Honest Abe and General Washington!!

 

This is just a real quick post to share with you all our directed drawing of 2 of our favorite presidents!! The directions came from Suzanne over at Kindergarten Planet. I'm quite partial to Abe, being from Illinois and all!! Check them out! Aren't they just too cute?!

 

 Honest Abe!  Love the eyes!

 It looks like he's thinking about something important here!

 Very detailed, right down to the eyelashes!

 Quite the smile!

Just love these guys! 

 He's quite patriotic!  Check out the uniform!  Red, white and blue!

 So serious, our General!

 I love this one!  He looks kind of cute for George!

 Adorable!  Who knew kindergarteners were such good little artists!!

"Entire Riddle Collection" on Sale!!

I'm super excited about finishing up my latest riddle collection.  All about Community Helpers!!  To celebrate I've put my huge collection of riddles on sale till tomorrow night for $10.  This collection sales for $18 regularly and now has over 105 riddles to teaching inferring to your little people on a variety of topics!  Hope you'll hop over to my TPT store to check it out!  Have a great night!!

"Teaching and Tapas Huge Giveaway"

Alyssha over at "Teaching and Tapas" is having a huge giveaway.  I know how you all like giveaways!  I've donated my entire "Inferring Riddle Collection" to the cause.  You'll find it under the 2nd grade giveaway!  

Get this, she has over 100 products that you can win with just a few clicks of the mouse. You can also enter to win by grade level!  Total value for all these amazing products is about $500. Ooh, la, la!!  Just click the link below and it will take you over to her website.  Have fun and good luck!!

Happy March!!

March is fast approaching and I finally got my "Calendar Pieces and Book Tally Set" completed.  It turned out really cute!  Hope you'll pop over to my TPT store to check it out!  Oh, by the way, it's free!!  My way of saying thanks to all of my followers!!  Here's just a little sneak peek.  I'd like to thank Ashley Hughes and Krista Wallden for the too cute clipart!!

"Race the Clock Sight Word Fluency Practice" Pack

Just finished up my "Race the Clock Sight Word Fluency Practice" pack.  It will be on sale today only for 20% off.  If you want a fun fast paced way to work on fluency, please check it out!  Have a great day!

 

"Word Sort Short 'a' Activity Pack"

Hi everyone,

I just updated my "Word Sort Short 'a' Activity Pack".  This pack is loaded with activities to do with your k-2 students.  Included are 3 emergent readers, ABC order activity sheets, cut and sort, memory or concentration, etc.  You can check it out at my TPT store.  I will be giving away 3 packs tomorrow.  If you're interested in winning a pack, please leave a comment below.  Have a great weekend!!

"Let's Build a Snowman"

I wanted to share some sweet little people with you tonight!  Last night we had a beautiful snow (perfect snowman building snow).  When we woke up this morning the earth was sparkly white.  Many were hoping for a snow day, but I'm so glad we didn't have one.  Otherwise, I would have missed seeing the delight on these little ones' faces.  Some of our little friends went outside today with their special needs' class and built a snowman.  It was absolutely adorable!!  Below you will see their very special snowman and a couple of my very special little ones!  Enjoy!

This is a picture of the whole snowman building group from both kindergarten classes!

What a little sweetie!!  Look at the delight on this little guys face!  Love it!

Let's kiss a snowman!!  You go girl!  (side note:  I was told the head rolled off after the kiss.  Too cute!)

"You Think It's Easy Being the Tooth Fairy?"

We began our tooth fairy activities by reading "Nice Try, Tooth Fairy".  In this little book Emma writes a letter to the tooth fairy asking to have her tooth returned, so she can show it to her grandfather.  The tooth fairy attempts to return the tooth several times, each time giving Emma a tooth of another creature.  

After reading "Nice Try, Tooth Fairy" we moved on to reading "You Think It's Easy Being the Tooth Fairy?"  I think this is my absolute favorite tooth fairy book.  This little fairy is hilarious sharing all about what all she has to do to be a super tooth fairy.  Even to the point of teaching children where to and not to leave their teeth.  

Next, we did our craftivity from Christie's unit on Dental Health.  Each of the little people created a tooth fairy and wrote about what they would do if they were the tooth fairy.  They turned out some real cutie pooties!!  Check them out!!  Love, love, love Christie's stuff!

A couple of group tooth fairy photo ops!!

What big teeth you have my dear!!

Fangs anyone??

A several one tooth wonders!!

What is a “Home-School Journal”? 

Are you looking for a way to have your students and their families interact through writing? If so, the “Home-School Journal” is an excellent way to make the connection. This is an exciting approach to teaching reading and writing through family involvement. The idea is that young writers need ongoing opportunities to experiment with print, trying to match sounds to letters, and to express their ideas in writing legibly and clearly for themselves and for others. “Home-School” message journals provide these opportunities for writing by providing a real audience for that writing.

Here's how it works: At school, the children will write a message to their families.  Then, the journal is sent home, and the child's family will wrtie a message back.  Families are encouraged to respond to their child's topic.  For example, if the child's message is about "hibernation" families would be encouraged to make reference to "hibernation" in their response.

I've done these journals with kindergartene through 2nd grade students and the benefits to both chlid and family are amazing.  I hope you enjoy trying out my "Home-School Journals with your little people!

Kyp 

 

Walruses, and More Walruses!!

This week we've spent time finishing up our walrus study.  We have learned so many fascinating facts.  Did you know male walruses are about 12 feet long and can eat 3000 clams in one day?  Yikes!  That's a lot of clams.  The little people were also fascinated with the fact they can dive 300 feet down into the ocean.  Of course we had to measure how far that would be.  Needless to say, it took a little while and when we waves at our friends on one end they looked awfully teeny!  

Here's a picture of our information chart!!

 What we "thought" we knew prior to reading our informational text.

 Our new learning...

Things we found out about walruses that we thought we knew, but weren't quite right.

Here are some fun activities we did with "Tooth Trouble".  This first activities comes from Deanna Jump's Arctic Animal unit.  We were reviewing Text-to-Self connections.  The little people did an excellent job sharing what you should do to keep your teeth healthy.

 This one is from one of my little guys who was really struggling at the beginning of the year and still doesn't know quite all of his sounds.  But, isn't this amazing!?  I'm so super proud of him.  He did this all by himself!!

Okay, I'm almost done for the night.  These next pictures are from an idea shared by Cara Carroll on her website.  We had learned walruses are able to whistle.  So, we graphed whether or not we could whistle and then did our pictures of us as walruses.  I have to tell you my principal came in for her walk thru while we were doing this activities and one of my little boys showed how awesome kinders thinks while she was there.  Now, we had 9 people who could whistle and 11 who couldn't.  But, we had only counted the people who could on our bar graph.  This little guy piped right up (in just a blink of an eye) and said there are 11 who can't whistle.  So, me being me asked him how he figured it out so fast.  He said, "I looked at the whistlers and knew it was 9.  So, I just counted on 2 more."  Wowie, wow, wow!  Amazing!  I love it!

Okay, on to the pictures of our whistling walrus selves!