The Crazy Pre-K Classroom

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...

Hello All, I don't know about you but I cannot buy enough bins! It seems every year I need to buy more at the last minute even though I have invested in many throughout the years. This year I found 2 types of bins at Target in the dollar section that I intend to use on my classroom tables. The larger purple and gray bins will hold 3 of the small fushia bins. These I will use for markers, crayons, colored pencils and anything else we need during the day. This way I figure there will be less spills and better organization. I normally use a large bucket of each supply for each table and it is just too much, the tables are cluttered and the kiddos end up knocking the little pails over. This way each bin can be stacked and stored without having to make sure they don't spill. These also have handles which will make them easier for little hands to carry. How else might you use these bins? Leave a comment and you could win a free surprise from TpT. Make sure to leave yo...

I finally have pictures of my new reading group setup. I have completly rearranged my classroom for the second half of the year in order to put my new system into place. Because my school requires I put everything into cabinets at the end of the week (we share our classrooms with the church) my system had to be portable and storage friendly. I purchased 2 towers with 10 drawers each. Everything else I already owned. Picture 1.: The back corner of my room houses the two towers, they are filled with quiet centers such as letter and number stencils, wiki sticks with ABC mats, pop beads, stringing beads and more. Picture 2: Closeup of same area Picture 3: Early reader buckets, classification center, word work tiles, Popcorn words (Unit found on TpT) and a bucket with the students handwriting workbooks.  Picture 4: Classification center with letter and word tiles for word work. This is a standing center that allows movement and keeps ctudents from having to sit for ...