It's the last Five for Friday until August 2nd, be sure to link up!

1. This happened again today, sigh. Here's hoping my thyroid levels are normal so it can STOP happening.

2.  Pretty sure I've got the beginnings of a cold too. Why do teachers always get sick in the summer?

3. I needed a way to get my pre-k summer kids excited about learning sight words, and these color by sight word pages seem to be doing the trick! They'll be up soon in my store.

4. I'm on social media now! I have a facebook page, and an instagram, but hardly any followers. Please follow me! (Just click on them!)

5. Here's some of our activities from summer pre-k this week:

Our pocket chart story, you can get it here.

Number match from Kinderkids, you can get it here.

Roll a Shape from Julie Lee, you can get it here.

This character activity is part of my Little Red Riding Hood pack, found here. And yes, the version we read does have a crocodile at the end! 

6. BONUS!! Don't forget, to celebrate 1,000 followers on TPT I am throwing a sale this week and there will be a big giveaway next week!!

1,000 TPT Followers Celebration!

I can't hardly believe it! I've been so busy with summer school I missed passing the 1,000 follower mark on TPT. I've been waiting to get there for forever! This calls for a celebration!

From now until June 20th my entire store will be 20% off, and check back on July 1st because I'm hosting a giveaway you won't want to miss!!

Thank you all for helping me get to 1,000!

You can now follow me on social media! Click on the buttons on the right side of my page to follow me on facebook, pinterest, instagram, and bloglovin!

Blog Lovin'

Apparently google reader is going away July 1st, but you can follow me over on Blog Lovin'!

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

Hope to see you over there!

2013 Summer Bucket List Update #1

Here's how I did this past week! 

My Math Journal/Notebook Pack is now listed here: 

We made it to the beach: 

I participated in the Book Study. 

And I blogged more than twice during the week! 

All that in-between working 9 hour Pre-K Days! 

Speaking of which I've also been uploading the Little Books and Pocket Charts I've been using with the Pre-k Sweeties as I go. You can find them here: 

I'll be adding more as the summer goes on, and bundling them in the fall!

Five for Friday (6/21/13)

It's Friday!!!!!!!!!!!! I've never been so happy to see Friday!!!!!!!! Here's 5 random things from my week!

1. Summer VPK is in full swing and we are well on our way to becoming Kindergarten ready!! This week we continued the fun with Brown Bear. Some of our student's Pre-K report cards showed that they were having trouble mastering sorting. These two sorting activities are from Julie Lee's Brown Bear pack:

2. We piggybacked off the animals in Brown Bear to start talking about animals. We started with different body coverings. This activity is a freebie from my store found Here.

3. Here's our pocket chart story for this week. We learned the words we, like, and the!

4. My very best friend had a baby this week! Here's little Levi on his birthday!

5. And to wrap up my week, today I made it through blood work without hysterics for the very first time!

Happy Friday Friends! Be sure to link up with Doodlebugs Teaching!

Throwback Thursday (6/20/2013)

 I'm linking up with Cara Carroll for this ADORABLE Throwback Thursday Linky Party. Here's one of my most popular posts from last August, all about how I do Daily 5. Perfect for back to school if you're considering implementing Daily 5 this year! 

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THURSDAY, AUGUST 2, 2012

MAKING DAILY 5 WORK FOR ME

I’m not sure if the Daily 5 book study is still going or not… I haven’t seen any posts recently. But Chapter 7 is all about trouble shooting and it really made me think about how/if I could make this work in my classroom. I came to the conclusion that I CAN make it work, but with some adjustments. Here are my problems with doing Daily 5 the way it is presented in the book:

1. The Book says to do 5 30-minute rotations. . . That’s an hour and a half! I only have an hour for rotations.

2. The book says to pull kids while they are working on other parts of Daily 5. I have four groups that I need to see for 15 minutes each, no exceptions.

3. The book says the kids can have free reign over deciding what to do when, and where to do it. I know, from 6 years in the same neighborhood, that these kids can’t handle that. Some choice yes, but they need structure.

4.  My students are expected to use the computers. Our district actually monitors student usage of the computers to make sure they are getting a good amount of time on them.

So here’s how I’m going to make it work for me, because I do really like the components of Daily 5 and I think it really simplifies things down from having so many centers all over the room. I will continue to do four rotations during my hour block. You can see by my board from last year here how I do that – One rotation is always reading group with me and the others were centers around the room.

I am going to simply combine my other centers into the daily 5 like this:

So each day my students will meet with me, rotate to either read to self/read to someone, rotate to either word work/writing center, and rotate to either listen to reading/computers. For read to self and read to someone I will let them choose where to work. However, computers will always be at the computers, word work at the word work center, work on writing at the writing center, listen to reading at the listening center. This way they still get to choose where to sit during one of their rotations, but I don’t have to deal with the entire class choosing (and fighting over) where to sit. The literacy games I have made in my various units will provide lots of choice at the word work center.

So on any given day my work board might look like this:

 Let me explain it a little... the kids are in four groups based on level. Red, yellow, green and blue. Each letter within the group stands for a kid. Normally the index cards have their name and picture. A and B are always partners, C and D are always partners. So Kid A in the red group will go with his partner B to reading group with me, then read to self, then listen to reading, then word work. He'll do this for two days, then I'll swap them so that he goes where C and D went - first to me, then to read to someone, then to computer, then to work on writing. 

I’ll keep you updated on how it goes once we get it started in a few weeks.

Guided Reading Book Study {Chapter 1}

I'm joining the girls at freebielicious for their summer reading book study on Guided Reading! Each week they post questions to think about and questions from teachers to guide you through the chapters. Every Thursday I'll be posting my responses and linking up! This week we're starting with Chapter 1! 

Be sure to check our everyone else's responses! 

An Apple A Day: Classroom Management

Today, I am  linking up with Leigh over at the Applicious Teacher.

Our topic for today is...

CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT
If you've been following my blog for a while, you know I have a puppy theme in my classroom. For classroom management I use the clip chart system, with a twist. My levels are dog houses! 

The children all start on Green (Doggone Good) and either clip up for good choices (Top Dogs, Best in Show), or down for poor decisions (Kennel Time, The Pound). At the end of the day the children color in their calendars to reflect their color. This provides their parents with clear communication on their behavior for that day. 

The clip chart and Behavior calendars for 2013 can be found in my 'Doggone Good Behavior' Pack:
Once my students have achieved five or more clip-ups (to blue or purple) they've earned a treat. That treat can either be a prize from my treasure box, or a reward from my 'Behavior to Bark About Catalog.'

The catalog contains rewards such as jump to any spot in line, wear a hat to school, sit with a buddy in a booth at lunch, etc. But my kids favorite was the super supplies reward. I don't have a picture, but I took a regular pencil box and decorated it with glittery smiley face stickers. Then I filled it with sparkly crayons, crazy cut scissors, markers, colored glue sticks and other fun supplies. My students loved earning the right to use those special supplies for a day! 

Make sure to link up if you have cute ideas for behavior management! 

Five for Friday 6/14/13

I'm on time!!! Can you believe it? I'm posting a Five for Friday, ON FRIDAY! It's a summer miracle! Here's my five, and don't forget to link up with DoodleBugsTeaching!

1. On Monday, my husband and I got a new patio couch, and a new grill. The porch has quickly become our new favorite place to relax and every meal this week has been from the grill. Steaks, Hamburgers, Hot Dogs, Chicken, even a banana smore's desert!

2. Summer VPK (Florida Pre-K) started this week! Our goal is to be Kindergarten Ready by August! That means lots of phonics and math practice! I began teaching them color words and simple sight words using one of my pocket chart stories and little books from my August Packs. Wednesday we learned the sight words, color words, and read through the sentences practicing one-to-one correspondence.

Thursday we reviewed the sight words, read through the sentences again, and then we took out the pictures and the children volunteered to help us put the pictures back in the right order by their matching sentence as we read each one. Then they completed this simple recording sheet that contained all the same sentences. They read the sentence, traced the color word, and colored the picture to match.

Today, we practiced reading the chart again, then each child got their own little book copy. The little books correlate so they have all the same sentences. We practiced finding the front and back cover, reading the title, then practiced reading our sentences and pointing under each word as we read. Last, the kids colored.  They were so excited to realize that they are READERS. They all took their books home today to read them to their families.

3. Going along with colors, we also talked about what happens when you MIX colors and we did this fun science experiment!

4. Thursday the kids wrote their own I am sentences using their names, and then today they wrote I am sentences using color words. This was a great opportunity to talk about capitals at the beginning, learning to use a two finger space in between words, and a period at the end of a sentence. They did great!

5. And now it's the weekend! Happy weekend from my favorite spot!

The Pocket Chart Stories and Little Books for August and September can be found here:

Or as a year-long bundle here:

Or as an August/September Bundle Here: