The Crazy Pre-K Classroom

Congratulations Ashley Clark for winning the Organization for Differentiation giveaway. I hope you enjoy the drawer tower! Keep following this blog series for more great giveaways and classroom tips!Watch for the next blog post on Sunday!!!!

In my quest to get organized for next year I have devised a system for differrentiation that I believe will work for me and my kiddos. (If you know me this is a huge step, I am a very disorganized ADHD person!) I am calling this series of blog posts "Organization for Differentiation." I hope you can gleam some insight and share some of your experiences along the way. Also, to kick off this series I will be giving away the biggest piece of the puzzle for me, the drawer tower! This is a $50.00 piece and I will have it sent straight from Amazon to the winner! See the pictures and make sure to enter the giveaway at the end of this post. So, here is the first step for "Organtization for Differentiation" The Tools: 2 drawer towers, dollar store drawer organizers, target dollar spot book bins and center supplies. This is in the very beginning staes and I will be updating you every step of the way. So to begin I have started by deciding what type of books I want on each c...

O.K. everyone I hope I am not the only one out there whose children fight constantly over summer break! My 10 year old and my 5 year old are like oil and vinegar this year. I may have to draw a line down the center of my house that neither of them can cross! But enough complaining, what do you do to keep your kiddos busy during the summer when spendin money is a no, no? So far we have been swimming, playing outside, legos, reading time, library, neighborhood park, arts & crafts and random other activities that are already getting old. Our favorite playdate people are vacationing etc. I would love to hear some ideas from my followers! I hope you are enjoying your summer break!

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...

Teachers Notebook has sponsored a bundle of items worth over $1,400.00 to help the community of Moore, OK after the devestating tornadoes that ruined their town just days ago. Among the wreckage were 2 elementary schools where courageous teachers risked their lives to save the children. 100% of the proceeds from this packet are going to the Moore Community. I have donated my Read the Room Mega Bundle. Click the picture to make a donation starting at $20.00 to get this bundle and help the people of Moore OK.

If you are like me you have probably had a bucket full of letter tiles for the kids to sort through during word work. Well, I am done with my disorganized bucket and have figured out a system to help. Once again I have hit the Target dollar spot and found exactly what I needed. I would think you could also pick up these items at a Dollar Store or Walmart. I purchased 2 coupon files with 13 pockets each (yeah!nobody has to share a pocket!). I purposly chose 2 different colors so that it would be easier to put letters back after use. I labeled the front and back of both coupon files and each tab inside with one letter. I also purchased two sets of hamburger holders in the Target Dollar Spot, these came in groups of 3, so 6 for $2.00. I used one of each color that matches the colors of the coupon files for "lost letters." The students that are not as capable of placing the letters back into the correct pocket can place the letter tiles in the lost letter bucket and the teach...