The Crazy Pre-K Classroom

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 ...