The Crazy Pre-K Classroom

Hello Everyone, Please welcome my first guest blogger, Toni from teacherlingo.com . She has written a great article for us on integrating movement into our letter recognition lessons! Enjoy! Christine Making Letters Move Author Bio: Today’s guest post comes from Toni, an elementary school teacher with a specialty in differentiated instruction and designing hands-on lessons that incorporate the multiple intelligences. You can often find Toni writing for TeacherLingo.com, where teachers can buy and sell their original lesson plans, worksheets, and more. She is married to a middle school math teacher and is a mom to a mystery loving 7 year old sweetie-girl and a quirky little light saber toting 3 year old. Have you ever made cookies with a preschool aged child? They want to feel, taste, and smell each ingredient before placing it in the mixing bowl. Young children use all of their senses when exploring a new object! This is important to remember when introducing children to their ...

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...

Hello All, I just wanted to share with you some great activities our department did this past week for Nocturnal animals and hibernation. We had so much fun exploring how animals live at night. We spent an entire day with no lights on, the kids brought small flashlights and one Mom donated finger flashlights (which are totally awesome, this was the first time I had ever seen them!). My class spent time discovering new animals that are nocturnal that we didn't already know about, like scorpions! My favorite part of the week though was our letter and number hunts. I hung the #'s 1-20 in my classroom and gave each child a clipboard with a recording sheet on it. They were instructed to roam the room with their flashlights and find each number. Once they found a number they were to color in the box that had the same number. We did the same with letters in my collegues room. The class had so much fun with this! I was surprised at how it kept their attention. They found all 26 letter...

So, in an effort to make life easier on myself I started jotting down and copying short literacy ideas to send home to my kiddos parents. I had a few struggling students that I wasn't ready to put in books but I wanted them to practice letters and literacy skills in a meaninful way.They have enjoyed this so much that I decided to type it all out on cute cards and make a unit for Teachers Pay Teachers. I fugure, like myself, there must be some other teachers with students like mine who are not ready for true reading groups but would benefit from some practice at home. The great thing about these activities is that they also do double duty when you use them in your classroom during small groups. 5 Minute Literacy 5 Minute Literacy has 22 different cards with an easy, fun activity for parents to do with their children. Each card is labeled with a number so you can use the included log to track which student has done which activity. (this also means you can print them out in cute c...

Hello Everyone, Thank you to everyone who linked up and visited my first linky party. All of the fall freebies were fantastic! I said I would giveaway my Pumpkin Patch Math and Literacy Unit to one lucky linker, drum roll please...... THE WINNER IS: Shuna Patterson @ Pocket Full of Kinders! Congratulations Shuna! Have a blessed weekend! Christine

Hello All, I am trying my hand at my first linky party! YEAH! Since fall is my favorite season I thought I would highlight it with links to fall themed freebies for our fellow teachers. Please link directly to your free item description on your blog or directly to your free item on TpT! To participate link up and please take a moment to place my linky party button with a short comment on your blog. I would sure appreciate you following me here at the crazy pre-k classroom and in my store on TpT. Here is my freebie for you: Corn themed mini unit I will be choosing a linky party participant at the end of the linky party (Oct. 13) to recieve my Fun in the Pumpkin Patch Math and Literacy Unit Have fun exploring some free fall fun! Link up below! You won't regret it! Till next time, Christine

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...

Letter name and Sound recognition is one of the key objectives of Pre-k and K instruction. We spend a majority of our day working on letters, including letters in every activity and talking about letters (and numbers for that fact!) Here are some strategies I use to help my little kiddos remember those letter and sounds! 1. I seperate my letters and sounds: When I want the children to focus on sounds I only use the sound, I say "this letter says a,a,a holding up or pointing to the letter a. this gives the child one thing to focus on versus trying to connect the letter name and the sound. 2. I follow my sound instruction with a practice sheet or activity: This helps the children solidify the letter sounds they have just worked on. 3. I only work on a few letters at a time: Overwhelming the kiddos with all 26 sounds at one time does not help them learn, breaking up the alphabet into small chunks helps the children to concentrate on the important letters first and then onto the ne...