The Crazy Pre-K Classroom

Debbie Diller and other succesful educators have said that children can distinguish between objects when they have a frame to seperate them. This would be why word walls, number walls and many educational posters frame there content so that children can concentrate on one space and not get everything all jumbled together. This is especially important when learning how to decode words and counting. One to one correspondence practice where a child places one object in one section of an egg carton is the same idea. This year I have been working diligently with my pre-kers on using 10 frames. I am seeing this tool used more and more often to help with counting, one to one correspondence, identifying amounts and grouping. There are endless possiblilities for using these in the classroom. This week after practicing with the ten frames from my Hibernation Unit we completed the following worksheet. You can see that the child who colored in red understood the concept pretty well but the child ...

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 ...

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...