We Heart Vowels

What? Another freebie. We had early dismissal today and I spent time working on a presentation under my other hat and eCoach. I am presenting to grades 3-5 tomorrow on how to create interactive test questions, how to use interactive readers and ways students can take notes electronically. So I am up for sharing some of my Kindergarten work posted this weekend on TPT.

 

First, a thank you to everyone who downloaded my Groundhog Roll & Read from Friday's post. and commented on TPT. If you missed it, you can still pick it up. : )

 

If you are one of the 5 people who rated and commented that freebie on TPT or Megan who commented on the Jan 24th's post, please email me at prlhrbr@yahoo.com for a surprise bonus as a thank you (include your user name).

 

2. And on to Monday's freebie. I am super excited about my new unit We {Heart} Vowels and We {Heart} to Read and Write. So here is a page from We {Heart} Vowels just for my blog readers. It is just one printable sort style available in the unit  and a color by short vowel bonus. Here is the freebie from Google Docs.  or right-click the pics below. Graphics by Pink Cat Studios, Kari Bolt, Creative Clips & Educlips.  If you download and use, I'd love a comment or message.

 Check out my paid products in this line as well. : )

 

 

Have a lovely week!

Jenn   

Linking Up with Classroom Freebies

Groundhog Roll & Read Freebie

1. A holiday, 2 snow days and 2 late days meant lots of time at home with my kids.

2. My two year old is into coloring now so I printed out some of the Valentine's books from this set for her to color.

She is so proud to bring you her picture (totally one color) when she is done. I tried showing her how to hold the paper with one hand so it doesn't move...she found tracing her hand to be great. : ) Love having my girls sit at the table and color (or do homework) together. Both my girls love Fancy Nancy so we also had glitter everywhere....and I mean everywhere this week. 2. My son prefers games...anything with rolling dice is up his alley.

We made this adorable freebie to practice reading fluency and speaking.

3. In the classroom, we've been using a similar version from my units Winter Sports Word Games & Read, Write & Count Around Town.

 

 

The kinders have theirs in sleeves so they can use different color wipe off markers to mark their words. I paired this up with listening center so after they listen to a story & write about it, they get a reading game. (My students have three workstations each day - one required and 2 optional). Once they all play through, they'll take home a blackline version for family games. Do you send home game boards with your students?


4. We introduce sounds in the order they are in Treasures reading although our literacy program is based on our PYP. We have worked on short a, short I and short o. During assessment this month, we found they were doing awesome with initial sound fluency but we are struggling with vowel sounds. Wait until you see the We {Heart} Vowels game pieces and sorts I'm working on to help us hear these sounds. (Okay...I can't stand suspense...a peek at the same game as the freebie. My own kids practiced long vowels with me. The rest of the pack is similar to my Candy Corn Sorts from Halloween).

 

5. Can I add in food? Do you cook risotto? What is your favorite ingredient to add? I usually add spinach to this but I'm thinking sliced up omelets.

 

We have a three day week next and I am aiming for symmetry craft with groundhogs (one of my favs), some Chinese New Year Math (two sided counters work great with red and gold) and to finish these workstations so my write the room changes from our Community theme to Winter Sports (Yeah!). Have a great week!

 

 

 And check out these linkys - TBA's Freebie Friday   Five for Friday.

 

Winter Sports and Monday Freebie

You may have seen my Winter Sports Word Games that I posted last week. I made it using high frequency words from kindergarten and first grade lists to help my son practice his word wall words. It has lots of fun games like Roll& Read and Read & Sort. You can check it out here.

 

What it didn't have was Vocabulary for writing centers. I put the finishing touches on this unit today. Its been half done while I procrastinated with other projects for my classroom. eek. It has a vocabulary sheet in color and black and white for writing folders, 2 sizes of color vocabulary cards for Write the Room and Writing Centers, recording sheets, label it pages, scramble sentence writing prompts and more. You can check it out here.

 

In the preview for Winter Sports Write It! above is a freebie - color by sight word. I couldn't resist making this for breakfast work.

 

You can pick up both sets on sale through January 21st. I am linking this freebie up to Classroom Freebies Manic Monday. Be sure to hop on over.

 

 

It is looking like snow for us tomorrow and its the hubby's day off. :-)

Have a great week.

Jenn

 

PS I was excited to see likes on my FB post of the MLK crafts we did so I sent copies of the word games unit. I will be sending a product to random commenters on the FB entry linking to this post. : )

 

 

 

Five for Friday - Martin & Maps

We focused on Martin for three days this week during Social Studies. (We also had Dibels and Running Records and worked on MAPS as part of our community unit).

 

1.  In case you missed it, here is the freebie I posted on the 15th. Kind Like Martin. which I am linking up to Freebie Friday! at TBA.

My lovely daughters coloring the pictures.

 

My daughter modeling the kindness crown.

Using it as a sort in a flipbook. Have the students add their own picture and write labels.

 

2. Here are some of our community of kindness flowers inspired by Little Bill's Thank You, Dr. King

 

 

 

3. We also used parts of Hello Two Peas in a Pod's January Phonemic Awareness lesson (these are great because the words align with the text and they are premade) and read Martin's Big Words (I love love the pictures).

 

 

4. We took a different spin on close reading by using the spotlight tool in our Smart Tools with our Scholastic Lets Find Out Read to Me. We circled "Dr. King" and "he" so we could talk about the details of what he did. We also studied the photos and looked for a word to match (ie. march). The kinders picked out details that were in the text or were not (ie. we didn't know if he was tall because it wasn't in the text).

 

5. Here are some of the great maps of their bedrooms in different stages of creation.

 

Growing up in my generation in an area where neighborhoods were still segregated, this has always been an important topic for me and  in my class. Now I teach in a school with an ESL population with 53 different native languages, some students from the near by military base, a population from section 8 housing, and a variety of other housing including trailer parks, older townhouses & ones that cost more than my house, apartments, and established neighborhoods. It brings a different dimension to talking about segregation, civil rights and a minister who had a dream.

 

Have a great long weekend!

Jenn

 

Freebie on the Fifteenth

Today is my wedding anniversary.
I heard a song in the car going to work by the Seekers that reminded me of my husband. I typed up the lyrics for him.

It is also the 15th...freebie on the fifteenth. And Dr Martin Luther King Jr's birthday.

Here is a very quick freebie I made. We sorted and talked about the pictures. The students colored, cut out and labeled the pictures (share, care, help). They wanted to turn it into a hat. So we cut out the pictures and put the kind behaviors that are our goals/dreams on sentence strips to make a headband. We can be kind. You can have them add their own pictures.
I love the show Little Bill and this book - Thank You, Dr King.

It was a great lead-in to the lesson on kindness. While putting together a scrapbook with Alice the Great, Little Bill thinks of ways he can care and share. We used an old mailbox magazine sheet cut apart to make a headband with pictures of how we can act kindly towards others. Then we traced our hands on multi-cultural paper and made friendship flowers just like the one Little Bill makes in the story.
I added the freebie from yesterday's post to this file as well.

Have a great rest of your week.
Jenn

RAC and a freebie

Had to share this Random Acts of Kindness.

Our Dibels window opened Monday & there was a free building sub…whom I grabbed! Whoot. This never happens. I am so excited to have gotten through testing my class – although my brain is mush.

So it definitely time for a freebie for you all. (Totally planned this yesterday but I couldn't decide which one to use and had to make credit pages.)

 

A new thing I made for my class are these simple sentence pages. The students find and circle the picture vocabulary from the theme. You can have them do all kinds of things with it. Here they are asked to highlight punctuation (! ? .) something we are always working on remembering in our writing. In my readers, I like to have the kinders use colored pencil to put a dot under a picture word, trace a focus word (word wall), underline the action word, etc… This helps us look closely at the sentence but on rereads helps with fluency (oh yeah there is that period). The sentences are simple with only a few words but not the same predictable text. The kids then use one or more of the words in their own sentences. The freebie is a MLK vocabulary sheet so it has more difficult words using the clipart from EduClips.

This format is in my Read, Write and Count Around Town. I should have the Winter Sports ones finalized with credits and loaded to TPT by this weekend (and I'll do a flash freebie then).

 

Have a great week!

Jenn

Five for Friday

Five for Friday & A Freebie

We had 1 day of school this week! After our winter break, we came in yesterday all excited to see each other and get back into routine. I of course was up super early, set the alarm on my husband's phone to make sure my own kids got to school, cleaned up the holiday mess fun, set up my new centers and attended a staff meeting before the kinders arrived. Here is a picture of the crafts we made for our reindeer party on the last day - reindeer hats, heart cards, candy canes. We made craft stick reindeer ornaments the day before with our buddies.

1  - After Media, we sat on the carpet and examined the covers. What parts make up a book cover? The kinders brought their books up to the document camera and found the parts. We made a brace map that we used as a checklist to make our own book covers (the topic - Where Are You?). The number one setting - the fire house. Guess I know one of our focuses in our Communities/Economics unit this 6 weeks (formative anyone?). They did an awesome job of designing their covers with detailed settings.

2 - We caught up on our Let's Find Out magazines. The kinders love the interactive feature. Whiteboard, pencil, favorite crayon and magazines go with them to the carpet squares. This one was Push and Pull with a winter theme. Great for the snowy predictions.

3 - Talking about SNOW. I was certain to print out  and copy the snowy writing and readers from my We Snow Love to Read and Write. Which we will work on next week as we had a SNOW day for our second school day of January.

 

4 - Our new unit is People and Places in the Community (maps, needs&wants, places, good & services, community helpers). Here is your freebie - A mini-reader on Needs and Wants. It is 16 pages because I wanted to make sure to hit food, water, clothes, shelter. The students can draw and write in the reader about a want and a need. I am linking the freebie up to TBA so check out Freebie Friday.

 

5 - I have been spending a lot of time with my family lately. My mom (who lives in our neighborhood) has been staying with my grandmother to be her caregiver. Since Thanksgiving, the kids and I have been taking little trips up to visit with the grandparents. Not in the cards for this weekend. Last time, I drove up in the snow...I got stuck...in the driveway. lol. Anyways, I decided I needed more balance. I didn't do any school (and thus blog/store work) for most of my break. I cooked and crafted with my kids a lot. My oldest daughter & nephew made a ton of these bags for the neighbors and family. I may have to make with my class - esp. with if its a snowy winter.

 We made playdoh out of oatmeal and covered it with snow "flour". It doesn't last long but being out of cream of tarter we improvised. My 2 year old drags a dinning room chair into the kitchen whenever I start getting things out to cook so we had tons of science lessons like jello and playdoh along with cookies.

6- It took a little while to get back into the swing of school this week. I kept creating for my Read, Write & Count Around Town pack as new ideas bumped other ideas. It is up on TPT on sale now for $3. I tried to sneak another freebie in the preview but I couldn't save small enough :(. So I put the preview with the freebie on my facebook fan page.

Hope you all are keeping warm!

Jenn

KinderMyles