Donors Choose CONTEST!!

I have a new project on the website www.DonorsChoose.org and I'm sponsoring a contest to get the funding started! When you donate $2 and use the match code DISNEY, you'll be entered to win a $20 donation to the project of your choosing. Every additional dollar beyond $2 (with the match code) gets you an additional entry.

Here's what you have to do:

Donate $2 to my project and use the match code DISNEY when you check out- your $2 turns into $4 for my classroom!

Contest runs from now until 7pm on Wednesday Jan. 22, 2014.

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!!