Insectsy and We Know It II

Hey Friends,

If you're coming here straight from part one, you're awesome! And if you're not, don't worry, you're awesome too :). I am starting to think I might have a crush on Mr. Eric Carle. This past week we used yet another one of his children's books, The Grouchy Ladybug as our focus text. Our sight word last week was 'look' and with the abundance of dialogue in the story, I thought it was a good opportunity to review the word 'said', 'you' and 'are' as well. Here are some student samples:

Insectsy and We Know It I

Hello Everyone,

It has been such a strange and overwhelming past couple of weeks, and I think if I had to sum it all up in one word it would be - bizarre. As many of you know, I survived my first case of food poisoning last week, but apparently it was a mere link in a chain of unfortunate events surrounding my bubble of friends. The reading specialist at my school recently got bit by a rattlesnake (he's doing much better now), the school psychologist was out for a couple of weeks due to appendicitis, and last night, my boyfriend also caught a bad wave of food poisoning. Bizarre, am I wrong? I'm bracing myself for a plague of frogs to fall from the sky next weekend. I'm serious. All these obscure and rather outlandish situations have really begun to bug me...

Earth Means the World to Us

Hi Everyone,

Last week we learned about the 3 R's: reducing, reusing, and recycling. We read a bunch of books about recycling and discussed what it means to take care of our Earth. My students especially enjoyed We Are Extremely Very Good Recyclers by Lauren Child. The illustrations and characters (Charlie and Lola) are so much fun and the way the book covers the topic of recycling is just wonderful. Later in the week, after the concept of recycling was in my students' schemas, we sorted out paper, cans, and plastic on our Promethean Board by taking turns completing this short activity.

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.

  

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!

Letter of the Week: Uu

Howdy everyone! I was so excited to come back to school and see my students again! I couldn't believe how much they had grown in just two weeks. It was funny how well behaved my students were for the first 20 minutes of class on Tuesday, but once they established themselves as being back in the classroom, they went right back to being the rowdy group of kinders I was used to :). We received our final student this last week and after nearly 2 months of school, I finally have my class roster. Last week we focused on the letter Uu. I plan on hitting the remaining vowels here in the next couple weeks so students can do some word building and cvc work.

Making an ImPACT III

Here is the final lesson in my measurement unit for PACT. It focuses on building the measuring skills acquired from the center activity and comparing lengths. You can access the worksheet with the grids for the strips here. (I forgot to mention I'm a Word Neanderthal and still use 2003 because I'm so used to it haha). Also, I recommend printing the worksheet double-sided to save trees! :)

Materials for this lesson on comparing lengths.

Making an ImPACT II

Yesterday I posted the first lesson to my measurement unit for PACT. Today I will share the second lesson: Measuring with Nonstandard Units. Access the worksheet for the center activity here.

Check out my spiffy poster worksheet I used with
built-in sentence frames to help model the worksheet
for the center activity. All of my students were able
to see wherever they were sitting on the rug!

Making an ImPACT I

Hello friends! Today I thought I would start the first of a series of posts focused on PACT. For those of you who don't cringe at the mere utterance of the acronym, PACT stands for Performance Assessment for California Teachers. The teaching event for my PACT was centered on math.

Happy Birthday America

236 years ago today, our country declared its independence. I'm not used to the 4th of July falling in the middle of the work week but I will be partaking in all the typical festivities - a huge family bbq and hopefully lots of fancy fireworks! It's also my beloved little brother's birthday so happy birthday to him as well. (If you're wondering, he's 216 years younger than the U.S.A.)

Haiku! Gesundheit

During my last student teaching placement, I had to implement a lesson that integrated the arts with another content area. I chose to teach a lesson in the realm of visual arts, specifically photography, and integrated it with haiku writing. I was teaching in a self-contained New Arrival Center classroom so I wanted to put together a project that provided multiple entry points. That way, all of my students, regardless of their English proficiency level, could engage and participate in my lessons.