September

Hello everyone, so I apologize for not blogging all summer and things have been crazy with school starting. I am the school's web curator, the lead teacher of my grade level team and this year I have taken on the responsibilities of Head AR (union rep) for my building and I am part of the technology team in my building. So, I apologize for not connecting... I will try to keep up this with blogging this year!

I am so excited that our school and district is moving up with technology. We have done away with our desktops in our room and each teacher has a new MacBook Air. We also got new interactive projectors and printers in all of our building. We have carts with laptops for our students to be shared between three classes. Unfortunately, we do not have computer teachers in our district anymore, they were cut/rifted about three years ago. I definitely valued their expertise and ability to teach students and now we are all trying to figure out how to help our students to become technologically literate at the same time we are also learning. My classroom also has a smart table which I have to learn to use.
It is exciting but scary..........I have been busy exploring links on pinterest and I want to share a few with you all today!

http://www.squidoo.com/math-smartboard-lessons

This site on Squidoo had tons of educational games and lessons for K- 5!

http://colaborativelearning.pbworks.com/w/page/31904645/Kindergarten%20Math

http://www.dreambox.com/teachertools

Dreambox was great for mathematics resources as well. What I liked was that it was broken down by standard, so I knew by introducing this game I was covering a direct standard! There were several grade levels that you can access!

What I want to know is what digital tools and resources do you use?

Pass it Forward - Lovely Blog Award!

I feel so honored and excited to recieve the...



Thanks again Becky at http://teachinglearningloving.blogspot.com for giving me this honor!  I have had so much support from other bloggers as I joined this online community of teachers.

Now it's my turn to pass it on!

The rules for this award are to:

1. Link back to the blogger who gave you the award.
2. Follow the person who sent it to you.
3. Pass the award on to 15 other lovely bloggers.

Drumroll please here are my other 15 lovely bloggers................

Mrs. Bailey at Klassy Kinders

Katy at Kindergarten Katy

Mrs. Bell at A Place Called Kindergarten

Sharon at Kindercuriosity!

Lindsay at Whyte Water

http://thekindergarden.blogspot.com

Susan at Kindergarten Basics

Jill at Color Me Happy Kindergarten

Crystal at Kreative in Kinder

Sally at Fairy Dust Teaching

Kelly at From Kindergarten with Love

Heather at Peace Love and Kinder

Ellen at Techno Babies

Mrs. Blakey at Kindergarten Room 102

Lisa at I Teach Kinder Kids

I searched long and hard to find all these great blogs...I hope that they love their award as much as I do!

Mrs. M is MIA

Well I know its been a long time since I blogged last. I have been on my Spring Break. We had our Easter weekend back onto our week off, so I took a little trip back to Toronto, my home town. It was so nice spending time with my mom and my brother, catching up with my cousins, playing with my nephew and meeting up with dear friends....kinda of like a whirlwind but now its starting to wind down and I need to get back to reality. Today is my last full day in Toronto and then I will be flying back to rejoin my husband in Jersey. We are going to the Tosh.O comedy show in NYC with some good friends so I am excited for that as well. So, what have I been working on the Teaching front....not much but I did finish the first and second grade core curriculum standards checklists and I am planning to complete the third and fourth soon! Just check out my TPT store. My grade partner took on a student teacher and she is getting ready to "take over" the planning and teaching for her final placement, so I gave my input and suggestions for next week but I don't even have to create the lesson plans, I feel so strange. I am being sooooo spoiled. I am very soon going to pass it forward and I am on the hunt for some lovely blogs to pass on the lovely blog award....

Thank you Becky!

Becky over at http://teachinglearningloving.blogspot.com (Teaching Learning & Loving), she totally made my day by giving me this Lovely Blog Award....I am so honored. Check it out below:

Kindergarten Core Curriculum State Standards

Hi all I am finally publishing my first item at TPT that people can purchase - exciting progress for me. My Kindergarten Core Curriculum State Standards Checklist. This tool has really been invaluable to me and I use it everyday. I am proud to share it with my online colleagues! 

As a freebie, download my preview to access the K Math Curriculum State Standards Checklist....A brief description is below:

Please click on the link below:

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Kindergarten-Common-Core-State-Standards

Kindergarten Common Core State Standards Checklist! This tool has been invaluable to me to plan from month to month and as a yearly curriculum pacing guide. I am so excited to publish this excellent organizational tool! The KCCSS Checklist ensures that I am planning for, assessing and delivering all standards, translating to a comprehensive and responsive approach teaching. This KCCSS checklist contains all Math and English Language Arts standards for Kindergarten. I photocopy these standards each month and I can either highlight, date, check or tally when I have covered the standard in each subject area. This document also gives grade level specific Standards of Practice, Literature Connections and College and Career Readiness ideas. Though the font is small, the checklist for each subject area is available on ONE page so that as a teacher I can easily assess "at a glance" the standards that I need to plan for and teach. I use this everyday and I hope that you find it useful. I am planning to make similar checklists for first grade and second grade and perhaps higher grade levels according to the demand, because it is time consuming to create! I will create them for you if you email me with feedback (demand). Please feel free to rate my product and to follow my TPT store and/or blog http://kinderverse.blogspot.com. I am new to this online community of teachers on TPT and blogs, Jaya Maharajh

Teachers Taking Care of Teachers

I know you all have seen how the tornadoes have ripped apart parts of the country. People have lost their lives and homes. Schools were affected as well. So here in teacher blog world, we are helping in any way we can. If you have any duplicate books, work sheets, games, or what ever you can find that would help, we need your assistance. If you have a TPT store, please think about donating some of your items to the teachers that were affected. I plan to give away some items as well as some books and manipulatives I am not using. Its for the love of teaching and ultimately for the love of all the children we teach. Please give generously. Click here for more information about the devastation in Indianna and join the linky party at: http://kreativeinkinder.blogspot.com/

The Lorax

Today was the last day of our Dr. Seuss festivities. We read the story The Lorax and completed some activities. In honor of this book, we as a school community made a commitment to the environment and pledged ways that we can keep our earth healthy and clean. We put our ideas on truffula leaves and adorned the school. Each grade level had a different colored truffula leaf and on Friday our school bloomed! We took a moment to take our classes into the hallway and posted our contributions. The students were so proud of their truffula leaves!

 Our K class was also asked to be part of a special composting experiment. We put our organic scraps from snack and lunch in a compost pail. We weighed our pail and it had 10 lbs in one day- That's 10 lbs away from the trash and landfills! Then I took the class to the composter and we went through the steps of composting. I told them that our compost would eventually become the rich soil that we would use to plant our vegetables and herbs later in the spring. 

Building Words Freebie for you!

Well this week flew by! Exciting work being done all around. In my school Kindergarten does not receive academic intervention services due to the fact that K is NOT a compulsory grade level. So, my awesome principal and direct supervisor wrote a grant and we have set up a K tutorial in the mornings targeting specific skills for literacy and math. The students arrive 8:00 instead of 8:50 for school two mornings a week, and we work in small groups to help "lift their levels" of performance and proficiency. On Fridays we have a planning meeting where we discuss the strategies that have been working in our groups. I shared the following worksheet with my colleagues and I am going to share it  with you as well. 

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Building-Words-Center-Challenge

This activity is designed to be used with square letter tiles or magnetic letters; however it can be used "as is" and students can write in the letters into the CVC word boxes. As a reading specialist, I learned that students need to learn to manipulate the sounds or phonemes of words. This type of activity is better to use than teaching word families because students learn to manipulate the beginning AND ending sounds instead of memorizing a rhyme. Eventually students can change the medial sound as well. This product has worksheets for short a, e, i, o and u. This can be used as an independent activity OR as a guided activity where the teacher can determine the letter sound and position to build new CVC words. This builds reading and writing skills and promotes higher order thinking. Enjoy! Please follow my blog or TPT page if you decide to download this worksheet and feel free to give feedback to this product! 

Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss!

Well we've been looking forward to it all week - Dr. Seuss' Birthday! The kids came to school wearing their wacky hats and we gave them these cute Cat in the Hat t-shirts for our Read Across America kick off. We decided as school to kick off our Read Across America week on March 2nd and extend it the following week until March 9th because we were wrapping up our Black History Month festivities. The school had a reading train at 9:20 a.m. where everyone came out into the hallways and read for 20 minutes. We have over 1200 kids in our Pre-K-4 school so it was very inspirational to see all these students reading together. I have to say I was very proud of our kiddos, since I didn't have to remind them to keep reading. They did such a great job reading their just right books from their reading bags. We had the principal walk down the hallway dressed as the Cat in the Hat and the kids loved seeing her. We also got a great complement for our display outside our classroom. Thanks to pinterest for the inspiration!

Our pinterest inspired bulletin board! 

My red fish blue fish inspired subtraction activity! 

My grade partner, the principal and me! 

 Then we had our kindergarten rotations...The kids rotate among 4 classes participating in Dr. Seuss inspired activities. We have 8 kindergarten classes in total. First they heard the story the Lorax and completed their trufulla piece for the environment. The entire school is making a forest of trufulla trees that will stay up until the end of April, in honor of Earth Day. Next, the kids saw a short video on Hop on Pop and played a game where they had to jump as they said two rhyming words. Then they heard Getrude McFuzz and completed a craft adding feathers to Gertrude. Then the kids ended in their own class. We completed patterns with colored goldfish in honor of One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish and then the kids ate them for their special snack! Our Kindergarten team rocks, the kids had a great time moving from class to class and learning about Dr. Seuss and his many books!

My beautiful fellow K teacher reading to the kids the Lorax

Another super K teacher demonstrating our Hop on Pop rhyming game.

Another stylish K teacher reading Getrude McFuzz

We had such a great day! We plan to take the kids on a Field Trip to see the Lorax in theatres!

Dr. Seuss Freebie!

So this weekend I finally posted my first activity to TPT. This is a learning curve for me. I am going to attempt to post a preview and link to my TPT for this Free One Fish Two Fish, Red Fish Blue Fish addition or subtraction Math workstation activity! Wish me luck! Please click on the link below to access my Dr. Seuss freebie!

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/One-Fish-Two-Fish-Red-Fish-Blue-Fish-Adding-Subtraction-Math

How to Support Your Elementary School Teacher

I have to give my husband a shout out because he has been an amazing support for me in all realms of my life, especially at work! He has been the one to help me cut and assemble my class centers, proof reading my report cards, volunteering for class events and putting together my class DVD at the end of the year. And if that was not enough, he did the most romantic thing ever! This summer he wrote this book How to Support Your Elementary School Teacher, in honor of ALL teachers everywhere. He self published it in August and has been going to schools and conventions passing on the message, opening communication and understanding between teachers, students and parents.

The book chronicles a year in the life of a teacher and highlights both the triumphs and tribulations giving parents and those outside the field of education a glimpse into the hard work that teachers do everyday. It also offers a month to month guide of suggestions of how to support the teacher in their life. I had many former parents buying this book and my principal even quoted my husband and featured him at my school's back to school night! We found a lot of teachers buying it to pass it along to their spouses (: and as a keepsake for themselves as it is a testimonial to all of us in our profession. It truly is a breath of fresh air and a positive view of teachers. Can I say that I absolutely LOVE my husband for doing this for me and all other teachers. He has been invited to speak at local school PTO meetings, conventions, bookstores as a local author and supporter of strengthening the parent-teacher-student relationship. Here are a few pictures of him in action!

The book is available on Amazon and Barnes and Nobles for $9.99 if anyone is interested. When he sells at schools he donates $2 to the school! Please check out his site at:

http://www.supportyourschoolteacher.com/Pages/default.aspx

and support him on Facebook:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/How-to-Support-Your-Elementary-School-Teacher/165908313482230

Lamb Visit!

Mrs. M had a little lamb, little lamb, little lamb. Mrs. M had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow!

So today was the day the lamb came to school. The kids were super excited and expected the lamb to be in the classroom as soon as they came off the bus! Our class was the last scheduled class because the other kindergarten classes had morning specials. We did so many things revolving around the sheep theme. We sang our nursery rhymes such as Mary Had a Little Lamb, Little Bo-Peep and Baa Baa Black Sheep that we were practicing in our poetry binders all week. We created a KWL chart of what we knew about sheep already and what we wondered about, so that we could ask the "lamb lady" our questions. They came up with good ones such as "Does it hurt when the fur comes off the sheep?", "Does a sheep hibernate?" and my favorite of the day "What's the difference between girl (female) sheep and boy (male) sheep?"

We talked about the fact that they needed to be super quiet and they had to turn their reaction levels down in case the sheep made any noise or did anything (going to the bathroom), this was part of life and we would just have to deal with it in a mature way. We did not want to scare the baby lamb and we would treat it as we would a baby human. So finally, the lamb came into our class and the students were enamored! They were great, asking their questions and staying quiet for having 50 kids (3 classes) in at once. Each student got a chance to pet the lamb and my grade partner even got to hold it while the lady prepared to leave. I was soo jealous! We had a steady wave of teachers in other grade levels rushing down from their classes to see the lamb at school......we even invited both vice principals (our principal was out).

Our VP taking a closer look at the lamb.....and the student looking up at him was
 happy that he made it because he reminded the VP to come in morning! 

Some of our students petting the lamb!

That is me, Mrs. M getting to pet the lamb!
He lifted his head for me and we had a moment, I swear!  

My inclusion room partner, Mrs. Bunch getting to hold the cutie!
 Look at how they are both posing...

The kindergartners wrote about their favorite part of our lamb visit. We charted what facts we learned from the "lamb lady" and did some Lovely Lamb Addition. Earlier in the week, we read the series Sheep in a Jeep, Sheep in a Ship and Sheep out to Eat by Nancy Shaw. So I was inspired to create different math workmats to go with the books for each table group. I was worried that the kids would get confused with the variety of choices but they rose to the challenge! We had Soooo much fun! We will definitely like to have the "lamb lady" come back next year. It was a rewarding experience for all.

Love 100th Day!

A sampling of our Hundredth Day Projects today! 

We had pajama day today and I was so comfy in my leopard print jammies. The kids were very excited from the moment they walked in the class and I had to keep them in check periodically. I was exhausted by snack time because we were trying to fit in our 100th day projects and Valentine's Day projects, not to mention double specials today. It would have been less stressful had I been at school the day before. Who knew that teachers would sometimes prefer NOT to have preps!  Well somehow we managed and the projects turned out well! My husband also sent flowers to work and the kids loved them as much as I did. Love the hubby for his thoughtfulness! A major shout out to him yesterday for helping me assemble all the valentine's favors for the kiddies!

Lollipop Flower Pot

So I went to the district meeting and returned to my classroom because I had another 45 minute faculty meeting.....met with my grade partner and gathered all the stuff to make my class loot bags. We had some extra valentine's day cups that a parent had sent in last year, the kindies had juice boxes for our celebration so we never used them. The plan was to put all the stuff we bought for the kids in there and put the cup of stuff in the cello bags. We had some chocolate, rice krispie squares, granola bars, fruit snacks, kisses & a lollipop. Then I remembered this great idea I saw on pinterest with a lollipop lily.

Thanks to Skip to My Lou blog for this cute idea:

http://www.skiptomylou.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/flower.pdf

I printed those on colored paper, put a cute message "We love how much you've grown!" and voila there are our Valentine's Day favors for our students.  They looked like those potted mums packaging and all! I think the middle would look better with the blow pop kind of lollipop but it is still stinking cute! I can't wait for each child to get their bloom tomorrow!

All packaged and ready to go!

Crazy Week!

Valentine's Day and 100th Day, on one day! Trying to get fancy, learning how to change the layout of my blog. How do they add all those cutsie titles and stuff? I am the web curator of my school's website but that's easy compared to this! Help...so technically challenged. How do I customize? Anyways on the school realm. This week is going to be great. Tuesday is the 100th day of school, a huge deal for kinders! We will make our projects, complete a variety of literacy and mathematics activities. If that was not enough, it is also Valentine's day....a double whammy! We are going to be wearing our PJ's all day! I have leopard print fuzzy ones this year. Tomorrow I'll be at our district math committee meeting and while I know we're doing important business, I rather be in class with my kiddos. To top it all off, we are going to have a lamb visit the Kindergarten classes on Thursday. What a crazy week right?

Welcome

Welcome to my new blog called Ms. M's Kinderverse!
I have decided to take the leap to join my global community of teachers, to share and gather ideas to help the students in our classes. I can't wait to start this journey!