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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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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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Freebie Friday – Martin Luther King Day
Happy Friday! This week seemed to last forever, it must be because I’ve been longing for this long weekend (I know, I know, we just got back from break, what can I say, I like to sleep in). We are off on Monday for Martin Luther King Day, but I usually recognize the holiday in the classroom on Tuesday, we talk about why we didn’t have school, and it leads into our activities for the day. On Wednesday I gave you some ideas for recognizing diverse characteristics, and this freebie fits perfectly with those activities. This easy little MLK Activity is from Little Miss Kindergarten. All you have to do…
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Classroom Documentation – Know your audience
I’ve spent the last couple of days talking about the basics of documentation; why it’s important, and different kinds of documentation. Today I want to get a little deeper, so I’m going to talk about defining your audience and directing your documentation to the intended audience. When I post documentation I consider two distinct audiences; adults (parents, family members, lab students, school staff), and my students. I do things very different for each audience, because they respond to different kinds of documentation. When I want to draw adults to documentation I place it at eye level for an adult. I am more likely to create panels for adult viewing, because…
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Social Studies Activities for Preschool
We’re working on social studies standards, and the timing worked out particularly well because today’s standard lends itself to Martin Luther King Day. 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: GeographyTopic: Human SystemsPreschool standards are most concerned with making sure that students recognize similarities and differences between people, families, as well as recognizing characteristics of different cultural groups. Last year my class was fascinated by our…
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Types of Documentation
Yesterday I talked about why documentation is so important in the classroom, so you know what it does, but it’s also important to get a grasp on what documentation is. The way that it has been best explained to me is that documentation tells the story of the children’s learning. This means that anything that shows evidence of the learning process can be considered documentation. Documentation generally falls into two categories; Documentation Panels: These are professional works created by a teacher to showcase specific learning experiences. They generally include photos taken by the teacher during the investigation and captions or a description of the experience. Panels are created to be…
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Documentation in the Preschool Classroom
I love documentation! It’s kind of a silly thing to say, but as a teacher documentation is something that I will always and forever include in all of my classrooms. There are a few different reasons for this; Documentation shares the story of the work that children are doing in the classroom. How often do you hear a parents remark that their children claim that they do nothing at school all day? The documentation that I have hanging in my classroom shows parents exactly what we’ve been working on, so that they can be sure that they’re children are doing a lot more than “nothing” all day. Documentation gives…
