past two weeks have been especially crazy- return from fall break (2 weeks off!), fall festival, 1st field trip, welcoming a student teacher, fire drill, Halloween and parent-teacher conferences. I'm looking forward to next week being normal!

I haven't been blogging much, but I've been adding several new items to my TpT store! Be sure to visit my site and check it out. We've been working a lot on informational text, so I created several labeling pages which my kiddos love. Hopefully soon I'll be back with some pictures of what we were up to the first 9 weeks of school.

Happy November!

Pete the Cat!

Well, I've jumped right back into the swing of things with my 21 new babies. It's hard to believe school has already started and at the same time, I feel like I never left. I've got a great group of kids this year and they're already doing some awesome work!

One of the first thing we do at our school is start learning the color words. How can you do that and not read Pete the Cat? The kids LOVE that book and it's such a cute way to introduce color words.

We focus on one color word a day, and our first word was "red". After reading the book, I gave the kids a baggie with a sentence cut up. They had to put the words in order and illustrate their picture. Here's what they did:

Are you amazed? I was!! We drew the cats together, step by step. I really liked doing this with my kids and intend to do more of it. No more "I can't draw a cat!" comments. So happy with how this activity turned out, and can't wait to do the rest of the color words! 

First day of school!

Can you believe school has already started? It's crazy, but true. We had a half day on Thursday, and it was great! Crowded, but great. I had 21 out of 22 kids show up- which is my best first day attendance ever. They are all super sweet and I can tell it's going to be a great year!

We didn't have much time for any fun crafts, since half days tend to fly by. We read "Miss Bindergarten Gets Ready for Kindergarten" and then drew what we did to get ready. Looks like many of my kids got new shoes. One was even so specific as to say he went to WalMart to get ready. So precious!

While they were working on their pictures, I took a few minutes to get a picture of each using my new frame courtesy of Pinterest. It turned out really cute and I can't wait to use it again on the 100th day of school!

Aren't they precious? We half another half day on Monday and then jump right into full days. It'll be a long and tiring week, but I look forward to getting to know my sweet babies and starting the year off right.

Help my class!

School starts in 11 days. 11 days!! That is craziness. We're on a balanced calendar, so we have 9 weeks of school, then 2 weeks of vacation. It's a pretty nice schedule, but still a little crazy to go back to school in July.

I've been busy getting my classroom ready for the new year (pics to come soon) and seeing what I still need to get. One big thing is non-fiction texts. I have a HUGE classroom library of fiction books, but very few non-fiction books and even fewer that are on the kids' reading levels. So I've made a new Donor's Choose project- and I need your help!

Visit my project page  and give whatever you can! $1, $20, every penny helps. I'd love to get this project funded before school starts!

thanks for your help!

Promethean Board!!

This past school year my school had a fundraiser to raise money to buy interactive white boards for our school. The plan was to buy them for 3rd and 4th grades, and then as more money came in move down. So that meant that Kindergarten would be last :(

Luckily, to help raise even more money, they made it into a contest. Whichever class raised the most money would get the first board. I had a SmartBoard at my previous school, so I knew how awesome they were. I wanted that board. I was getting that board. And then I turned into a fundraising monster.

My room mom and I went crazy!! Bake sale, penny drive, you name it! We kept going and going, even when other classes would start to get close to us in funds. In the end, I'm proud to say that my kids (yes- my kids really did most of the work) raised over $1100!!

And look what was just posed on Facebook:

I feel like Jesse Spano singing "I'm so excited! I'm so excited!" Now I really can't wait to get into my room and get ready for the new school year. It's going to be awesome!!

TpT FREEBIE!

I know most of us are in the middle of summer (some blogger friends just started summer, craziness!) but I'm already planning to go back to school at the end of July. You read that right, JULY. Technically students don't start until August 1, but teachers report back much sooner. So I better get ready!

I just made these cute dismissal tags to use with my students this year. My plan is to print and laminate them, then punch holes and attach to their backpacks with zip ties. I think it will definitely help in the beginning of the year with the dismissal chaos. I will probably also put a label on the back side with the student's name and my name. That way if a child gets separated from the "herd" during dismissal, another teacher can easily identify them and help get them to the right place. Goal for the 1st week of school? NO LOST KIDS! haha

Best part? I'm offering it you to FREE! Just go to my TpT website and download the file. Then print and use as necessary. While you're on TpT, be sure to check out my other products! 

**UPDATE- since this has become so popular (and my cute hubby isn't working so we need the money) I'm now selling this on TpT for just $1. Sorry y'all!! But it's still a great deal and super useful in the classroom. Also you can message me if you need custom tags made, and I'll put them up on TpT for you. Thanks!

The day we had a fire

**I started this post a few months ago, but for whatever reason didn't publish it. Here it is a little late!



Well, so here I am again. Sorry I've been an absent blogger. I got a little busy with this small thing called GETTING MARRIED! I went from being Ms. H to Mrs. A :) Things in my personal life have just calmed down in time for things at school to get crazy. We're in the middle of state-mandated testing for grades 3-4 this week, and K-2 has their test next week. Yes, that's right. My kinder babies will take a standarized "bubble-in" test next week. The crazy thing? They're excited for it!

So anyways, this week 3rd and 4th grade are taking their tests. Wednesday morning my class was in the middle of doing our PALS lesson when "BEEP BEEP BEEP!!!!" Fire alarm. Did I mention 3rd and 4th were in the middle of testing? Did I mention it was pouring down rain and 45 degrees outside? We weren't sure if this was real or not, but headed outside just to be sure. We were getting into our spot (in the rain) when I heard the sirens. It was real!

Luckily, it was a very small fire that was contained to an emergency light in the library. However, it was still a scary thing and definitely a huge distraction for the kids. It was all they could talk about. So what did I do? Turned it into a journal prompt. Here's what some of them had to say:

"My adventure: We were doing PALS this morning and the fire drill went off. There was a fire. We got wet. It was scary for me and it was tiny."

"We had a fire. I was scared. We got wet."



Picture Labels!

Once again, I've neglected my blog. Things just got crazy and well, these days I'd rather spend time with my cute hubby than glue to my computer :) 

But, now it's summer and I have all the time in the world! And as crazy as it sounds, I'm already getting ready to go back to school. I'm working on a few things to add to my classroom, including these direction picture labels:

What do you think? I'm pretty happy with how they turned out, and I think they will really help my students keep track of 3 and 4 step directions. Not to mention how much it will help if I have any EE (exceptional education) students in my room this year. You can grab your own set on my TpT site! 

Dr. Seuss Week: day 1

This past week was Dr. Seuss week at school. I made sure to take my fancy-dancy camera so I would get some good pictures. I sure did! The kids had so much fun every day of the week. And I had a blast doing all the "fun" activities (and sneaking some good learning in with it!)

Monday's theme was "Cat in the Hat". I had all my kids wear a red shirt because I wanted to do this:

It was so cute! It's a little hard to see but they each have a "Thing __" sign numbered from 1-17. So precious! As you can tell, I was the Cat in the Hat. We had so much fun and the kids LOVED it! I think they also liked getting all the attention from the other students in the school :)

That afternoon we had an all-school assembly and luckily the weather was beautiful:

A local group called "Ride for Reading" showed up on bikes to deliver books for all the students!

So many books! My kids got to each pick a book which was very special for them.

Stay tuned for day 2: Green Eggs and Ham!

TpT store updates

Hello everyone! Sorry I have been MIA from the blogging world. I have been crazy busy with school and wedding planning. Luckily, things are falling into place. Now we just have to wait for the next 6 weeks to pass and then we can celebrate on our honeymoon!

I've also been busy adding a few things to my Teacher pay Teachers website. I added 2 super fun 100th day of school activities and created my first emergent reader book! It's a short (5 page) fill-in-the-blank book about penguins. It was a huge hit with my class! So much so that the other K classes all did it as well.

In honor of Valentine's Day next week, I've created a fun emergent reader using a bunch of sight words and color words. I'm sure my babies will have a lot of fun coloring each page! Here's a sneak peek:

Be sure to check out my TpT store and see what else I have. I'll be adding things as I come up with them! 

Penguin post!

In 2 weeks we have a celebrity visiting our classroom...SNOWBIRD! For those of you who don't know, Snowbird is the character on one local news station who announces school closings. Naturally, he's very popular among students and teachers. He will come to all the K classes and read a few books about penguins.

To prepare my students, we will be doing a mini-unit on penguins. I created this short fill-in-the-blank book for my students to complete as we learn more about penguins. I can't wait to see their illustrations for each page!

To download, check out my TpT website! This book is listed for just $2.50 and has 5 fill-in-the-blank pages- perfect for a week long study of penguins!