Kindergarten Connnections

This weekend I downloaded the greatest New Year's writing project and I just had to share it with you!  I can't wait to share it with my first graders this week!

I found it on this creative teacher blog:

Holly, from Kindergarten Connections, has a wonderful freebie that not only helps them practice their writing skills but also teaches them to think of others.  It's not your typical New Year's Resolution writing template.  It's a template for teaching your students to think about how they can make this year awesome for OTHER people.  I love it!  Download it now...I did :)

Cuties and Crayons in Kindergarten

Here is another wonderful kindergarten blogger...

Jennifer Drake at Crayons and Cuties in Kindergarten has lots of fun ideas for her K-kids.  She also loves a good blog hop.

Check out this cool activity for helping your young ones learn to spell their name.  Very clever with a little cowboy kick....I can appreciate that in this part of North Idaho! The students can walk on the letters of their name to practice spelling it.  There are some cute cowboy boots and a hat they make to go along with it.  Be sure to visit {this page} for more details.

The feet are printed on double sided scrapbook paper and like most of us...we hate to throw things away, so Jennifer shreds the paper scraps and saves them.

Then she fills a box with them and the students have to hunt for letters in the box.  I think this would be fun in one of those rice/water/bean table in your classroom!

My last weekend of Summer 2014

Yeah....life is busy and life is full and life is flying by....But this blog is something I really want to revive and move forward with because I realized I am neglecting some of my hobbies I love the most!

This is the blog post that inspired me to blog again!   Post --> {Click THIS}  

Kathy has a whole list of great math game ideas for levels K-3.  My first graders will be coming right after Labor Day, and when I saw this I knew exactly what I needed this for!  

I am going to make one of these...

• My version: The game will be for two-4 people.
• Each person gets 6 linking cubes of of one color (or little bears or whatever you have that they can have six of one color per person) 
• They will roll one die and they get to put a color token in each section when they roll it.  
• If they roll the same number twice, they lose a turn.  
• The winner is the one who gets one of their tokens in each section first!
• This is a very easy beginning of 1st grade center game which won't take adult involvement to participate.

Kathy has other great resources on her website...check her out!

KathyGriffinTeach.com 

Day 113 Clever Classroom Blog

Here's a new blog in the Teacher Blog realm of creativeness.  It's the Clever Classroom a creation of Emma Farrell.  Emma is an Aussie teacher who has been teaching, making and creating for quite some time.  She started on Ebay and moved toward TpT a few years ago.  Her specialty is primary...from pre-school to 3rd grade.  Her blog is brand new...but her eBay store and TpT store have been around for quite some time.  

Emma has over 250 items in her TpT store.  And she has gobs of great FREE stuff...which this time of the month is a blessing to find! (payday is only a week away...man, getting paid once a month really stinks!)

She is a woman after my own heart...she is organized.  She has nice category links to her blog posts making it really easy to find the needful thing you are looking for!   See...functional and cute!  And she has more too...but this is just a few of them....

Right away I found a really cute Mother's Day art idea.  Perfect for framing or mounting on a fridge :)  I think
it will be a fun card to go with our Mother's Day tea and our flower pots my 1st graders are making for their moms.

You also need to check out her description and how-to for keeping your table cloth on the table in your classroom...or if/when the table is outside in a breeze.  This has been a battle over the years....masking tape, binder clips, chip bag clips and even the attractive roll of duct tape to no avail.

This looks like a cool idea.  Click {HERE} to go to her blog and find out how to make it.  You may need a conversion chart because being Aussie she talks in that strange metric language...lol

Thanks for hopping by today!  Come back again real soon and see who else I find!

Day 70 Teacher Bits & Bobs

Happy Monday!  March is my favorite month...perhaps it's because it's my birthday month or that spring break is soon to come or that the hint of warmth is in the air or that everything is green (my favorite color) because of St. Patrick's day or that my husband will be making corn beef and cabbage soon or better yet...I find freebies!!!

There are lots of fun finds to be had this month...Teacher bits & bobs is a creation of two Kindergarten teachers, Kerri and Lindsay.

Today's post has two fun freebies that they created and shared.  The first one is themed writing paper.  It's great for a poetry starter.  Or just for sentence writing.

The second freebie is a skittles graphing activity.  I downloaded the Skittles activity and it was a great center!  I just bought a huge bag of Skittles and then put a share of them into different baggies.  Worked perfect...I do suggest you save this for centers in the afternoon though...you don't want them sugared up in the morning! :)

Day 63 Apples and abc's

High energy kinder is what you get with Michelle's blog:  Apples and ABC's

I had to chuckle when I read Michelle's post about using feathers to write like George Washington.  It was one of those amazing ideas...that didn't quite go as planned.  I have to give anyone who posts about failures a lot of credit!  As teachers we know that our students learn equally from their successes as from their failures! And we as teachers, still have lots of learning to do too.  Especially those of us that think outside the box and love to supplement fun in with the adopted curriculum.

Michelle has created some great emergent reader books that she has for sale in her TpT store.
I like them because they are interactive.  The students can draw the pictures to go with the sentence which helps them plant the seeds of learning that much deeper!  Great job Michelle!

Visit her store on TpT...she has over 60 other ideas as well!

Can you believe it is already March?  We are into the third month of 2013...how the heck did we get here so fast!?!?

Do you have any fun units you do in March?  I know St. Patrick's Day and perhaps Spring take the forefront...but what else do you do?  Please share because I love trying new things!

Day 57 My (Not So) Elementary Life

Today's blogger is a delightful newbie teacher named Heidi.  I'm not sure where she is from...though from reading her blog she has had bad snow days and scary tornado scares at school.  I'm so happy that is not one of the drills we have to do up here in North Idaho!

Her blog is called My (not so) Elementary Life and it is full of her fun experiences as a new teacher and great ideas she has created.  I love her enthusiasm and positive outlook on even the worst of those teachable moments!   Heidi teaches title I math and is a Kindergarten Reading teacher.  She has great ideas for helping the little ones understand big concepts.

Heidi also has a TpT store and a Pinterest board with her creations and other fun things she has found.  And I am happy to say...she is one of those OCD organized people like me :)  So it is really easy to find your way through her Pinterest Board!

Be sure to stop on your next blog hop and see the creative units she has posted!

Day 44 Today is a two-fer!

So as usual, I was hopping around looking for good ideas, catching up on what my new blog friends are posting and then I was lost.  But lost in a happy place apparently.  I found this colorful header....

Just looking at this colorful header puts you in a good mood, doesn't it?

Teresa is the author behind Fun in K/1.  Yesterday she had a great Abe Lincoln writing freebie that I snatched up and you should too!  I will be doing Abe and George next week since this week is Valentine's and we are preparing for the 100th day of school.

Teresa has some creative ideas on her blog.  I found a few other ideas that would be fun to try with my class.

We are working on these very same contractions this week with our reading program.  And since it is Valentine's Day this week...Hearts and contractions, they go hand in hand!

Then I found this fun book recommendation idea.  My students love to tell me about the books they are reading and so I'm sure they would love to tell each other.

While checking out the cool creations from Teresa, I saw the link she had at the bottom of her page crediting the clipart she was using in her work.  

So this is the 2-fer...This amazing clip art sight...the clip art is free and you can use it on your TpT an TN sights without paying those additional license fees!  It's so nice when people support teachers.  We should be sure to support Laura Strickland and her clip art website!

Day 42 It's a Jungle Out There and $25 TpT giveaway!

I found Marie's blog last night --It's a Jungle Out There is a kindergarten blog...but she also creates things that can be used at other primary levels as well.

For the next few days you can enter to win a fun Valentine's Giveaway.  A $25 TpT gift certificate! I would be in heaven to be able to spend another $25 on TpT....how about you?

For those of you who haven't celebrated your 100th day...here is a great freebie she made:

That would look cute in the hallway next week!  It's a freebie on TpT.  Click HERE and go download it!

Day 29 Mrs. Lee's Kindergarten

Whoa...put on the hopping brakes!  I was getting lost in today's blogger.  Julie's kindergarten blog is full of great ideas.  I got so into reading through her posts and ideas that I forgot what I was doing...posting about her blog!

Here is the first thing to distract me.  These are those jumbo lip smackers.  First I flashed back to junior high when the Bonnie Bell ones were so popular.  There were coupons in all the magazines for getting free ones.  They had quite the marketing strategy going because everybody had them.  Well, now here is a new use for all those lip smackers...

Use them to make smelly stickers!  

This is an awesome idea!  Thanks Julie!

Then with 100th day on the brain...I saw this cute idea she used on the 100th day of school.      They counted by 10's to 100.  But with first graders and counting dimes, I will make it 10 cents a scoop and a $1.00.  

Here is a subtraction center.  Awesome cute idea for finding the missing addend of 10.   I was trying to figure out where she got the link for the flowers/suns when I got further down her page...

And I realized it was part of her weather unit!  lol...I was thinking math and flowers....not weather and suns.  Here is her link to this unit:  What's the Weather?....perhaps it would be a great thing to look for during the big sale this weekend on TpT.

Day 27 Miss Kindergarten

Miss Kindergarten...sounds nothing like the Arnold Schwarzenegger character does it?

No...and she is much more creative and insightful too!  No whistle blowing and cadence calling I would think.

She has lots of creative ideas.  She says she is artsy, and her work shows that side of her well.  She has quite a few of her creations on her TpT store.  Which if you are reading this the first weekend in February...there is a big sale going on!  Great time to shop!

I scrolled through some of her posts and ended up going to TpT and adding some of her things to my wish list...it's kind of like a hold list.  I put the things that catch my eye in there. Then when there is a great TpT sale --like this Sunday-- I go back and SHOP!  Does anyone else do that too?

So hopping around her site I came across this wondrous post!  On Fridays we do fun things like art and math games.  They think they are 'just' playing games.  But what they don't know is that they are simply reinforcing the skills that I have been teaching them all week!  Teachers are sneaky that way!

Miss Kindergarten has a math game unit all neatly tied up with Common Core math standards for Kindergarten and 1st grade!

These are two of the games included. I love the bright cheery game boards.  Makes me want to replace my shabby worn out game markers!

This unit isn't just in my wish list...I actually put it in my shopping cart!  I can't wait to buy it on Sunday! 

Here is a list of all the games included in the unit in her stores.   She sells it in both her TpT Store and TN Shop.  Having the list of common core that align with them is very handy.  If you are going to play games any more...you need to show why so people know you are actually teaching :-) Because before quoting and posting standards everywhere...we weren't actually teaching...it was all a sham...and nobody learned anything! LOL

I also found this cute game.  I am well past teaching short vowels to 99% of my students, but I bet I could use this same idea for my Bossy R words!  Now the wheels are turning!

Day 23 The 3 AM Teacher

The 3 AM Teacher is an amazingly talented artist as well as a teacher!

You can find some great clip art resources as well as her units on TpT and Teacher's Notebook and she has an Etsy shop too!  

Right now she has a special deal.  If you sponsor her son's efforts to raise money for Jump For Heart you can get either a really cool mega pack of background digital paper...or a mega bundle of math clip art. They are both awesome, but I am eyeing the math clip art myself.  You have until February 10th to sponsor him and get this great deal.

If you sign up to receive her posts, you won't miss my favorite thing...her Friday Five:

Freebie, Find, Funny, Frazzle, Feature

You can simply read and enjoy it...and maybe find some cool thing along the way...or you  can pretend it's the newspaper and just read the funny.  This was this week's funny, a definite teacher funny!

 I know a few kids this year that have already proven this one very accurate!

Maybe someday I will be one of the 3 AM Teacher's finds!  

If you have already started following me, thanks and welcome!  If not, then thanks for visiting.  Maybe come back again sometime and see who I have found next!

Day 21 Wolfelicious

Today's blog should get an award for the most colorful header!  It's what caught my eye and drew me in...so good choice there!  The name was the second hook -- Wolfelicious

April teaches Kindergarten in Florida.  She is full of energy...which is amazing considering she is a mom to an active 3 year old boy and getting ready to have her second child in about a month!  She is getting ready to go out on maternity leave and she is doing the most amazing thing...she is planning her whole 10 weeks off.  When I did that, my co-workers thought I was crazy.  It is so nice to see I'm not the only crazy one out there! lol

April teaches in Florida and down there they have already had their 100th day of school. They made the cutest hats...I'm thinking I might need to make these with my 1st graders cuz they are so stinkin' cute!

Click HERE for the actual post.  But here are the pictures of the clever hats they made.

Aren't they cute...the hats too? 

April has a TpT store and a store on Teacher's Notebook as well.  Visit them and see more of her great kindergarten ideas!  

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