The Crazy Pre-K Classroom

Hello All, I have taken a few activities from my Winter Units on TpT and made them free for you to sample! Each one can be found as part of one of the Winter units found in my store. I hope you enjoy these and the sale I am having on all of my Winter units as a Thank you for being great followers! This 20% off sale will last through the weekend! Have a Wonderful Christmas and Holiday season!Use this link to get your freebies: Winter freebies link!

O.K. so call me crazy but I have been wanting to do something special for all of my blog and facebook followers! So, here is the deal: Spend $30.00 in my TpT store after the 28% TpT Cyber Sale discount and I will send you my brand new 121 page Winter Animal Unit for free. Currently listed for $8.00 it includes 10 complete centers you won't want to miss this winter!Here are a few pictures from my New Winter Animal Unit. Use this link to go directly to this unit. Winter Animals Unit Link I will need an email that can recieve and open a 150mb pdf via dropbox. You can leave your email below with a comment letting me know you have purchased and what name you use on TpT. You can send me a private message on facebook www.facebook.com/thecrazyprekclassroom) with the same information or send me an email at this address: thecrazyprekclassroom@gmail.com Thank you for your purchases, following, comments and freindship! Christine

Hello All, I am so glad to be back in the blogging world, I am sorry for my absence the last few weeks due to unexpected surgery. I have a way to make it up to you with a huge sale Monday and Tuesday on TpT! Get 28% off everything in my store even new items posted this weekend. Stay tuned for new listings, especially my new Winter Animal Centers to be posted later today. Have a wonderful Holiday season!

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 ...

Happy Saturday Everyone! Each year when we study Nocturnal Animals we end our unit with a "Day in the Dark:" where we dim the lights, play with flashlights and have all around learning fun in the dark. I wrote a post about this last year introducing my Nocturnal Animals Unit on Tpt and introducing everyone to my favorite activity, read the room with flashlights. Well this year on top of all the activities I did last year I added a new one. Since a few of our nocturnal animals like to rummage through the trash (raccoon, skunk, possum, rat etc.) we played "Trashcan Reading" here is what we did: I had forgetten my phone yesterday so the pictures are from home instead of the classroom :( I had this bucket of "trash" sitting out in the classroom, the kids asked me what it was and I told them it was my trash from working the day before. They we very curious about this trash bucket that was just sitting by my chair with all of this colored paper inside. While t...

Hello All, Here is a follow up to my most recent post about the importance of math in the pre-k classroom. Today we worked on Graphs and Patterns. My class has been exposed to both of these several times in group teaching and number centers but this is the first time the children filled in the patterns and graphs on their own. I knew which ones would do well and which ones might have some trouble folllowing along. I will show you what both look like. I walked them through the patterns by first having a group pattern lesson on the carpet and then brining them to the table for the worksheet. We assigned each letter a color for the entire sheet so that there was no confusion in the switching of colors and so that I could use the colors to help them understand the pattern. A=orange, B=yellow, C=green, D=white. All typical colors of pumpkins; I even showed them pictures of each color pumpkin that I took at the pumpkin patch over the weekend but that is a different story. Back to the pattern...

In Pre-K and Kinder working with numbers is just as important as word work. We spend alot of time talking about manipulating letters for reading but not much time talking about manipulating numbers. Sure counting forwards and backwards is important but if you cannot identify what number comes before or after then there is a problem. Leaving holes like this in the learning of numbers and math strategies can cause frustration for children later in their education. Count and color is an excellent way to help children understand one to one correspondence and how to stop counting at a certain number. I have often found in my classroom that when you ask a child to count objects they either skip, go to fast or cannot stop till they get to 10. These habits all need to be worked on before they become a permannent way for the child to work with numbers. This also brings in the importance of 10 frames, having a child place one object in each box allows them to decifer between each box and the obj...

It is almost that time of year again when we are reminded to give thanks for all the blessings in our lives. My followers, you, are certainly friends to be thankful for. Thinking about all of my blessings this past weekend at my brothers wedding amongst some of the most gorgeous fall scenery I was inspired to create a little something special for all of you. This center includes uppercase and lowercase full color turkeys for matching and letter recognition with three differentiated recording sheets. One blank to write both letters, one for recording uppercase letters and one for recording lowercase letters. I hope you enjoy using this center and thank you for being you, teachers who inspire children to learn everyday! Turkey ABC Matching Cneter Freebie!

TPT hit 100K likes on facebook and is offering a 10% DISCOUNT ON EVERYTHING! They have not said how long it will last so I put my store on sale for 20% off for today and tomorrow to give you some awesome deals! Don't forget to plug in the code at checkout FB100K for your extra savings! Use the following link to go straigh to my store! MY TPT STORE

Hello All, With fall in full swing and parent teacher conferences on Monday I have not had much time to create or blog however for all of my loyal followers I have decided to make it up to you buy bundling all of my fall worksheets at a discount and adding a 5 worksheet freebie to my store! My kiddos have been enjoying my newest sets of worksheets that are all interactive and keep their attention. I have taken out all of the centers and other printables in order to give you an entire unit of useable worksheets with 22 exclusive worksheets for free. You will not find these 22 new worksheets in any of my other units, they are only in the bundle.All of the worksheets are interactive withmore than one way of learning on the page. The students have really enjoyed all of the cutting/gluing, counting, coloring the correct number, matching the correct letter etc. These have been working so well in my reading group rotations. I have hardly been interrupted and this early in the school year that...

This week has been a whirlwind of fun apple activities. I think my favorite new apple activity is the apple fraction stamping we did on Tuesday. I sat everyone down at the table and showed them whole, half, fourths and eigths. They were amazed that you could cut and apple like that and put it back together. After each cut I had the children stamp that section on a piece of construction paper where I had written the different fractions. I was amazed at the amount of critical thinking this activity produced. My four year olds had the best questions like, "So if you cut it again what do you get?" and "Why does the apple have a stem and 5 points on the bottom?" Our last stamp was the 5 points at the bottom because it looks cool and reinforces the 5 section "star" in the middle of the apple that holds the seeds. One little one asked me, "Mrs. O'Donnell if the seeds are stuck inside the apple how do we get more apples?" So then we had a talk about ...

Hello All, I am holding a short giveaway (9/14-9/16) for my newest unit: Scissor Skills: teacher book, cutting practice+. Please visit the giveaway section at www.teachersnotebook.com to enter and while you are there please check out all of the new items in my store! Check out the following pictures to see a sampling of what is in my Scissor Skills Unit Thank you for being loyal followers, good luck! Christine