Five for Friday: Bring on December!

It has been a very long week and I just cannot manage to stay up past 9 p.m. It's that feeling of exhaustion that you made it through the week and a long weekend is ahead =) Only three more weeks and then we get a nice long break. I can hardly wait!!

We finished up with all of our Thanksgiving projects this week with some writing prompts, creative turkeys, and the Mayflower ship.  I love letting the kids do crafts to help improve their fine motor skills but we sure have sailed through our supplies of crayons and glues very quickly. I foresee some donations being needed after Christmas break.

Our Thanksgiving in our new home was a success! I love hosting and filling our home with family and friends. It's the feeling of the 'house' turning into our 'home' with love and laughter. We managed to fit us all at one table and plenty of food for everyone. I'm so thankful to have the family that I do =)

My turkey cheese platter =)

My favorite little turkey celebrating her first Thanksgiving!

We stopped at a local farm and they had this cute centerpiece in their store. It was very pricey so we decided to replicate it. It smells so yummy and added some nice decor to the serving table.

We are note big turkey people in this house so our main dish was chicken cordon bleus that I made. They were a hit!

The view from the landing but I got almost everyone in!

I don't know about you but I hate returning from break and seeing all of the decor we have to take down so we prepped our room with some Santa mobiles to hang from our ceiling and we put up our December write the room activities too. All of the turkeys went home. 

Our new home has a two story great room so our little six foot Christmas tree looked a little silly. I found a 12 foot tree at Home Depot online with a coupon. Wooohoo! It was a little time consuming to put up so it may stay that way for a while. LOL! I love my little helpers. Don't you like the swim top on the little one? He dresses himself and I can't argue on the weekends =)

I have been looking to get a new laptop and have been waiting for the iPad pro to come out. I really love the large screen and the fact that I can do my PowerPoint on it. I was a little frustrated that I couldn't get all of my clipart on it and was planning on returning it until I read this blog about using an ixpand on apple products. It has a USB on one end with a lightning adapter on the other. I have been spending the past couple of days transferring pics over on it. It works great!!

Enjoy the long holiday weekend!

Five for Friday: We've almost made it!

It's been a turkey of a week! We started with our anchor chart after reading fictional and informative texts. We also labeled the parts in helping my lil kinders do their activities. Our anchor wall is becoming so colorful =)

These books took a bit of a turn when I started designing them. I started with focusing on the words 'do', 'you', and 'see' because these are the ones we are studying right now. I then changed the theme to match Thanksgiving to make it more relatives to our lives right now. The kiddos are really getting much better at following the prompts independently. I am so proud of them! They are differentiated to meet the needs of all of my class and interactive too!

Interactive & Differentiated High Frequency Books *Thanksgiving Theme

"A Plump and Perky Turkey" is my absolute favorite Thanksgiving book! I love every bit of the book. The class then made their own 'WANTED' posters similar to those in the stories using different mediums. They had a blast!

I found these cute templates on Pinterest and printed them in black and white so the kids could match the shapes and then color them accordingly. They were a major hit with everyone!

We did a little craft with Pilgrims and writing about things that we are thankful for in our lives. I was impressed with some of the thought that was put into them....thankful for freedom, army, mom & dad, teacher, cat, etc. If you haven't read the Junie B. Jones book related to her Thanksgiving celebration then you must. The list they comprise in the story is hilarious. We just finished the book this week and the kids are begging for a Christmas one.

Have a wonderful weekend!

Five for Friday the 13th! Oh my!

 

I just had to post this as it was a recent discussion with my principal. I don't know why we are evaluated on items that are out of our control. I need to learn to just let some things go but it's oh so hard for my personality. Here was our busy week in Kindergarten!

I ordered dice in dice for the very first time after seeing them on a blog and we LOVED them! I thought we would call them "Peek-a-boo" dice since the name is so fitting in finding the little dice inside. I made some differentiated activities for the kids to do in adding the dice together and they did WAY better than I thought they would. Some were even coming back asking for the harder activity. WIN! We even added a little fun to some Veteran's Day activities with them.

Another differentiated lesson we did was learning about turkeys. I made some illustrations at the top with the words in a key to help with the reading passage. This still was a bit challenging for some but we did them together so it was good practice.

My other readers, however, flew through their reading, writing, and personal connections portions! I might have to make these ones a bit more challenging for them next time.

We celebrated Veteran's Day by reading a few books. One that I particularly like is "Sweet Land of Liberty". We discussed the aspects of our freedom and those that make it possible. As a class, we generated some ideas as to what we would tell a soldier and then they wrote them on their letters after making a craftivity to go along with it.

 

You would have thought Christmas had arrived when our Curriculum Director walked in with this beautiful box of interactive science materials for me to check out! The box alone says it all....INTERACTIVE. We are in the process of adopting a new science program this year and I am on the committee. I also did our literacy adoption and it was really an eye opener for me so I quickly volunteered to do this one as well. I am curious as to the programs used by other districts. I really would like to see an interactive one with kits for experiments like this one. There are four different companies we are looking at so I am anxious to dive in =)

 

We were able to escape for 24 hours and attend a football game at my alma mater. I haven't been to one in a very long time and the memories quickly came back as we entered Ohio Stadium. We went to the Skull Session (a pep rally with the band) before the game. I don't know how I earned two degrees at OSU, went to every home football game, and managed to never go hear the band prior to the game. Seriously...must have been tailgating or something. We went and visited all of my favorite spots and had a blast! It was a quick getaway but well worth it =)

 

Have a great weekend!