The Crazy Pre-K Classroom

Hello Blogging friends, can you believe in just a few short hours we will be in 2015? Where has the time gone! I know I have not been as present online as usual so I put together a little freebie as a thank you for your following. I also have my entire store on sale (20% off everything!) from January 1st-January 4th, just in time to stock up on resources for the second half of the school year. Click the links below to go directly to the freebie and to my store. Thank you for a wonderful 2014! Snowflake-Slap Freebie: Dolche Primer Sight Word Games The-Crazy-Pre-k-Classroom TPT Store Have a blessed 2015! Christine

Well, my post really begins in August of 2013 at the start of school with 14 pre-kers and a new school year full of fun and uncertainty. The excitement of new friends and families to serve, the start of a new class of kiddos, so incredible! However, if I had known the whirlwind I was about to be on I may have curled up in a ball in the corner! That is not to say all was bad. The one thing that kept me sane was my kiddos at school and the wonderful staff I was surrounded with. My class was wonderful, my Teachers Pay Teachers store was growing and all was well with my family and I. August and September were wonderful but for some reason every year October seems to be the month something hits home. Without question the first week of October we got a shock, my husbands Grandmother had died suddenly, which meant a trip from Texas to New Jersey for the funeral, That would only be the first 2 days I was away from my kiddos. You see I was out more than a month in the 2013-2014 school year, bet...

WOW! This was about the fastest September in my immediate history! I can't believe that switching from Pre-K to Kinder has left me with no classroom reveal or new ideas for my blog! Thank you everyone for being so supportive and patient. I promise to catch up as much as possible over the next couple of weeks. So, my classroom, where do I begin? I went from a decent sized room with windows to a closet with none. Don't get me wrong, I am not complaining it just poses certain storage and space issues that I had not needed to address in several years. How do you fit a full classroom of supplies into a tiny space, how do you organize it and how do you fit anything new that you will need for your new grade? Well, I started by clearing my entire classroom into my living room over the summer and doing a serious purge (which was very painful since I hoard all things school related!) then I went shopping! My Michaels' teacher discount, a coupon and other sales helped me to purchase q...

Grab your flash freebie while you can. My new Kindergarten BTS book, If you give a teacher a classroom! is free for the next few hours! Be sure to hop on over to TpT to take advantage of the 28% off sale! Use the code BTS14 at checkout for your discount! I'm headed over to fill my cart! Happy TpT product hunting! Use the link below to grab your freebie! Enjoy, Christine http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Kindergarten-Teacher-Book-If-you-give-a-teacher-a-classroom-1372500

Well it is official I am moving up to Kindergarten! Now don't worry I will keep my blog name and TpT store the same, I will not ask you to follow me elsewhere. I am thankful for each of you and will continue to provide posts with resources for both Pre-K and Kindergarten. I am truly excited to have the chance to experience where my kiddos go after they leave me. I am curious about the dreaded "summer slide" and how far Kindergarten progresses them. I am also nervous, not in my abilities to teach and learn but in the unknown of where the curriculum goes and what the expectations are for these little darlings that were just my precious 4 year olds. I won't be getting the same students as last year so I won't have to worry about looking at them like they are still 4 but with a new set of kiddos I am interested to see the difference between those who attended Pre-k and those who have not been in school before. Which brings me to another subject...room change, oh the h...

As a Mom to two boys 11 and 6 and as a Pre-Kindergarten teacher I have seen first hand the successes and failures that children experience based on their early childhood experiences with language. My oldest son was diagnosed at 4 with receptive and expressive language disorders, he spent over a year 3x per week in language therapy to build his language skills. Receptive language disorder is the inability to keep words that you have heard and expressive language disorder is the inability to retrieve and say those words. You can see where we had a big problem on our hands. Not only could Conner not retain words but he also could not find them in his brain to say them. If you think of the brain like a filing cabinet it is as if his words were filed in the wrong drawer and were lost when needed. There was no specific language in our home, objects were described as "things" and this often lead to frustration for Conner when he could not describe what he was trying to say. His lack...

Hello Everyone, I have finally returned to my blogging world after a long break. It has been a hard year and while I have wanted to sit and blog often there just wasn't the time or energy. So here is the jist of it, I started off the school year 30lbs lighter thanks to an ugly strain of cyclospora (so my body was weak going into the year). September seemed uneventful as I happily awaited my brothers wedding which was going to send me from Texas to New Jersey and 3 days off of school but then my husbands grandmother passed and a 2nd trip to New Jersey was planned, putting me 2 more days in the hole. 5 days gone by mid October and then the big stuff started, are you ready?....Appendicitis with emergency surgery over thanksgiving break, tried to go back to work early and didn't even make it 3 hours! Another 5 days down the tubes. Then the next week the flu, of course setting me back another 2 days. Are you keeping track that is 10 days before Christmas! We only have PTO for 7! I s...

For quite a while now I have been looking for a Guided Reading system that worked for my classroom. I needed something that the class would get excited about, kept the parents informed of progress and was easy for me to maintain. After looking through various blogs, products and polling other teachers I realized I had to create my own system. There just wasn't anything that met enough of my needs out there that I could find. So for several months now I have been piecing together what may be the best thing I have ever made for my classroom. INDIVIDUAL GUIDED READING BINDERS!!!!! Here is a view of one of the front cover choices: I had always used simple folders with a reading log and the weeks books. There was no space to send home more literacy building resources that the children could work on. When I would send home extra resources in the kiddos backpacks I would either never get them back or they would get lost in the child's home for a while. I also wanted everything for...