The Crazy Pre-K Classroom

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...

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 ...

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...

I was recently at a wonderful seminar in San Antonio on Right Brained Learners etc. One of the points the speaker wanted us to take away from the seminar was to make sure we were teaching in word families. Now I understand the pros of word families and the cons. What about decoding? Can the kids read or are they memorizing? How will they branch out from word families to other words? Well, the speaker wanted us to remember that children can only accomplish so many tasks at a time and giving a child a word family versus a bunch of words to decode cuts down significantly on the number of tasks to complete, thus making the child more successful and building confidence in spelling and reading. So I came back from my seminar and took out my word family dry erase cards from Lakeshore. I introduced how to use them and what do you know kiddos that had not been taught about word families were able to come up with many words and stay with me when I gave them more. They had so much fun finding out...

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...