Word Wall & Show & Tell

I'm always looking for ways to incorporate our word wall into our learning. In addition to the buzz words that come from our theme units I have started to incorporate items brought in during show & tell too.

While the children are showing and telling I keep my card strips and sharpie nearby so I can write down what it is they are sharing. 

 After they finish we quickly discuss what letter they think the item starts with and then each child gets to place their card with the corresponding letter. It's been very successful so far! Although my current class is small I know larger classes would probably not be able to do this unless show and tell is narrowed down to only a few but since we're small everybody shares every week!

  Until next time...

Valentine's Activities

Last week was so much fun! We learned about fairy tales. Of course we took advantage of hearts for Valentine's Day!

We began by decorating our goody bags!

Fortunately I was able to find lots of great ideas for activities on Pinterest like these...

I was even able to use my fairy tale dress up dolls to coordinate with our theme.

More Pinterest ideas....

I was even inspired to work on one of my own where the children matched the letters of their names to make their own cards to take home!

I also decided to use the tp roll shaped hearts to decorate our lovely Valentine's Day cards.

We were very fortunate enough to have an awesome parent allow us to borrow more than enough princess dress up props for our princess party we threw.

More fun ideas I modified 

Last but not least always finding more opportunities for writing experiences. I've even come up with something I think will be great to incorporate daily!  More on that later...

See you next time!

Helping with Fine Motor Skills

As we were decorating our bags today I found a really cool way to help reduce waiting time while working with peeling the backs off of stickers!

What We've Been Up To!

I thought I'd give a little glimpse of our days since up till now. Since it's been a while between posts.

Right now we are exploring weather conditions but before that here's what happened!

We had an  awesome party 

before our holiday break!

Between October & November we learned about pumpkins and other foods!

We explored more food learning about 

The Very Hungry Caterpillar

We had big fun at the pumpkin patch! 

See you later!

Happy New Year!

It has been so long since I posted I thought I would write share what's been going on. I started the school year with just one class on Tuesday and Thursday mornings now we have two classes! Our Monday Wednesday Friday class started on the 7th of this month and things are going great! I also have more good news. Since I'm usually done with class by 10:30 every day I have signed on to teach KinderJam classes. I'm already about half way through my training and I'm very excited about becoming an instructor! I hope everyone has been keeping busy so far!

Changing up the Environment

After summer enrichment was finished I realized my shelves were a little full to say the least! I am a student of the creative curriculum that says shelves shouldn't be too cluttered, I just wasn't abiding by it! So in an effort to shake up some things and keep the classroom interesting I decided to take out the majority of materials I'd placed on the shelves and commit to refreshing regularly. I am ashamed to say the shelves to still have quite a few things on them even after this!

Here are a few shots before and after.

I cannot believe that there is still lots of other stuff in my garage even with the shelves this full!

I also felt like the kids were having a hard time putting everything back in its place.

Sorry the before photos aren't as clear,

but you get the idea!

Almost finished reorganizing this one!

I think this is much more organized.

 

The kids are able to put the blocks and toys back on the shelf much easier now.

Sensory Boxes

I decided I wanted to add a bit of more variety in our sensory activity so I found quite a few rice recipes and after reading a few reviews settled on Kool-Aid and food coloring to color the rice. I did not take photos of the the process I figured there are tons of them on the web. But this is what we ended up with:

2 sensory boxes for under $7! You can't beat that with a stick! Uninterrupted moments of play, priceless!