The Crazy Pre-K Classroom

For quite a while now I have been looking for a Guided Reading system that worked for my classroom. I needed something that the class would get excited about, kept the parents informed of progress and was easy for me to maintain. After looking through various blogs, products and polling other teachers I realized I had to create my own system. There just wasn't anything that met enough of my needs out there that I could find. So for several months now I have been piecing together what may be the best thing I have ever made for my classroom. INDIVIDUAL GUIDED READING BINDERS!!!!! Here is a view of one of the front cover choices: I had always used simple folders with a reading log and the weeks books. There was no space to send home more literacy building resources that the children could work on. When I would send home extra resources in the kiddos backpacks I would either never get them back or they would get lost in the child's home for a while. I also wanted everything for...

We had a great Valentine's Day week here in Pre-K. There were so many fun activities to support our learning objectives. i snapped a few pictures of my kiddos enjoying some love themed centers! We used our valentine 10 and 20 frames to count and color in a group and then used our Valentine's CVC cards to sticker spell. I loved using the dollar store plastic hearts to practice counting, putting ABC's in order,sorting and playing partner games. These are just a few of the activities we had fun doing this week. My kiddos particularly liked making their own Valentine's in free art with punches, decorative scissors, markers, colorful pens, stamps, card stock and embellishments. It was so great to see them use their creativity and imaginations to make such cute projects. So, what fun activities did you do for Valentine's Day?

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

Hello All, Today our curriculum (Handwriting without tears get set for school Pre-K) called for sentence building. Each child was supposed to dictate a sentence and we were to count the number of words in the sentence. This is a simple activity that would only take a few minutes had I not put my own spin on it. I decided to turn this into a sentence building, sight word, graphing activity! WHEW! Literacy and numbers in the same lesson, I love double duty lessons! We started by choosing a picture from a bucket. Each child took a turn and made up a sentence. We counted the number of words after I wrote the sentence on the large graph paper. Once our sentences were finished we identified and found each of our sight words. We circled each sight word and counted how many times we had used each word. I wrote the word and number on the right hand side of the sentence sheet. Once we finished counting each sight word we made a bar graph to compare how many times we used each word. The ch...

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...

Hello All, I had so much fun with my 5 senses unit this week at school that I decided to create a whole unit around it. I included some items that I have been using in my classroom such as the vocabulary building cards and the word wall/pocket chart vocabulary cards. Use this link to see the entire unit: My 5 Senses Unit I have also written a teacher big book, created a few worksheets and given my ideas for centers/activities that I have been doing for years with this unit. My favorite part though has to be the treasure hunt that I posted about a couple of days ago. My freind, Bev Fleming and I came up with this and it was so much fun! Check out the past post and get the recording sheet for free by scrolling down past this post. This unit also has a freebie of its own, I am giving away my hearing worksheet, you can find the freebie by clicking on the following link: 5 Senses Hearing Worksheet Freebie