Ready for Spiders! (with freebies)

Hello friends! Mark this date down, it's Friday night and I actually have my lesson plans done for next week! Normally, it's a late Sunday night last minute kind of thing. We just finished up our week of bats and next week is spiders! Here's the awesomeness lined up for next week:

 I love the book "Aaarrghh Spider!" 

And Hadar has a super cute freebie that goes along with it!

The writing from this unit will be so much fun!

We've been working really hard on labeling and this next freebie is great. 

Kindergarten Lifestyle has this freebie for bats and spiders.

Our other book for the week is "Diary of a Spider". These diary books are so much fun, but some of the humor is lost on my kinders. 

I have a little packet to go with this and can't wait to use the 5 senses bubble map.

And....of course, each morning we will do our spider morning messages!

They have so much fun with non-fiction units! 

We Love Word Families! {And a Pin It to Win It!}

Hello friends! We have been working on word families the past few weeks. And, wow, these kiddos have actually got it! We've really been working hard and still have a long road ahead of us to get all of my little friends reading these words. But we are off to a wonderful start! When I sat down with my buddy on the other side of the wall to plan our activities for word families, we saw that we were in desperate need of something that would work this early in the year for kinder and be consistent for each word family we worked on. 

Here's what I came up with:

In the pictures above, my kinders are working on the word family house that matches the word to the picture.

We did the circle map today. Students had to cut and glue the pictures that belonged and then label. 

I'm loving how quickly they pick things up! I know it seems like we have to keep adding more and more on the kindergarten load. But the amazing thing is how much they can actually do when we try and have those high expectations. 

This packet has a week's worth of activities for 30 word families. 

Now... pin it to win it!

Use the rafflecopter to pin it to win this packet! 

a Rafflecopter giveaway

911 Program and October Linky

Hello friends! We had our annual 911 program today. They always do such an awesome job. The students have to come up with a pretend emergency and call 911 on the special phone they bring. They are asked all of the questions that would be asked if it were the real thing. This is awesome practice for my kinders! Love their hearts, some of them were really shy but they all did it and did an awesome job.

When they were asked about what an emergency is and when to actually call 911, they remembered what we talked about during fire safety week. I was one proud teacher. I love combining life skills into our morning message! Those skills keep on being squeezed out by more and more being expected in kindergarten (but we all keep plugging along).

Here are my fire safety morning messages:

I also have them for pretty much all of the other themes. 

It is saving me so much time this year to have them already done and ready to go. 

What have you been up to this October? Link up anything that goes with October in the linky below!

An InLinkz Link-up

Halloween with Lots of Freebies!

Hello friends! It's about time to pull out the Halloween activities! Here's some Halloween things you can snag from my little store. Just click on the picture to check them out!

These activities are for K and 1st for tons of station fun!

The Old Lady books are always a hit with my kinders. I actually used this pack for my evaluation 2 weeks ago. 

Morning messages are great to get your kiddos talking about that certain subject and learning new facts. I extend these morning messages by having my kinders write and draw about the message in their journal. 

The bats morning messages are free in my store so you can try them out to see if you like them!

These are free until Monday afternoon with the Facebook Frenzy. Just click on the picture and then the FB Frenzy. You can snag about 40 more FB Frenzy freebies by following the hop!

Now for a freebie just for my blog followers:

These freebies are from this pack:

Just click on the pictures to go to the Google doc.

Happy Halloween Planning!

Line 'em Up!

Hello friends! How do you line up your kids? This summer I found a wonderful freebie from Primary Possibilities' FB page (BTW it's still there!). It's numbers to put on the floor for when your kids line up. 

So, I printed them and was excited to use them. I decided not to laminate them. The school laminator was out of film and I'm really stingy with my personal one. And my thoughts were, it's going to be taped to the floor, so it really doesn't need to be laminated first. Right?! Well, that was an EPIC FAIL! 

Here's what they look like now 2 months into school: 

The crazy part....I don't understand why they are like that! My kids aren't hard on them and it's not like my floor is mopped often. And not all of them came up, just some. 

So, thank goodness that freebie was still up. I reprinted, laminated and put new ones down. 

The moral of this story is....laminate before you tape to the floor! (at least I hope it lasts this way!)

Just as a side note, I absolutely LOVE having the numbers on the floor. Each of my students have their number to line up on (and I can switch it if I see some friends not working out together). They always know where to line up, there's no pushing to be in the front or back, or even a question of where to go! It also helps the students that have to go through my classroom from another classroom to go to the bathroom. 

At first I thought it might be tough for some of them to remember their number, especially ones that don't know their numbers up into the teens. But they had no problem at all. We did it once to practice and that was all I had to do. I only had one that had trouble finding their spot after the initial practice (and let's face it, it took that child a month to remember where their cubby, rug spot and table spot was...too many spots I guess). 

Do you have a system for lining  your students up? If it's on the floor, how do you keep it there?

Pumpkins! {and a freebie!}

Hello friends! We just finished up our week with pumpkins!! I might have said this before, but I love fall! The thematic units for fall are so much fun! Ok, anyway, here is  my week in pictures. {some are seriously blurry, I really need to bring my real camera instead of using my phone...} 

Here is our fall tree. The week we worked on -at words each student wrote as many as they could on their leaf and we added it to the tree. I meant to do the same with pumpkins this week and our word family. It didn't happen so we will do it and add to the tree Monday. I *think* the plan will be to keep the tree up all year and add seasonal die cuts to it with whatever we are working on. 

Here is our pumpkin exploration. I let each student dive in and grab what they could from our pumpkin. They got to put it in a zippy bag and take home (I know my parents just love that, lol).

 During recess, I brought the pumpkin outside for them to really clean it out and have fun.

Love their hearts, they planted the seeds!

 This is our thematic word wall with all the words we need for writing. The glove is for telling "5 Little Pumpkins"

The word wall cards and everything for the life cycle of a pumpkin can be found in my little store. Just click on the picture.

 

Here we wrote down our pumpkin investigation. Here is the link to the original idea.

Our song to sing about pumpkins. Here is the link to the original idea.

I love 5 Little Pumpkins. I changed the wording around a little to leave out witches (the only thing "Halloweeny" we can't use).

Our KWL chart. I love seeing what they already know and what they are curious about!

Here is some journal writing (and the perfect example of why I need to bring my actual camera). We have a thematic morning message and the students write and draw a response in their journal. 

You can check out the morning messages by clicking on the picture below.

 

We make class books for almost everything. They stay in our library for students to read. At the end of the year we draw names and everyone gets to take one home.

 I have no clue where this writing paper came from, but I love it! If you know, please let me know so I can give that wonderful person credit! 

Now, for the freebie. If  you would like to try out the morning messages you can try the one on bats for free! Just click the picture to download.

Thanks for hanging in on this long post! I hope you are having fun with fall festivities!