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...

Hello All,       I know some of you are still in school....hold on you can do it!!!! We are out here in Texas and to celebrate I have started a new series of products AND THE FIRST ONE IS FREE!!!!! I am also giving away my biggest and most popular bundle. "The Ultimate literacy Bundle" is 600+ pages of teacher resources to teach literacy! My new adventure has me creating "Centers for $1.00" These centers focus on a specific concept for the Pre-k, K and 1st classroom. I have listed the first 3 of this series and I have 2 pages full of ideas for more! So grab your freebie and check my store often for many more of these centers to come! Click on this link to go directly to your freebie!!!! Don't forget to scroll down and enter the giveaway! Centers for $1.00- St, Sm, Sw I have listed 2 other centers for $1.00 and added a huge bundle of all of my "go to" resources for literacy instruction. Be sure to check each of them out when you visit my ...

Hello All, Today we had so much fun with our sight word from my freebie Snowflake Slap . First I laid out all of the snowflakes on the carpet. If the child could read me the word they could keep the card and crumple it into a snowball. Once all of the words were read and squished I told the class we could have a snowball fight! It was such great fun that we took our "snowballs" into another kinder classroom and attacked them. As the kids threw the sight word snowballs we made more snowballs and threw them into the crowd from leftover paper. It was great fun! Once we settled back into our classroom we placed all of the snowballs into a bucket and each child pulled a word. If they could read it they recorded it on the left side of the worksheet below, if they couldn't read the word they recorded it on the right. The ones most did not know were pretty consistent so I know which ones we need the most work on. So hop on over the TpT to grab your free copy of Snowflake Slap an...

As a Mom of 2 dyslexic kiddos I know it can be heartbreaking to watch them struggle to read and learn. It has been especially difficult with my 2nd son who is 7. He is repeating Kindergarten so that he can go through Dyslexia therapy without missing new concepts at school. He has already given up on reading, hates it and cries over every word. To say he is a severe dyslexic is an understatement. So a few weeks ago we had a talk about how to make reading easier, he loves to color, cut, glue etc. With that in mind I made a few worksheets after searching for some to buy and coming up empty. We did one worksheet a night for the last month and he was happy to do them. Little did he know he was truly learning how to see b,d,p and q without reversals. I think using large type with a very simple font also helped. I know there are specific fonts out there that SLP's feel are best but I wanted to use a different one to see if it truly made a difference. I personally think the simpler the fon...

As a Mom to two boys 11 and 6 and as a Pre-Kindergarten teacher I have seen first hand the successes and failures that children experience based on their early childhood experiences with language. My oldest son was diagnosed at 4 with receptive and expressive language disorders, he spent over a year 3x per week in language therapy to build his language skills. Receptive language disorder is the inability to keep words that you have heard and expressive language disorder is the inability to retrieve and say those words. You can see where we had a big problem on our hands. Not only could Conner not retain words but he also could not find them in his brain to say them. If you think of the brain like a filing cabinet it is as if his words were filed in the wrong drawer and were lost when needed. There was no specific language in our home, objects were described as "things" and this often lead to frustration for Conner when he could not describe what he was trying to say. His lack...

Hello Everyone, I hope you have all been well. I am home this week recovering from gallbladder surgery which has given me some much needed catch up time for assessments, lesson planning and TpT unit prep and organization. I have been working on a series of teacher resources for introducing and teaching vowels sound and blends/digraphs. I posted about my Digraph/Initial Blend unit last week and have now listed a short vowel unit. I will hopefully have the long vowel unit finished up here in the next few days. Each of these units take some prep and if you are like me card stock and laminating are an obsession. However, this prep pays of with colorful, engaging resources that children can use for years. Each of these resources is color coded and have cohesive posters and resources that the children find easy to follow. Since these are large units with lots of color you will want to make sure to protect your investment by organizing them in a way that keeps everything together and right at...

Hello all, I hope all of you came through the holidays well and are looking forward to spring! Here in Texas we had 2 ice days and a couple of late starts which is highly unusual for us but I know some of you have missed much more than that! Anyway, this year I have four children who are very advanced in their reading skills. They have mastered cvc words, cvcv/cvvc words and the dolche pre-primer and primer sight words. We are now moving into intial consonant blends and digraphs. This week I started by introducing l, s and r initial blends on a binder ring, I gave each child a set and had a master set for myself. We went through each set before doing anything else. I then took the posters out for several of the l blends and we went over several objects that start with each blend. We then spent some time thinking about other words that start with this blend and recorded them on our critical thinking posters. I then used pocket chart sentences to show how we could use the words properly ...

In Pre-K and Kinder working with numbers is just as important as word work. We spend alot of time talking about manipulating letters for reading but not much time talking about manipulating numbers. Sure counting forwards and backwards is important but if you cannot identify what number comes before or after then there is a problem. Leaving holes like this in the learning of numbers and math strategies can cause frustration for children later in their education. Count and color is an excellent way to help children understand one to one correspondence and how to stop counting at a certain number. I have often found in my classroom that when you ask a child to count objects they either skip, go to fast or cannot stop till they get to 10. These habits all need to be worked on before they become a permannent way for the child to work with numbers. This also brings in the importance of 10 frames, having a child place one object in each box allows them to decifer between each box and the obj...

Have you ever encountered a parent or teacher who thought thast worksheets were just a teachers lazy way of keeping children busy? I have had my share of people refer to worksheets as "busy work" or "time wasters." I wish they knew how valuable worksheets can be for learning and assessment; especially when they are used in conjunction with a full lesson. Often times worksheets are given after a lesson is taught to help solidify learning and assess understanding. This week I had the opportunity to start with my worksheet and bring it to a lesson. We completed this shape worksheet together at the table, copyright goes to Teachers Helper. This is my copy, trust me my 4 year olds don't color this well yet but they are working on it! Anyway, after completing this worksheet we all brought our own copy to the carpet and proceeded in making a graph to compare the number of shapes there were on the page. I also took the opportunity to reinforce shapes and colors during ...

So, we all know little ones these days love technology but we can't afford to put an ipad in each childs hand for school. As much as I wish we could it is just not feasable for most schools. While a classroom might have 1 or 2 tablets that is just not enough for a class of 20+, so I have decided to fake it! For my four year olds this year we will be studying our word families on "tablets" printed on cardstock. I have used a tablet graphic copyrighted by scrappindoodles.com to create word family posters, worksheets and word work centers. I have also used this graphic to create a beginning sounds unit, multi-sensory ABC mats, and am currently working on EIOU word families and numbers. I have printed the first set of "tablets" and my 5 year old has not stopped playing with them. He even used a blank sheet that I have provided and made his own word family tablet: It is a litle hard to see that he has written the name of each picture in pencil on the page as well. I...

Hello All, I have just reduced all of my theme units to $5.00 or less on TpT!!!!! As a way of saying thank you to all of you wonderful teachers out there! I thought a little extra savings and the ability to stock up on theme specfic resources would get your school year rolling in the right direction. This is not a sale I will leave these and all future theme units I make at $5.00 or less with the exception of mega units and combo units. Please visit my store to check out everything from Farm to Hibernation to Ocean and more! Thank you for investing in our young children! TPT STORE LINK And don't forget to download all of my great freebies! Please leave feedback and follow my blog and store. Till next time, Christine

Well school has officially begun here in Texas and it is wonderful to get my family back on schedule and my new little class of cuties into routine. This year I am girl heavy with 9 girls and 5 boys. They are a wonderful group of 4 year olds and I can't wait to get to know them better. I have one student yet to meet who should arrive in the morning but otherwise my group is energetic, full of life and typical four year olds with a love of learning and for the Lord. The families I am working with have done an excellent job with these little guys. So far we have practiced our procedures, learned how to properly play in centers, used our crayons, markers and pencils with success and had fun getting to know each other. Tommorrow each of my kiddos will get their chance to add their name to my new word wall that is why I am revealing it to you today! Since my classroom is also a Sunday school room I have some restrictions on what I am allowed to do, this being said I have gotten somewhat...