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!