The Crazy Pre-K Classroom

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...

Hello Everyone, I hope you have all been well. I am home this week recovering from gallbladder surgery which has given me some much needed catch up time for assessments, lesson planning and TpT unit prep and organization. I have been working on a series of teacher resources for introducing and teaching vowels sound and blends/digraphs. I posted about my Digraph/Initial Blend unit last week and have now listed a short vowel unit. I will hopefully have the long vowel unit finished up here in the next few days. Each of these units take some prep and if you are like me card stock and laminating are an obsession. However, this prep pays of with colorful, engaging resources that children can use for years. Each of these resources is color coded and have cohesive posters and resources that the children find easy to follow. Since these are large units with lots of color you will want to make sure to protect your investment by organizing them in a way that keeps everything together and right at...

Hello all, I hope all of you came through the holidays well and are looking forward to spring! Here in Texas we had 2 ice days and a couple of late starts which is highly unusual for us but I know some of you have missed much more than that! Anyway, this year I have four children who are very advanced in their reading skills. They have mastered cvc words, cvcv/cvvc words and the dolche pre-primer and primer sight words. We are now moving into intial consonant blends and digraphs. This week I started by introducing l, s and r initial blends on a binder ring, I gave each child a set and had a master set for myself. We went through each set before doing anything else. I then took the posters out for several of the l blends and we went over several objects that start with each blend. We then spent some time thinking about other words that start with this blend and recorded them on our critical thinking posters. I then used pocket chart sentences to show how we could use the words properly ...