The Crazy Pre-K Classroom

   I recently conducted an entrance testing for a 5 year old attending our Kindergarten in the fall. Our testing is truly quite simple and just gives us an idea of who the child is and what their personality is like. I will tell you that my heart was breaking for this child. When I walked up to this child to introduce myself she was alone, no parents with her, and she had a huge stack of worksheets that she was supposed to "study" while she waited for me to test her. I saw that she had a school uniform on and asked her where she went to school. Her reply was devastating to me, "I just got kicked out of school because I wasn't learning good enough."   I have been teaching in my current school for 12 years, Pre-Kindergarten and Kindergarten. Over these last 12 years one thing is for sure, children have changed! Mostly I believe due to technology but also contributing to this change are the breakdown of families and the lack of freedom to explore our environme...

We all know that being comfortable in your daily space is important. Having items that make you happy and are exactly what you want can help make your year go smoothly. It is also a real pain when you figure out you need something and have to beg, borrow and steal to get your lessons ready for the next day! I've been there 1000 times and now I am the teacher everyone comes to when they need something. (I guess it helps that I am a hoarder, but don't follow my lead on that end!)      I have come up with my list of necessities that I find make my days in my classroom a whole lot smoother and I do not spend time going to the store after school or groveling at my coworkers feet! I normally make one or two large Amazon orders per year to stock up on the consumables. I try to also buy everything on prime so that my shipping is free! I also keep and eye on Amazons lightning deals in case any of my necessities come up on an extra great sale price. The following list is in no...

So, you want to use the Daily 5 with your 4 year olds but you are not quite sure how you are going to get them ready or if they can even do it. I can tell you after implementing the Daily 5 in my Pre-K classroom for the past 3 years I am confident that not only can you teach it but they can accomplish it! Not sure what the Daily 5 is? You will want to get your hands on the book "The Daily 5" by: Gail Boushey and Joan Moser. My school used this book and accompanying videos as a professional development study three years ago and my classroom has never been the same. Tailored to elementary students who can already read I had to tweak it to meet my classrooms needs. I wait until the class is acclimated to school before even thinking of teaching the 5 areas of the Daily Five. Each day the children are supposed to: Read to self, Word Work, Read to someone, Listen to reading and Meet with the teacher. I always start with teaching read to self. I have the whole class bring one book t...

Well, here is a jam packed post full of my 2013-2014 classroom decor, information on the TpT sale and a great new product called smart fab. I will start with the huge 28% off sale running today and tomorrow, my entire store is 20% off and at checkout use code BTS13 to get another 8% off! Great deals to be had, I have 57 items on my wishlist, I've been waiting for this sale to buy them! Next, I will explain smart fab so when you see my reveal you know what to look for.I was sent three sample rolls of this product to test and review, smartfab is a replacement for board paper, constructon paper and other craft paper we generally use in a classroom. It is light, cuts easily and has bright even color. I used 2 of my sample rolls when decorating my classroom. I did not have time to do any special projects with it however the green makes a great board cover when doubled over (or else you can see through it)check out the vibrant color in this picture of my front board. The small orange ta...

Hello All, I have finally decided how I am going to manage my centers this year. With 4 towers full of drawers and various other centers I need to keep the kids organized in an easy way. I have created 3 small clip charts to help me with this. One for literacy centers, one for number centers and one for exploration centers. The exploration center chart will cover my science and sensory centers. I made it simple on myself by just using ribbon and velcro dots (which I buy by the hundreds on ebay since they are so expensive!) You can get these charts in my TpT store by using this link: Jungle Clip Charts To assemble start with a piece of 1" wide ribbon and print your pages on cardstock. Laminate for durability. lue the header to the ribbon and place velcro dots on the ribbon, equally spaced to fit the center cards. Place the rough side of the velcro dot onto the back of the cener card and attach to the ribbon. Add clothespins with your students name on them and you are finished. Ha...

Hello All, I am now back to working on my goal of organization this year after a 2 week whirlwind vacation. While away I was able to create 2 differentiated spelling centers that I am focusing on organizing this week. I have organized these centers for those who do not have the money to invest in all of the fancy organizing tools that I have been gotten for this upcoming year. This weeks drawer is simple using plastic bags and binder rings. The real organization comes in differentiating these two centers. Lets start with The Jungle Drop , this is a CVC word practice center. I have placed all of the working mats, bags of pictures, bags of letters and flashcards in the drawer. I have printed all of these on cardstock and laminated each. The flashcards will eventually make their way onto a binder ring for easy self checking. To start differentiating these units have the children match the lowercase letters to a print out of the uppercase letters. For those that are ready give a bag of pi...

In my quest to get organized this summer I am working on a blog post series called, Organization for Differentiation. This is the 2nd post in the series, you will want to make sure and read the first post so you can see where this started. I have begun to fill several more drawers with differentiated centers, recording sheets, manipulatives and the like. Here is what I have been up to: This is my Sunflower Literacy Unit which I will be using at the very beginning of the year to help with visual discrimination, identifying uppercase/lowercase, vowel/consonant identification and critical thinking. The first activity asks the child to separate the vowels from the consonants and then there is a practice sheet inside a dry erase pocket. The second activity involves building words with the sunflowers to match the flower pot by picture and by word. The third activity has several dry erase protected practice sheets for the children to complete and the fourth activity has the child picking th...

In my quest to get organized for next year I have devised a system for differrentiation that I believe will work for me and my kiddos. (If you know me this is a huge step, I am a very disorganized ADHD person!) I am calling this series of blog posts "Organization for Differentiation." I hope you can gleam some insight and share some of your experiences along the way. Also, to kick off this series I will be giving away the biggest piece of the puzzle for me, the drawer tower! This is a $50.00 piece and I will have it sent straight from Amazon to the winner! See the pictures and make sure to enter the giveaway at the end of this post. So, here is the first step for "Organtization for Differentiation" The Tools: 2 drawer towers, dollar store drawer organizers, target dollar spot book bins and center supplies. This is in the very beginning staes and I will be updating you every step of the way. So to begin I have started by deciding what type of books I want on each c...

It used to be that schools catered to the way typical girls learned, sitting quietly, listening and "still" learning. Well, we know these days that this type of learning sets boys up for failure. While some girls can still handle the old school way of learning I am seeing more and more girls that are unable to learn this way, now setting them up to fail as well. So what do we do? We as teachers have all had training on the three musts of learning: auditory, visual and kinesthetic. We are supposed to put each of these into every lesson, but how easy is it to make sure every lesson has all three? And how often are our kinesthetic aspects just moving around manipulatives on the table? We need to realize that children, even up into the higher elementary and middle school ages need to move to learn. We are so used to sitting children at desks for long periods of time and then wonder why we have such behavior problems? This year my 4th grader was part of a rotation system like thos...

Today we had a surprise day with no chairs. Our tables and chairs were moved out of the way from our flower project the day before so I just left them there. I had floor toys out when the children first came to school and had taped bulletin board paper to the floor. After circle time we all gathered around the board paper and created a garden which I will hang on my bulletin board for the rest of the year with the addition of their picture and some embelishments. I will post pictures of that when I am finished with it. It happened to be a rain day so we spent our playtime completing our garden and completing a plant parts worksheet on the carpet. We used our clipboards and yes this involved glue and scissors. I am lucky enough to have a class that can handle those tools properly on the carpet. After lunch we had or Math groups so while I was working with one group the other children completed a read the room activity quietly and once they were finished worked on their seat work whil...

So I need to address a hot topic at the Pre-k level. We all know what bullying looks like in Upper Elementary, Middle and High School but did you ever stop to consider it can begin much sooner? I am fully convinced that the roots and beginnings of bullying starts much sooner than Elementary School. Up until 4 years old children are mimicing appropriate and inappropriate behaviors borrowed from those they see the most; parents, grandparents, other family and family freinds. The child sees a behavior and believes it is appropriate and copies it to gain approval. Kinda like the first time you hear your three year old repeat the curse word you just said because you cut your finger cooking dinner right? Now add the fierce need for independence that comes with becoming a Pre-K aged child. Not only is the child going to be copying behaviors at home but now adding their own personality into their behavior. Anything can contribute to the bullying mentality in a young child, we already mentioned...

Hello Everyone, This past week a colleques and I attended a wonderful seminar given by Summit Professional Education and taught by Lori Benson Adams, M ED. I have to say this was the single most informative and educational seminar I have ever been too. I typed 7 single spaced pages of notes in the first 2 hours!!!! Besides Mrs. Adams being amazing, the information we gleamed from her expertise will now impact various parts of my classroom and teaching. If you ever have a chance to attend one of her seminars I would highly recommend it! This blog post by no means has all of the information we learned but I feel these 5 tips could make serious beneficial changes for our Right Brained Visual Spacial learners. (1) Always use a picture schedule, all the way through elementary school, even into middle school if necessary for the child. (2) Add pictures with color to every lesson, as school progresses it becomes much more auditory in nature and needs to have a balance for our right brained th...

Have you ever looked through your curriculum and thought an activity would be great for learning but really boring? Sometimes I wonder who is thinking some of this stuff up? For instance I had an activity to do today to teach positional words where the children were supposed to use a plastic cup and a bottle cap to show me they understood my directions. I just couldn't do it! How boring to sit on the carpet and move around a bottle cap so........I changed it! I happen to have a class set of small bug jars and plastic spiders. Well, my kiddos know I am totally afraid of spiders so I told them that at the end of the activity they could "attack" me with the spiders. This made the boys especially happy! The class loved using their bug jars and spiders to complete the same objective. Here are some other ideas to help engage 4 year old minds with fun in mind: (1)Add a song: the best songs for learning involve movement and are ideally written on large chart paper for tracking wh...

Hello All, I have finally finished putting together my Jungle Theme Behavior Chart. I am so excited to use this in my classroom this year. Since I cannot get into my classroom for another 2 weeks I decided to hang it from my curtain rod for the pictures. The system works like this: Each child starts everyday on Happy Hippopotamus, this is acceptable behavior for the classroom. The child can then move up or down from there depending on their behavior choices. I have included the list of acceptable/unacceptable behaviors that I intend to give to my families as well as a full explaination of how I intend to use this chart. I give several ways to assemble this chart in the packet using magnets, ribbon and/or laminating. I chose to use page protectors and binder clips for my classroom. I chose the page protectors so that I could store the small reinforcer graphics for rewards inside the chart. I punched both sides of each card inside the page protector with ...