Where have I been?

Good question. Working. Far too much it seems. The good news is I will retire at the end of this school year which will hopefully give me more time to share everything I've created over the past few years. I have a bounty of bulletin boards, displays, lesson ideas and printables to share. Unfortunately I haven't the time now to do so. Please be patient, there will be much more to come.

Bulletin Board Update

Last November we had our Scholastic Book Fair and while I always promote the book fair on the reading bulletin board, I upped my game a bit and added a small contest to it. Students who took the time to find to submit their answers received a $.50 off book coupon to use at the fair. I found the cute monsters via Pinterest and made similar shapes using the colored butcher paper I had available. I then searched for every monster related book to pull eight questions that could be answered by looking at the book covers.

I found another Pinterest inspiration for my I Spy bulletin board. Although the inspiration was a window with lots of 3D elements to look at, I adapted mine to be flat using some Carson Dellosa clipart I had on hand along with some purchased snowflakes.

Hopefully it won't take me as long to post our next bulletin board which is currently being created by our Library Club members.

Turkeys!!!!

With the emphasis on Common Core, learning non-fiction text features is beginning earlier and earlier. This year my school has also incorporated a Stephanie Harvey program which also leans heavily on non-fiction text. Last year I developed a Kindergarten lesson with my team that taught the students about many of the features and then they practiced by creating their own non-fiction texts. To help all our students succeed, we created a tiered system with increasing difficulty. Beginning with students who needed the most support, we offered them a word bank with pictures and the beginning letter for each label. Our second tiered students were successful with only the word bank and beginning letters. Our highest tier was able to sound out the items needing to be labeled and word with only the word bank. To get a jump start on this year, I created a new labeling activity for the upcoming holiday season.

Each level is laid out the same, with the exception of the beginning letter sounds and pictures within the word bank. The activity is available for FREE from my TPT Store. I hope you find this activity useful with your students. If you do download it, please take a minute and leave me some feedback. I'd love to know what you think of the tiered system and how it worked with your students. Enjoy.

Autumn Activities

Fall is such a fun time of year, especially with our little learners. I took longer than I wanted putting this activity pack together because I kept adding new ideas. I finally had to tell myself to simply stop. Plus I didn't want to put out the English version without the Spanish one, which of course takes me longer. I had lots of help from my kindergarten teacher, both in ideas of what she'd like in activities and help with proper Spanish translation. She is fueling the fire....

Here are a few of the samples. The activities are the same in both packs, except there is a bonus page in the Spanish version that Mrs. Wildenhain really wanted, and I wasn't about to say no. LOL

Both packets are available for purchase from my TPT Store. I hope you find them as useful as my teachers have been. 

Library Shelf Dividers

This was actually the project that originally had me thinking about starting a TPT store, but I never took the time. Well, I guess a year has changed that. I took the time today to update the clipart, add a few more dividers for some of my popular non-fiction sections (something I've been wanting to do for a bit now), and then put them up as an item for sale.

This is what they look like on my shelf.

Here is a pic of several together.

They print two to a page, simple laminate, cut and tape to a cardboard magazine holder.

I've used these dividers in many different lessons, both for library skills and for literacy/phonics. They are available for purchase from my TPT Store. I hope you enjoy them too. 

A teacher's request

Apparently "Y" is more important in the Spanish alphabet than I thought it was. Which just demonstrates that all those classes I took.....I'm not even going to finish the sentence. LOL

Therefore, I updated the Spanish Alphabet Coloring Pages to include yo-yo. If you already downloaded the original set, please re-download the updated version. Or, if you'd like, send me an email and I can send you a pdf of only the "Y".

se habla español

Well not really. I've have plenty of Spanish classes in college, but I am simply not comfortable speaking it. My students love it when I try, but I think its because they get to giggle at my efforts. What learning another has taught me is empathy for those trying to learn English. Most of my students are second language learners so I do my best to scaffold my lesson with lots of pictures, graphic organizers, sentence frames, etc. I also work with my bilingual teachers to provide the support they need to help my youngest students in their native language. We are currently working on our letter recognition in my phonics class, so after I developed the alphabet coloring pages, I thought I should do the same for my bilingual classes. If hope you have a use for them, or if not, pass them along to a colleague who does.

This will be a FREE download through the end of the year. Grab it from my TPT store while you can.