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.