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Friday Freebie – Candy Heart Sorting
Happy Friday! Can you believe January is almost over? It seems like it has flown by! I’m jumping on the Valentine’s day train because I love Valentine’s day. I wanted to make sure that I had a chance to share a couple of Valentine’s Day freebies with you, so I’m starting a bit early. This Conversation Heart graphing set is the same one that I have been using with my class for the last four years. It is from Pocketful of Centers, and she thought of everything. The set includes a page for sorting, a page for counting each color, and a page for graphing. I use these three pages…
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Preschool Printables for Valentine’s Day
I love to celebrate holidays with my students, and Valentine’s Day stands out as one of my favorites. As an adult, you either love Valentine’s Day, or you hate it, but little one’s haven’t yet developed a reason to hate it. I love that I get to encourage my students to share their love with everyone, and they’re happy to do so! Over the years I’ve collected a ridiculous amount of Valentine’s Day activities, but my favorites are the one’s that I’ve put together for my students. Each year I’ve tweaked them just a bit and I am so proud of the collection that I’ve put together, so I had…
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Reggio inspired writing centers
On Monday I talked about how my classroom is ever-changing. I am constantly rotating materials in my centers, so thought I would give some examples for different center materials. Once I gathered a ton of materials for a particular center it was much easier to switch them out frequently. When it comes to the writing center, my students especially love the following language-related materials: Clipboards filled with PLENTY of paper (my students tend to be quite prolific!) A variety of writing utensils (pencils are always available, but I switch in pens, colored pens, colored pencils, markers, crayons, etc.) Alphabet stamps Dry erase boards and markers Mini notebooks I also like…
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Reggio inspired math centers
Yesterday I talked about how my classroom is ever-changing. I am constantly rotating materials in my centers, so thought I would give some examples for different center materials. Once I gathered a ton of materials for a particular center it was much easier to switch them out frequently. When it comes to the math center, my students especially love the following math-related materials: Scales (authentic bathroom or kitchen scales, as well as balancing scales) Calculators Abacus (I have a Melissa & Doug Classic Wooden Abacus that my students LOVE) Rulers, yardsticks, and tape measures magnet numbers I also like to add things that students can manipulate with each of these items,…
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Creating a dynamic preschool classroom
Do you remember visiting your friends’ homes as a child? Their toys were so much more fun to play with that your own, and their bedrooms/backyards/playrooms were WAY better than yours. You never understood why they wanted to come to your house, but they felt the same way, your stuff was more interesting than what they had. This is because it wasn’t the same old stuff that you played with every single day, your play things were boring because you were used to them, and they were always available. This idea is true in the classroom too. My students don’t want to use the same materials every single day, nor…
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Friday Freebie – Winter Snap Cubes
Happy Friday! I love a short week like this one, especially when a nasty bug is going around, I’m in need of a couple of weekend days when I can sleep in! I was so excited to find this freebie, there are certainly more than a few winter blues floating around my classroom (myself included!) so I’m always looking for ways to make winter just a little more fun. These winter snap cube patterns look like just what we need. These are from Klever Kiddos, and I have the Easter set (which my students absolutely loved last year) so the winter set will be the perfect addition to my math…
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Becoming Young Thinkers
I’ve been doing a bit of a book study on Judy Harris Helm’s Becoming Young Thinkers. I wanted to share my favorite insights from the book with you, so I’ve been doodling the quotes that jump out at me. Here are my favorite quotes from the first chapter, you can see my favorites from the book’s introduction here. Of course, I completely forgot to photograph them before I started adding color, so I don’t have the black and white versions this time, but I will with the next set!
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Social Studies Activities for Preschool
Remember, the Standards that I use every day, and am most comfortable with are Ohio’s Early Learning Development Standards – you can review them here, however I’ve found that even if your State’s standards differ, many of these activities can still be aligned similarly. I’ve rounded up some great ideas today!Domain: Social StudiesStrand: GovernmentTopic: Civic Participation and Skills For preschoolers, this standard focuses on understanding responsibilities, negotiating social conflicts, and practicing cooperative behaviors – the foundations of being productive, responsible members of society. Here are some activities that are aligned with this standard; Cooperative games with basic materials from Moments A Day A cooperative art project from Anna Reyner Practice grace…
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Documentation Display Ideas
Documentation panels are great for so many different purposes, but it can be really difficult to find enough space to display all of them and your students’ artwork, especially when you don’t have a ton of wall space in the classroom. Over the years I’ve gotten pretty creative when it comes to displaying documentation, and of course, one of my favorite places for inspiration is Pinterest. Here are some of the most innovative display ideas (many of these are for photos, but could easily be modified to accomodate artwork, work samples, or panels) that I’ve found – I especially love documentation displays that could tie in with the project itself,…
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Google Drive Student Portfolios
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How to Create a Documentation Panel Using Power Point
I create all of my documentation panels using Microsoft Power Point, this might seem kind of strange, but I’ve found that it gives me the most freedom when moving and manipulating photos and text. I’m going to walk you through how I do it – and I don’t do tutorials because I always miss a photo or an important step, so it must be pretty easy if I’m doing the tutorial! I hope that my screenshots will make it easy for you to follow along, the first two steps are the most important, and the ones that I tend to forget, so if you can get these, the rest will…
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Google Drive Student Portfolios
