PreK Days

A few weeks back one of my Pinterest ladies asked me if I had a website where I posted all of my classroom ideas I always posted about and I said why yes I have a blog, but i have have never really posted anything from school before, but I guess I should so I can look back and remember all of the fun stuff we do. I mean I don't work my butt off each week for nothing!

The past 3 weeks have been jam packed with crafts and work and I thankfully remember to snap pictures of a few things.
2 Weeks ago we met Ms. A who taught us all about Apples. I didn't take many pictures from this week because no one had asked me to post my classroom ideas yet.We love glyphs in our class and we usually do 1 a week and since we were leaning about apples this week it made sense we would do one on Apples. The students did great cutting all of their pieces out, but some of them had a hard time with the seeds. The directions were: If you have swallowed an apple seed draw 3 seeds on your apple and if you have not swallowed a seed draw 5 seeds. Thankfully we always make extra copies because some of my friends just drew dots ALL over the middle of their apple and some friends made 3 or 5 tiny dots. Luckily I had made an example and they were able to see what the directions meant.

Next the students cut, painted, and created their very own Apple Cores. I sadly was not at school that day because Little Lady was sick with some virus going around, but I think they did a pretty great job!

Our students also tore paper to work on fine motor skills to create an Apple Tree. I thought these would be super cute and easy, but my babies seemed to have a difficult time understanding how to use the different pieces to create their trees. We are working on letting them have some freedom artistically and I don't think they are used to this yet. They are still used to someone telling them exactly where to place each piece, but we will get there with a little time and a little freedom.
 

A few of our jobs which I of course forgot to take pictures of so these are pictures from the sources.

Apple Seed Number Matching

Roll An Apple Tree

Apple Tree Number Matching

Apple Patterns

Next we met Ms. F and her funny feet and she taught us all about The Farm. Surprise surprise we did another Glyph and everyone followed the directions to create their own cow. The udders crack me up!

One of our Jobs this week was for each table to create a different Farm Animal. One table made cows one made horses, one made  sheep, one made  pigs, and one made chickens. I like how each one looks a little different because we let the kiddos do their own thang and didn't hover over them while they were working. I feel like we are always telling them what color things should be and how something should look and so what if their pig doesn't look exactly like my example pig they are using their imaginations.

Another job each student completed was Planting A Pattern. I provided each student with 2 different types of seeds (beans) and since only 1 table a day was completing this project I got to work 1 on 1 with each student as I passed out their "seeds". We talk about patterns regularly because one of my attention grabbers is while I am waiting for my friends to join me on the carpet I will start clapping and patting my knees in a pattern and the students magically start following along. We have talked about AB, ABA, and ABBA, patterns so this simple AB pattern was a cinch! So far this has been one of my favorite things we have done. They turned out so cute and my kiddos did an awesome job completing it on their own.


Each week one of our jobs is to create something that starts with each letter out of the letter (that sounds confusing). Last week we made an Alligator out of the letter A and this week we made a Fox out of the letter F

Our last job was some good ole Pig Shape Graphing(I forgot to snap a picture of a kiddo completed pig). The students colored each shape on the pigs body a specified color then they counted each shape and graphed how many there were. This was very easy for some students and others had a more difficult time with this, but since I was able to work one on one with each I was able to help them count and figure out how many boxes to color. 

Something I am trying to do each week is add some science into our day. My 2 main goals this year were to make Religion and Prayer a key aspect in our class and to add in more science. So far I feel like I am doing pretty good adding in more and more each day while still keeping up with our core lessons. We read a book about magnets and sinking and floating so this week we learned about what is and is not Magnetic. We worked as a class at their tables since we only had 5 big magnets and the children did awesome passing the magnets around the table to see if each thing was magnetic or not. Then they worked on their own cutting out each picture and gluing it onto the magnet if it Was Magnetic and gluing it into the box if it Was Not Magnetic. I made my own worksheet from the printable at Bunting, Books, and Bainbridge This was really fun and the kiddos did awesome following directions and figuring out what was and wasn't magnetic.

Now we are caught up with our past few weeks in the classroom and we can get on with what we did this week.
 We met Mr. X and learned about being different and being healthy. Mr. X taught us all about our bodies, our 5 senses, and our teeth.

We used Toothbrushes (magic erasers hot glued on giant popsicle sticks which were the genius idea from Mrs. Cathy) to brush these yucky yellow teeth to beautiful healthy white teeth.

We rolled a dice and placed that many Teeth (marshmallows) in the mouth. Not sure why this came out so blurry.

Cut out healthy and unhealthy pictures from magizines to glue onto healthy white and unhealthy yellow teeth.

Sequenced toothbrushes from smallest to largest. This was my own creation so no link to Pinterest. So yes I do come up with some of my own ideas. I have one for next week I am pretty psyched about. Let's just way it has to do with camping and position words

Made X-rays out of X's

Took X-rays of our hands

And used those super cute Toothbrushes created by Mrs. Cathy to clean these yucky unhealthy teeth which my kiddos dubbed the cow teeth.

So as you can see we have been pretty busy down the hall in 4K. We are all ready for next week and meeting our new friend Ms. Y. She will teach us all about camping! Get ready for some bear hunting and a little tent time. 

PreK Days

So someone told me recently that I should add a few posts here and there about what my day is like when I am not at home wrangling my precious teething princess. 

I have taught  at a small Catholic school for 5 years now and it blows my mind to think I have already been there 5 years, but it really blows my mind to think that I have been teaching for 11 years now! I still remember arguing with my mom about what I should major in at school and her telling me I should be a teacher and I also still remember me telling her she was crazy because I was going to study anthropology (boring!) and I even took a fashion marketing class (because I have so much style and fashion sense). Well she was right of course because she is almost always (not all the time), but almost always right and once I took my first child development class I was hooked. Then I started teaching in a tiny school in a little red house called Thackston School Branch and I knew what I was meant to do. That little school is no longer there, but the people I met and the lessons I learned there were invaluable.
I absolutely love my job and couldn't imagine doing anything else or teaching any other age. I also happen to have a pretty great teaching assistant (I hate calling her that because she should get just as much credit as I do because she is that awesome) who keeps me sane everyday.

My classroom a few weeks ago before they took down 1 half of my chalk board to get ready to install my new SMART BOARD!!!!!!!!!! 

Currently we use the Letter People curriculum and yes I get to play with puppets everyday. This is Mr. R and he wins rainbow ribbons for his roses.

but we also try to add in even more to make each week more successful and fun. No matter how much I do I always feel like I could have done more or done something better. Especially now that I have my own child I always try to think if this was my child that I am teaching what would I want her teacher to do, teach her, or treat her. I believe children should be allowed to create and discover without too much intervention from me. I like to give them the freedom to make choices and use their imaginations. I guess I am a cross between a convergent and divergent teacher because there are some things I feel like should be done a certain way like letter writing and behavior, but when it comes to the creative aspect of preschool I feel like children should be given a variety of supplies and given the chance to create their own versions of what visual they are given.

So what have we been up to lately?? Well thanks to Pinterest  I feel like this has been one of our best years yet. One thing we have changed this school year is instead of doing every activity as a class I have adopted something from my friend Nicole who teaches right next door. She learned about "Jobs" from her time as a student teacher and now we have adopted it for our classroom. I think that might be one of my favorite things about being a teacher. I love that most teachers are so open and willing to share because all we are all trying to do is make everyday as successful and fun as it can possibly be and if you have a good idea or see a way I can try to be a better teacher then by all means I am always open to suggestions. So now like I said instead of doing every activity as a group which can be difficult because I like to be able to work as closely as possible with my babies to make sure they are getting everything they can out of each activity and this permits me to do this. Each day during our afternoon work period each table is completing a different activity and each day we rotate these activities until each table has completed it. I have 5 boxes that I keep the supplies for each activity in so when it is time to work I have everything right at my fingertips and a convenient place to keep everything together. Now how do I keep up with which table does which activity each day you ask? I have a chart that looks something like this that hangs on my board

My boxes are pink, purple, green, and blue, but  I have 5 tables and only 4 squares so how does that work out? Well 1 of my tables is usually being pulled by my assistant Mrs. Cathy and she is either assessing them or doing some 1 on 1 work or they are doing the same activity as 1 of the other tables. How I know who does what each day is by moving our table shapes around. Each table is labeled with either a yellow triangle, red square, green circle, orange diamond, or a blue rectangle. This helps when I need to call a table to do something I just say blue rectangle table line up, or green circle table get you snacks, etc.

 Each shape sits on a little plastic bracket and each day they are rotated. Whatever shape is not on the chart is my assessment table for the day and the other tables complete whatever activity is in the corresponding box.

Then the next day I rotate them. Blue is off the chart, red moves down to blue, green moves down to green, yellow moves down to purple and orange moves to pink.
I had to get the hang of doing things this way and running 4-5 activities instead of just 1 at a time, but now that my students and I ahve gotten used to it after a few weeks things are running smoothly. It helps that my babies are so good and so smart.

So what have we learned about this week. This week we met Ms. F who has funny feet which makes her different from everyone else. We talked about being different and then we talked about all kinds of words that start with F and one of our special words was Farm so this week we learned all about the farm.

Some of the activities we completed (these pictures are not from my class, but I will take pictures this week)
F is for Fox

Planting a Pattern

Pig Shape Graphing

Farm Animals

Chicken, Cow, Pig, Sheep, Horse not pictured

Cow Glyph

This week was so much fun I am so excited for next week and meeting Mr. X and x-rays, teeth, and 5 Senses.