The Crazy Pre-K Classroom

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...

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...

O.K. so we all remember those famous dioramas that we made in elementary school were meant to teach us about animals and where they live. While these are cute projects with a purpose they are best suited for elementary students not pre-k. But with curious minds and a natural love for animals it only makes sense to introduce our kiddos to facts about animals and where they live around the world. For pre-k there are so many great easy ways to incorporate animals into our classrooms. I like to make animal masks for each habitat we are working on as well as read the room cards and recording sheets. The kiddos can record the name of the animal by reading it on the other childs mask. My class also enjoys making animals out of construction paper and gluing some facts that I have typed and printed about the animals. I like to try to decorate my room to mimic the habitat we are working on, I have to say I am a huge stuffed animal collector so I have many of the animals needed in beany baby size...

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...

I have to admit I love Read the Room! This activity is so popular in my classroom, my kiddos beg me for it every week! I love it because it allows children to move and experience writing in different positions. I especially love what my children are learning through this activity: (1)Visual Discrimination: Having to find each card and match the picture on the card to the picture on the recording sheet then write the word on the correct line. (2) Letter/Sound Recognition: Associating the letters and sounds in each word associated with a picture.(3)Handwriting Practice: Writing each letter on a line, practicing proper strokes and letter formation. (4)Self-Control: Being able to move around the room as instructed completing the activity without getting out of control.(5)Vocabulary: Identifying the common objects that go with your teaching. When I realized this week that I had 26 different sets of Read the Room I thought it was time to share! So, I have placed all 26 sets in one mega pack ...

Hello All, This past week was so much fun. Between creating snowmen, playing in fake snow and having a cotton ball snowball fight we had a great time. One of my favorite activities was a non-standard measurement activity, measuring ourselves against numbered snowballs. I started by taping 30 numbered snowballs from bottom to top on my cabinet and then I hung a graph with each child's name and the numbers 1-30 with the title "How many snowballs tall are you?" Before starting the activity we counted the snowballs and I had each student estimate how many snowballs tall they would be, I also had them guess for me. I was surprised at how many estimations were close or correct. I recorded their estimations on the dry erase board and we then stood by the snowballs one at a time. We recorded our height on the bar graph. We talked about who was the tallest and who was the shortest, which children were close to the same height etc. After everyone had a chance to be measured...

Hello All, I just wanted to share with you some great activities our department did this past week for Nocturnal animals and hibernation. We had so much fun exploring how animals live at night. We spent an entire day with no lights on, the kids brought small flashlights and one Mom donated finger flashlights (which are totally awesome, this was the first time I had ever seen them!). My class spent time discovering new animals that are nocturnal that we didn't already know about, like scorpions! My favorite part of the week though was our letter and number hunts. I hung the #'s 1-20 in my classroom and gave each child a clipboard with a recording sheet on it. They were instructed to roam the room with their flashlights and find each number. Once they found a number they were to color in the box that had the same number. We did the same with letters in my collegues room. The class had so much fun with this! I was surprised at how it kept their attention. They found all 26 letter...

So, in an effort to make life easier on myself I started jotting down and copying short literacy ideas to send home to my kiddos parents. I had a few struggling students that I wasn't ready to put in books but I wanted them to practice letters and literacy skills in a meaninful way.They have enjoyed this so much that I decided to type it all out on cute cards and make a unit for Teachers Pay Teachers. I fugure, like myself, there must be some other teachers with students like mine who are not ready for true reading groups but would benefit from some practice at home. The great thing about these activities is that they also do double duty when you use them in your classroom during small groups. 5 Minute Literacy 5 Minute Literacy has 22 different cards with an easy, fun activity for parents to do with their children. Each card is labeled with a number so you can use the included log to track which student has done which activity. (this also means you can print them out in cute c...

After having a super fun week with my kiddos studying corn I decided to put everything we did down on paper and give it away for free! It all started with a pesky common core objective involving measurement but turned out to be so much more! My teacher freind Bev Fleming and I decided that our Autumn theme would be best served by studying fall veggies, which eventually lead us to corn. We decided to create a cornstalk that would "grow" all week long. I made a base out of wood and used an old lightbulb holder to place pvc pipe in. I bought 4 couplers to attach the pvc pipe together as it grew. Here is a picture of our cornstalk on day 3. It grew from 1 foot all the way to 9 feet, with 5 ears of corn on it. (this is my little boy, Collin) I used butcher paper and green paint to decorate the pvc pipe in sections so it could be easily assembled each day. I attached the paper with hot glue. For the ears of corn I glued 2 pieces cut into corn shape leaving a hole large enough t...

This week in our apple unit we joined with another class to have an apple tasting. We sampled red, yellow and green apples. We talked about their names, what they taste like and if we liked them. We then made a graph of our favorite apple and then counted how many of each we liked. You can see we ended up with a tie between the red delicious and granny smith apples. After our apple tasting we cut a pear, apple and orange in half. We showed them all to the children and then filled in a venn diagram for a compare and contrast lesson. The classes were so interested in these activities, they were great science lessons. I hope you can enjoy some of these activities with your kiddos!

Hello All, With my last minute trip to Atlanta I only managed to get one new activity listed on TpT but it is a good one! Digging for Dinosaurs is a fun word work and sentence building activity that can be played by partners, individually or at a center. Full instructions and color graphics make this a fun time. I plan on placing a tub of sand with the words buried on the table with sifters, shovels and dinosaur skeletons. Click the above link to check it out! Use this 17 page activity to teach sight words, how to build a sentence and parts of a sentence. A bulding mat and poster with sentence parts is included along with 5 pages of word bones and a journaling page. Enjoy, Christine

Why are sensory activities so important for Pre-K kiddos? Exploration is the key to learning at this age. Kiddos need to feel and manipulate objects in their environment, when they are allowed to play in what I call "controlled chaos" children are engaged, happy and learning! Here is a list of my favorite sensory bin fillers, yes I get into the mix too! Shaving cream (great table cleaner and makes the room smell fresh!) popcorn kernals with farm objects mixed beans (think sorting) packing bubbles (bare feet!) packing peanuts (did you know the newer ones dissolve in water, awesome!) cotton balls with winter wear (think snowball fight) slime (fabric softener, glue and water in individual cups, stir with popsicle sticks, then play away) Tinsel with popcorn/cranberry rope and Christmas items Rocks and Sea Shells (once again think sorting and collages) WATER and funnels, ladels, sand sifters, buckets, shovels, water toys etc.! I know this could be       ...

I designed a scavenger hunt for my third grader that gave his class a chance to learn a few things about 4th grade and a fun end of the year activity. His class went around in groups today and had such a blast. Finding each place, stamping their passport, writing down an objective for the next grade and then coming back to draw a map and write a paragraph about what they want to learn nest year. Tomorrow they will finish with one more clue which leads them to their new teachers classrooms and has a treasure box filled with a candy treat for them. I was so excited that it went so well! Here are some pics and a link to the files on Teachers Pay Teachers. Passport-to-the-4th-grade-3rd-grade-end-of-year-scavenger-hunt I have created a passport/scavenger hunt for children moving to 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th grades. The objectives are all taken from the Texas TEaks and are common core aligned. Below are links to each different passport, there is also a blank passport if y...