here a chick, there a chick...

AAAAAAND....we have chicks!

I love this unit, because hatching chicks is so memorable to these little guys!  What a great way to get a hands on learning experience, too!  I gotta tell you...I have a little boy this year who has been SOOOOOO excited about chicks.  I think he started asking me when we were going to get them in our Dinosaur unit WAY back in FEBRUARY!  And since then, it has been an ongoing question. :-)  It was fun to see the class get excited about our chicks hatching today, and especially fun to see this little boy trying to contain all his enthusiasm! 

We have begun naming the chicks.  Meet Fluffy. 

Fluffy had a big crack in his egg when we left school yesterday, so I had a hunch he would hatch while we were out.  He sure did.  There were 2 chicks already hatched when we came into school today and this morning we got to see another hatch.  "Fluffy" was so funny, b/c he was so protective of the other one while it was hatching. 

Meet Mr. Wiggles. 

He was named Mr. Wiggles b/c even though his crack in the egg was significantly smaller than Fluffy's yesterday, he was just a wigglin' around in his egg. 

Lastly, (for now at least), we have Lucky.  I'm not sure why they wanted to name this one Lucky, but they all liked that name, so Lucky he shall be!  Lucky was the one that most of the class got to watch hatch.  They had all went to recess, and before they left, I'm not kidding, there was a good size crack, but nothing I was expecting to hatch anytime soon.  I checked on it towards the end of their recess and the crack was all the way around the egg.

I knew it was coming soon, so I got out my phone and 3/4 the class was in the classroom while it happened, but some were still washing up while it hatched.  I showed the video to those kids who missed it.  Their excitment is contagious!  I love it!

So, here is our infamous Lucky!

 We still have 3 eggs left in our incubator and 2 of them are cracked, so we will see what happens.  I will be updating this post through out the week as we get more and more pictures of our chicks, so keep checking in with us. 

More QR Craze

I hope everyone had a great Easter!  The month of April has just seemed to have flown by!  We will be doing our study of chicks, and other oviparous animals, this week and next.  This is always a very memorable theme for the kids, especially when they get to see the chicks hatch.  We will be getting our eggs on Friday, and they should start hatching on Tuesday!  I am so excited!!  
Until then, we are busy, busy, busy with our day to day. 

 Here is a center that is always fun.  I have found this center works better mid-late year when the kids can understand better CVC words, word families, etc.  So, in this center they pull out the letters in their name, put them on top.  If a kid has a short name or a vowel-filled name, I let them use the letters of their last name too.  Then in the divided part, I have them put a vowel in the middle, and I usually have them make a word family and try to make words from that.  That is how I found is easiest for them.  

Before Easter I started some work on QR Codes again.  I wanted something new that the kids could do at a center.  I came up with some QR codes where the kids scan, write, and put them in ABC order.  After that, I thought, "hey, I could use the same format and do more with rhyming words too!"  I also did some place value ones as well.  This week we are doing rhyming, and next week we are going to work on the ABC order.  All of these will be available on my TPT store, but for now, the ABC order is the only product up and ready to go.  

I do have a piece of advice, the qr codes are all in a row, so I found it beneficial, to put scrap paper on top of the ones you are not scanning, so it doesn't scan the wrong one.  
Click here to view the ABC Order QR codes on my TPT store.

  

this and that...

Long time, no blog, huh?  Time got the best of me, I suppose.  So let me fill you in on what we did last week.  First off, I came in Monday morning to find this:

Yes, several of the plants sprouted over the weekend!  I was so shocked to walk in to this when Friday there was nothing.  

In between our Math chapters, we reviewed with a fun place value game.  Its simple:  roll the dice and add up the ones, until you hit 10, then trade them in for a 10's circle. 

We had to add some Easter goodies into our week, so we wrote a friendly letter to the Easter Bunny!  

How sweet is that?  

This week is a short week, so I'm not sure how much we'll get done.  If I am not back on before Easter, everyone please have a blessed Easter!

the many uses of a divided tray...

Ok, so this week I find myself swamped in work! --Not for this year though, I'm already thinking of new things to implement, new ideas to try, and with three small kids, the more organized I can get now, the easier it makes my life come August.  I'm working on reading groups activities/organization, I am working on a new behavior system that makes misbehavior less of a guessing game for the parents, a new classroom makeover, my minds justa' adding on to the already large "to do" list.  When I'm trying something new though-that I think will benefit the kids, its not even like work, I get all excited. Thankfully, I've got some awesome co workers that inspire me to try new things.   Anyway, that's what I've been up to this week.  

Here is a center we have going on this week.  

If I have any advice for primary teachers, it  is BUY THESE TRAYS!  I use them for SOOO many activities!!  We do CVC work with them, we make CVC words from our names...a ton with them.  And they are only $1!!  I got mine from Walmart a few years ago during the spring/summer.  

In this particular center there are spring caterpillars, each a certain word family, and they make those word family words in their trays with magnetic letters (or whatever letters you have available).  I had them take a Dry Erase marker and write them on the caterpillar instead of using the recording sheet.  The recording sheet would be great for first grade, though.  

Here's me with my plug:  (cough, cough): The caterpillars and the recording sheet are part of Spring Bundle unit on TPT.  Click here to see it.  Have a good rest of the week, everyone! 

Spring Fever!

Well, first off, Kinder Korner got a makeover?  What do you think of it?  Long story, it was not something planned but I like the new look a lot, and it didn't even take me 3 days like it did the last time, so that's something too! :-)  
We started our study of "plants" today.  I hope I don't bore you with my posts and pics of what we do this week, but this is honestly one of my favorite themes that we do throughout the year.  Maybe because there is a lot of Science involved, maybe b/c the students always seem to love it, or maybe because I am getting "the fever".  We had 70 degree weather today, and are suppose to have it all week! -(Dare I say that?)  This time of year always seems to mark the beginning of warm weather, sunny days, and fresh air again.  Spring fever--the only kind that I welcome.  
So, when the class came in from a pull out they spotted the cups of soil I had put out for later that day.  I said to myself, "Becky, that was such a rookie mistake".  I know better, and we then had to rearrange the schedule a tad to start our learning about plants right then and there so they could go ahead and get their hands dirty.  :-)  
First we started by reading a story on how a seed grows.  If you are looking for an informational text on plants, I highly recommend this one. 

     Then we went ahead and planted our sunflower seeds.  Fingers crossed that we get at least 1 bloom from each child's cup.  I put about 4 seeds in each cup to try and up my chances of this happening.  It seems like every year, no matter how hard I try, there's always 1-2 kids that don't get anything happening with their plant.  

     Tomorrow we will write in our "plant observation journals" for the first time.  We will periodically update these when we see changes in our plants. 

You can get my plant observation journal and more for FREE in my TPT store.  Click here.

Spring Has Sprung!

Hello all!   Spring is in the air here in KB!  Color me happy about it too-- I love to see all the bright colors and have outdoor recesses again!  
This week we have been working on some creative writing.  "If I were a kite, I would go _________."  I've said it a million times, but it excites me so to see how far they have come in their writing.  The last one took the words right out of my mouth! :)

I love the mawtins=mountains, and the grosh re=grocery. :)  I should invent some sort of game where you have to interpret phonetic spelling.  It'd be fun to watch!  

Here are some centers we worked on this week.  Completing the sentences and also craft stick word families.  They are REALLY easy to make and were just what we needed as a nice review this week. Craft stick word families are craft sticks that have Velcro on both ends, you can swap out initial letters and word family letters as well.  I color coded mine, so the students knew which set was theirs.  

These acrostic caterpillars brightened up our hallways.  We spent some time talking about how to make this type of poetry. It took some practice to understand the concept, but then we were on our way.  We started with the acrostic on paper and brainstormed some possible choices as a class.  Then they spent one day writing their choice words on the paper, and the next day converted those to the caterpillar craft.  I wish I could have taken a picture of what the kids wrote on theirs, but I have yet to learn how to cloud out the names of the kinders.  :(  But they all had really "Springy" answers, I was impressed!  
The acrostic caterpillar template is just part of my "Spring Bundle" product I have on my TPT store.  Click here to check out the full product.  

Next week is Plants.  I can't wait-it's one of my favorites!  Stay tuned. :-)

"Sometimes You Feel Like a Nut.." (and today I did)

Our target skill we focused on today, and the rest of the week is punctuation and using it to cue our inflection while reading.  So for today's lesson, I decided to read the book, Punctuation Takes a Vacation.  Cute, cute book.  For my Kindergarten class this should have been a review because we had talked about the period, question mark, and exclamation point--and what their "jobs" were.  So, this lesson was not about "what punctuation should we put at the end of the sentence?" I geared it more toward using more inflection in our voices when we are reading.  After the story, I explained how we change our voices to fit these punctuation marks.  We don't say a (!) sentence as a question, etc.  I did some examples on the board of how a sentence sounds with a period behind it, and how that same sentence sounds with a ?, and a !.  I wanted them to work with partners to practice this inflection so I put some sentences (without punctuation) in a bag, along with a card with the 3 punctuation marks we focused on:  period, question mark, and exclamation.  I wanted to add an element of fun to it though, so I also put cards in their bags to "say it like Santa", or "say it like a grandma", etc.  So that's all well and good but I'm up there in the middle of a classroom, providing them with my best "monster voice", "parrot voice", etc.  Being in front of a class acting lke a parrot, can make a teacher feel pretty nutty.  Add in the fact that this lesson was being observed, and that the kids took awhile to warm up to my goofiness (CRICKETS!?!),  I pretty much felt like a hot mess.  :)   In the end, however, I will say that I think I took one for the team here though,  b/c "crazy lady" or not, the kids seemed to have a lot of fun with this inflection exercise..eventually! when they were doing it themselves.   And I was cracking up at some of the voices as well.

I have the materials (minus the "say it like ____" cards) I used for the lesson, on my TPT store for FREE right now.  

Click here to go to my TPT store for the below sentences, punctuation cards, posters, and more.