Happy New Year!

That's really it, just wanted to say best of luck to all of you in 2014!
:)Amanda

as promised :)

Beginning December projects:

For these first two, we reviewed shapes and talked about "December" theme items that might come in the shape of a triangle. Then, we dyed popcorn by putting already popped popcorn in a baggy with a little bit of paint and shaking them up good! Once the pieces were glued down, we made our triangles into real pictures! Love this art project!

 

Next up: The Shape Snowman dancing in the falling snowflakes. A classic, but I love it every time!

 

 Today's quick afternoon reading lesson: There Was an Old Lady who Swallowed a Bell!

Coloring, cutting, sequencing, gluing, and labeling - whew!

 

Check back for more to come! 

:)Amanda

Happy Holidays!

I didn't get a chance to take pictures before our snow day on Friday, but here's one to hold you over until next week... I'm not really sure this picture should be forever available on the internet, but here goes! My kiddos have such a silly teacher :)

Photos to be taken/posted as soon as possible: Shape snowmen, Popcorn art, Free painting, Labeling work, and Snowy day Ten-Frames

Happy December everybody!
:)Amanda

Happy Thanksgiving!

Thanks to all of you for following/reading my blog posts this year! I am really trying to update more often and add photos! I need to figure out that anonymity piece though (putting smiley faces on like stickers or blurring out faces - most of the time it ruins my pictures, so I'll work on finding a happy medium here). But anyway... you are appreciated just for reading my updates, my venting, my excitedness, my ramblings - so I am celebrating YOU this Thanksgiving! Thanks for having an interest in my classroom and my students!

I have had a really fun time celebrating Thanksgiving with my class this year - I am hoping I started a "Something I'm thankful for..." Show-and-Tell day because that was REALLY fun! Our students and paraeducators all participated and we saw some very cool things! I loved hearing some guesses after our initial "clues" were given - and a lot of times they were right! Thanks to everyone who participated for bringing in your cool items and sharing your stories of who gave it to you, who you share it with, and why you were thankful for it! The quote of the day, was from one student that said: "But the season is about giving, not getting. I'm thankful for my family and friends! Well, plus my snow globe!"

Happy Holidays, everybody!
:)Amanda

Lots to update!

I cannot believe how fast October flew by, and now we are already two weeks into November! I have not posted a new blog entry in a while, so I'm sorry about that - I think this is about the point I reached last year and just gave up - but I'm trying to get back into the habit... so here are a few things from the last month or so that I have been meaning to share!

What feels like months ago, we were working on letter Ff and 

made these super cute paper plate frogs! I love the long tongues!

 

Then, during ::Pumpkin Week:: we played a few rounds of pumpkin bowling before this happened!

 

 Yep, you read that right - pumpkin bowling!! We used toilet paper rolls for pins and a small pumpkin for a ball - taped a bowling lane onto our floor, stacked up the paper into a pyramid, and added up how many pins we each knocked over! I gotta say, I thought the math would be the most fun part, but watching the pumpkin explode was definitely the highlight!


Last but not least, I want to tell you all about this awesome article a fellow teacher brought to my attention and I have since passed on... for some reason I cannot rotate this photo, but google Contemporary Arts Center's newest exhibit for kids - "The Dinosaur says Moo" and check it out if you can!

I guess that's it for now - right now I'm planning letter J and K lessons, a lot of fun fall crafts and activities to go with some read-alouds and I'm REALLY looking forward to our show-and-tell something we are thankful for day on Monday, Nov. 25th!

Until next time :)

...been a couple weeks...

Well, we've continued letters A-F, we're on Gg now - fresh from Fall Break and ready to work! I am in love with these cute giraffes (for letter g) we made on Monday so I just had to share a few of them! Pinterest-inspired of course, but with the students' own little twists :)

Elmer the Elephant Week!

As promised, although sorry it's a little late, here is some of the great stuff from our last week's theme unit - Elmer the Elephant by David McKee! We read 6 of the Elmer books, voted on our favorites at the end of the week, and completed daily "following directions" art projects along with worksheets that tied in with our math work!

Bar Graph - "Elmer" (the original introductory book) turned out to be the winner!

Some of the group art-work was just too cute to take down, so I hung the mosaic "team-work" Elmer and our Handprint Herd together over the cabinet in our room! Love the idea of a "We are one awesome herd" bulletin board or door display, but this is what I had space for and I'm thinking it'll stay up for a while!

 By the way - that mosaic Elmer was such a cool project! The kids really got into it... I made one big elephant cut-out on black butcher paper, cut it into 8 sections and each student was responsible for mosaic-ing his/her own section with help from an adult if needed. Then we had to work as a team to put all of the pieces back together to make one big "patchwork" patchwork elephant! I just LOVE it!!

Last but not least, here is a quick pic of 2 of the worksheets I made to go with our read-alouds. On the first day, we read talked about descriptive words and colored elephants differently for a "Special Day Parade" and of course, counted the elephants too! The second pic here is from Day #4, a review of some pattern-making that we had touched on in math lessons throughout the week - students completed letter patterns and then made their own elephant patterns with colors or more letters!

I had a lot of fun spending a week with Elmer and I think our kiddos did too! One of the books - Elmer and the Big Bird - presents a great anti-bullying message so I think I'm going to keep that one checked out from the library for another week and see if I have any student council members that would like to read it to some of our primary classes!

Time for a break...

I am so proud of everyone's work on letters A-E over the first 6 weeks of school - we're writing and building letters, words, and even some sentences! We've been rocking out to the StoryBots songs on YouTube and other fun songs for each letter too! This week, we're going to take a break from letter work and phonics songs to do an author/character study on Elmer the Elephant by David McKee. I'm so excited because Elmer is one of my favorite characters in any children's book and all of the books teach amazing lessons about being yourself, not bullying others, and teamwork! Check back this week for pictures (sorry I didn't upload any last week - but I promise I will this week - I've been ALL over Pinterest!!) haha! Have a good weekend, yall!! :)

D is for DINOSAURS!

Letter Dd week was super busy, but very fun!

We spent a few days with some "D for Dinosaur" stories and crafts, but then reviewed our first 4 letters and even practiced putting words/pictures in alphabetical order (A-D only for now)!

We had our Day #20 visit from Zero the Hero - he brought us some Super Star stickers and we super hero made masks out of paper plates (Pinterest!) after we did a worksheet all about #20 together!

On Friday, our school's Student Council held a mini-assembly before dismissal about standing up against bullying - the student presenters did a fantastic job and we're looking forward to the next one!

THANK YOU!!!

I just want to quickly use this forum to send a big thank you out to a lot of very deserving awesome people!

Thank you to Mrs. Jane's Uncle Tom who donated a TON of amazing "Prize Box" toys, books, puzzles, and more to our class! How crazy that the gift lot would include some of my kiddos' most favorite things - like an Owen and Mzee book for a boy who has retold the story of friendship and sand along with the O and M songs on YouTube for a year now! (Look it up if you don't know the story - it's pretty awesome!)

Thank you to all our coworkers, friends, and family who helped make the JDRF Walk in Newport today such a huge success! I always love walking with the Cahill family and knowing that I work with some people who took the time and effort to read about Jill's battle with Type 1 Diabetes and donate to the cause is icing on the cake!

Thank you to everyone who has helped me deal with some stress these past couple of weeks - you know who you are and I hope you know how much your support means to me!

We had a great week working on letter C and continuing to practice singing, signing, spelling, and creating with warm colors - looking forward to next week!

Blooming flowers!

Look what we saw at recess today!

In other news... I'll have to post pictures this weekend, but we made our own class book this week called Who Stole the Cookies from the Cookie Jar? We are great authors - the book has real pictures, funny rhymes, and a silly ending! More to come :)

Light Box Station Creation!

I can't believe I almost forgot to post this picture too! I am so excited to use this with our three students with vision impairments this year... it is a lightbox that Jane helped me attach to an art easel station from our preschool classroom that was no longer being used! How cool is this!?? Thanks Jane and Rick for your idea of using the straps - it is going to be Fantastic! I just added this as a pin on my pinterest page - I love the storage underneath for all of the overlays and cool things that the consultant brought us to use!

Zero the Hero came to visit!

Found this idea on Pinterest, so I don't really know which teacher blog to credit (sorry!) Anyway, I fell in LOVE with Zero the Hero while I was planning for this week so I just had to try it out... Today was the 10th day of the school year, and Zero the Hero made his first appearance - he'll be back every tenth day to help us count to 100! The story is that he "holds the ones place to make room for ten" - place value is a tough math concept for most of my kiddos, so I'm thinking this will help!

Here is our own Zero the Hero! Isn't he CUTE!??!

 


 (I took the pic in my bathroom mirror so you could see the cape - no judging my messy-ness, I was busy pinning!) haha!









After we read the online story about Zero the Hero, the kids made their own paper versions by following directions for gluing cut-outs and adding details - here are a few of them!

Now I don't know who is more excited for Zero's next visit on Day #20 - me or the kids!
:)Amanda

Letter Aa Week!

Well, we made it through our first 5-day week! Lots of great handwriting practice on letter A to start off right - some of the students were even finding and reading "apple" in a story! We did a lot of cutting practice this week to see where everyone was at and how much help we'll be needing from our amazing occupational therapist who will start seeing students individually next week!

Some of our letter A projects included a story map of Johnny Appleseed (this was with my 3rd grade alternate assessment group), apple stamping, and paper plate apples for labeling the parts of an apple! We also made apple growing sequences, a favorite apple bar graph, and sorted paper squares into red, green, and yellow apples on a large piece of butcher paper - that one took a lot of group work, but we did it together!

I was shocked today at recess to see something that I helped plant this summer actually grow into something! There are two garden boxes on our school's preschool playground that our summer preschoolers helped clean up and planted a few seeds in. I do not have a green thumb to say the least, but with the weather's cooperation over the last month or so, I'm happy to say, we're growing radishes, pumpkins, sunflowers, basil, and some pretty wildflowers! I just had to share a picture of these too, since everyone that knows me knows I can't grow a plant for anything! Haha!

Well, that's it for this week. I'm working on keeping up with the blog and getting photos to share with you all, so I hope you're enjoying it! See you all next week for letter Bb and Weather Week!
:)Amanda

Reminder about Following this Blog...

In case I forgot to tell you, you do NOT have to become a Google member or sign up for anything to follow my blog this year! Just enter your e-mail address in the box on the top left of the page - that's IT! Nothing else to it :) Once you enter your email address, you'll get notifications in your inbox that I posted something or uploaded a picture! Thanks for following!

Chicka Chicka Boom Boom week!

Well, I think the app test is only going to be good for text updates - I have been trying to upload a picture all weekend, and it just isn't working :/ So, I'll start fresh! 

The first week (well, 3 days for the kiddos) was a success! We really enjoyed some Pinterest-inspired crafts and listening to the Chicka Chicka Boom Boom song on YouTube. We are learning to read our classmates' names and have gotten to check out all of the new activities that I ordered over the summer. I think the musical instruments and color-sorters are going to be the favorites this year! Pictures to come soon! For next week, I'm planning some really fun Letter A and Apple theme lessons and crafts, plus we'll jump into our first Signing Time lessons of the year - Our Classroom and My Backpack! 

Some of the Chicka Chicka Boom Boom activities from this week:

1. Class Book (We're all already authors!! Lots more class books to come - these are always my favorites!)
2. Happy Helpers Job Tree
3. Name Trees (the students built these based on the number of letters in their names and I built the job tree at the same time - it has 6 leaves for "Amanda" - and was their model!)
4. Paper towel roll palm tree crafts - lots of fine motor practice tearing the paper leaves, sticking them into the roll, and sticking stickers onto the roll too!

App test...

I think I can post from my phone too! Oh how technology never ceases to amaze me :)

Summer Preschool

I gotta tell y'all - I wasn't sure I'd be able to get into the blogging thing again this year, and I was so bad about staying up with it last year - but, I'm gonna start off by keeping my promise! This summer, I was lucky enough to co-teach our school's summer preschool program and we did a really fun Eric Carle theme! Here is one of our Pinterest-and-read-aloud-inspired "Foolish Tortoise" crafts - they turned out so cute and had a great sensory twist for our kiddos!

We finished up with a visit from Sunrock Farm (Cold Spring, KY) and a fun water day! Here's a photo of Farmer Frank talking to the kids about the animals he brought with him:

School Starts in Less than 3 Weeks!!

I'm starting fresh with my classroom blog this year, and I'm making it a mission to post at least weekly updates plus photos of our fun craft projects and learning activities! I am looking forward to hearing your responses - so please jump in with me on this blogging adventure and feel free to comment and share! To start, take a look at this board on Pinterest full of fun ideas for our first week back to school... it's really only 3 days, so we'll have a lot to squeeze in, but it'll be lots of fun! I'm planning a "Chicka Chicka Boom Boom - Look Who's in Our Room!" theme - check it out here!