The Secret KinderGarden

Hi Everyone,

I hope you enjoyed your weekend! I don't know where you are reading this from, but here in San Diego, we are enjoying some absolutely gorgeous spring weather. The low point of my weekend was having to drop my boyfriend off at the airport. Lucky (or unlucky if you ask him) bug gets to travel to Colorado for a few days. I miss him already! The highlight of my weekend was playing frisbee with my friend at the breath-taking beach in Coronado and trying African food (my first time) for dinner. It was the ultimate late Sunday afternoon/evening of R&R if you ask me.

The Carrot Seed

Hi Friends,

Last week we finished our unit on what plants need to grow. I am loving the content that I'm teaching this quarter! It is so engaging and fun for my little ones. The overarching theme of last week was plants, but more specifically, carrots. We used The Carrot Seed by Ruth Krauss as our focus text and it is truly one of my favorite children's stories. It is such a simple yet poignant tale about the tenacity of a little boy and his belief that despite what everyone tells him, his carrot will grow. I found this text very refreshing as it reminded me of the innocent sense of empowerment that I once had as a child and strive to maintain here in my adulthood.

Needs of Seeds

Hi Everyone,

We finished up our soil/plant wall yesterday and I think it turned out lovely, don't you? The illustrations to accompany the interactive writing are my favorite! Stay tuned for more from our plant unit later this week.

So I have a confession to make...

Creating Classroom Community

Hey Everyone,

Happy Monday! I've kind of been on a blogging kick lately, have you noticed? Anyways, I finished our new classroom door a couple weeks ago (I guess that makes it kind of old now), but forgot to feature it. It took a couple hours to make, but I really believe it was time well spent as it bolsters the sense of classroom community in our room. My students gave me tons of compliments when they saw it the next day and even brought other students from other classrooms to show off to during recess.

A Really Dirty Unit

Hi Friends,

As promised, here are the lessons I did on soil with my kinders last week. After writing and learning about mud pies, we dug a little deeper and explored soil. I launched the lesson with an interactive flipchart on our Promethean Board. For those of you who are not in teaching or familiar with it yet, a Promethean Board is like a chalkboard from the future, and the future is apparently now.

Our morning weather graph flipchart using ten frames with sentence frames

at the bottom to help compare information we see in our graph.

Mud Day

Hey Friends,

What a busy week! We finished our unit on mud, seamlessly setting the stage for plants, by focusing on soil this week. I did so much with this unit that I think I'll post a separate blog post featuring the actual lessons at a future time. For now, I just want to celebrate surviving another two weeks of teaching! My students' behavior continues to be one roller coaster of a ride. I will say, getting spit on and told "you suck" by the same little five year-old girl was a new experience altogether. Interesting way to start off my career to say the least. You know what they say, sticks and stones...

Cubes, Cylinders, Cones, and Spears

Hi Friends,

We started our unit on shapes last week and finished it up today. We did a lot of exploring to learn about the different properties of 2-D and 3-D shapes. I actually taught this unit when I was student teaching a year ago and changed it up a bit for this year.

  

Fashionate About Teaching

Hey Friends,

I'm really excited about today's post as I finally get to feature some local talent. As a teacher, I collaborate all the time with my colleagues, but it's a skill that I try and transfer to various domains of my life outside my professional one. I love getting together with different people and creating something a thousand times better than what I could've done on my own. This time I had the awesome opportunity to work with my friend, Chris, on a photoshoot for this here blog. I hope you enjoy the results of our collaboration! :)

Muddled

Hi Everyone,

With exactly 44 days left before I'm woefully unemployed, I've already started to think about and reflect on this past year. Honestly, I'm really proud of all the things that I've accomplished thus far but I'm also overwhelmingly disappointed with my constant struggles to get my classroom management under control. Recently my class size went down to 19 students and I truly believed things would start to get better. They haven't.  Although I feel like I have my back up against the wall, I'm not giving up until I hear that dismissal bell ring on June 7 and will continue to remain hopeful.

Student teaching, every resource I've read, every teacher I've spoken too, none of it seems to be helping me get through my daily challenges with my students' behavior. I just feel lost. Luckily, I can feel my skin thickening every minute that I am in the classroom and I know come next school year, I'll be ready, so ready. I've found that in these times of trouble, Mother Mary does not call to me. Instead, I get quite the morale boost from reading all the stories my kiddos have written capturing some pretty special moments in the classroom, reminding me that no matter how hard I am on myself, I am a good teacher and I can do this!

Mud Pie

Hey Everyone,

My name is Tiffany. This is my mud pie. It is my secret.

This week, for a fun introduction to spring and a scaffold for moving into plants and insects, we are learning about mud, more specifically, mud pies! How cute is this introduction for Tiffany's mud pie recipe?!? I absolutely love her writing. If you knew the group I have this year, you'd recognize a certain sincerity beyond that of just being kinder writing that really makes her writing pop. I'll be sharing more about the writing process my students are currently going through to complete their mud pie stories later this week. Thanks for stopping by! :)