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...