Five for Friday: May 8

Another week down!

I'm back to link up with Kacey at Doodle Bugs Teaching to share five things from my week! :)

and I'm also linking up with Teaching Blog Addict for Freebie Friday.

You can find the freebies under 2 and 3.

We introduced new play dough mats!

These alphabet play dough mats have been a huge hit and a great support for the kids who need it.

This is a free download from This Reading Mama!

Our caterpillars are growing so fast!

We have been making observations every day.

Here is what are observation table looks like most days.

Magnifying glasses, caterpillar/butterfly books, pencils, crayons, observation sheets, hanging folders (to keep their observation sheets/book covers in) and mini cubes to measure the caterpillars with.

Mid week my ECE partner transferred the caterpillars over to the net with the kids.

They were so excited to watch her! 

Click on the image below if you would like to check out the butterfly observation and other printables in my TPT store :)

We are still working hard on mastering addition and subtraction!

We practiced with these addition and subtraction sticker stories this week.

Click here to grab the template for free!

We made this craft for our mom's this week!

I got the idea from Food, Love & Life.

This is my sample.

And we did a directed drawing and drew our moms.

They drew in pencil, I outlined it for them with a Sharpie and then they coloured it in with crayon.

Then I glued them onto manila folders and laminated them for durability.

Here is my sample...

And these are by the kids!

We put our flower craft inside and sent them home!

I hope the moms love them!

One area of focus for our team for the next 2 months is problem-solving and supporting students through solving open-ended and higher-order thinking questions.

We decided on several different questions to try and here is the first one.

First I did this activity with them whole group.

I did an example then I had some students come up and create a pattern with pattern blocks for me.  Then I drew their pattern and we circled the core and labelled the pattern together.

Then students were able to try these prompts at centre time.
Here is an amazing one that one of my kiddos made.

At first I told him, "remember we are solving the problem not just building!" To this he replied I did solve the problem! It's an ABABCB pattern and the second shape is a yellow hexagon!"

!!!

I looked closely and realized he was right.
What a creative thinker! I was blown away!
(Although he missed the "using 10 pattern blocks" part of the instructions.. but I let that fly since I was so impressed with his creativity!)

I had some of my kids try a similar but different problem and record their ideas as well.

We were so happy with how it went!
It's making it's way onto an interactive math board which I will share soon ;)

That's it from me!

I hope you have a great weekend!

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Teaching Money in FDK

Today I'm popping in to talk about all the money fun we have been having in our class lately!

The FDK expectation for money is..

NS1.10 explore different Canadian coins, using coin manipulatives

First we started by watching the song Canada in My Pocket by Michael Mitchell.

Then we used my coin posters to learn the name and value of each coin.

Sidenote: Sorry about the glare in some of these pictures... lamination and classroom lights are not friends... ;( 

We also added these word wall cards to our math word wall so that the students could use them whenever they needed.

At centre time we worked on sorting coins by kind...

and many students completed this "My Book of Canadian Coins" booklet.

On the second day we watched this Canadian Coin Song.

and I also introduced them to the Coin Spot game from TVOKids.com which they LOVE every year.

Update: I just found out while teaching Canadian Coins this year that this game is no longer available on TVO kids.. which is so sad because it was such a great game! If anybody knows of a good alternative please let me know!

I introduced a few more new centres...

Here is a patterning centre using coins:

On the third day I introduced them to the coin poem...

and then left it out as an option to de- and reconstruct the poem during centre time.

My ECE pulled a small group of kids who were not quite fluent with coin names and values to work on co-constructing this anchor chart.

For a challenge I put out these add and match the value cards one day for my high kiddos...

and we also played "Feed the Piggie"

The students pull a card from a jar, scan the QR code (which takes them to an audio clip of me reading the sentence) and then place the correct coins "in" the piggy bank. Then they were asked to write how many coins are in the piggy bank.

If that was too easy there was a challenge option which included writing the number of cents and dollars in the piggy bank.

If you are not familiar with QR codes and would like to learn more click here!

If you are interested in any of these activities you can find them in my newest product

"All About Canadian Coins"!

Click on the pictures below if you are interested!
It is 30% off until 9PM EST tonight!

My kids are really fluent with coins now and we are ready to move on!

Do you have any tried and true money/coin teaching ideas for Kindergarten?

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May Currently

I'm linking up with Farley at Oh Boy Fourth Grade for the May Currently!

Listening: I never seem to be listening to anything when I'm working on the currently's so I decided to start sharing songs that I like at the moment! This month I'm listening to and loving "Something Big" by Shawn Mendes!

Loving: Since we just bought a house I'm constantly looking around for things to decorate the house with! I found these astrology prints on minted.com and am in love!

I'm thinking of putting these in the powder room and having a grey/white/mint colour scheme.

Maybe with some quatrefoil as a pattern thrown in ;)

Thinking: My outside bulletin board has been the same for too long so I need to plan out a new one and get busy! I'm thinking about creating a math problem-solving board (our hallway boards have to be math-based).  I always draw out my bulletin boards before a unit.  It helps me plan and remember to keep samples/take pictures.

Wanting: There is SO much we want to do in our new home but even buying furniture etc. is hard without actually being in the space! We get to go in twice before we actually move in in June so we are going next weekend! Can't wait to get in so we can start painting/decorating!!

Here is one of my favourite inspiration pics!

Image from: http://tocrave.blogspot.ca/2013/03/color-kreyv-neutrals.html

Come visit my "home" Pinterest board for more favourite inspiration pics!

Needing: It is FINALLY sandal weather here in Canada! I pulled out my sandals for the first time this year today and realized that my toes were not so sandal ready... so the first thing on my to do list after I'm done this post is to paint my nails!

Just for fun, here are my favourite nail products & colours!

I'm an Essie girl for nail polish!

And my favourite glitter out of the Martha Stewart Glitter Trio is "Smoky Quartz".

I love using that glitter for an accent nail!

Here's a pic I dug out of my Instagram archives to show you what Chinchilly looks like!

Chinchilly is my favourite nail colour for fall & winter!

The glitter is Deborah Lippmann's "Happy Birthday"

Summer:

Yes - I HAVE to get my full licence this summer. I think my licence expires next year and I don't want to cut it that close.  I hate driving so I'm super nervous but I'm hoping to take a few lessons before the big day to ease my nerves a little!

Hope - I'm hoping to have lots of time this summer to chill out and work on updating my store! I've been jotting down ideas for products but I don't always have the time to create everything I think of during the year so I'm looking forward to having the time to focus on my store this summer :)

Dream - A girl can dream right? Oh how I wish I could win the lottery so that I could pick anything I want for my new house! And of course unlimited clipart would be a teacher-author's dream come true ;)

That's it!

Be sure to check out the linky to find out what other teacher-bloggers are up to this month :)

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Five for Friday: May 1

I'm actually linking up with Kacey from Doodle Bugs Teaching for Five for Friday on a Friday! Yay!

Here is a recap of my week :)

On Wednesday afternoon our caterpillars arrived!

On Monday I told the kids that we had special visitors coming to our classroom and I had the students make predictions based on 3 clues.

The clues were

1. It is a living thing

2. It is very small

3. It can be many different colours

Here are the caterpillars the very first day!

They have already grown SO much!

And we recorded some of their wondering as a group.

They are also observing and recording their thoughts and ideas at the caterpillar observation table at centre time :)

My kiddos still need some printing practice so I made up two new printing books that they can choose from at centre time and put it in the writing centre.  They love anything with a wipe-off marker!

 These printable are from Cara Carroll's "ABC It's Easy as 123" pack.

You can find it on TpT here.

The pre-primer sight word printable are made by me and they are free!
It is a BIG freebie with a whoopin' 43 pages!

Click here or the picture below if you are interested in downloading them!

And I'm linking up with Teaching Blog Addict to share this freebie for Freebie Friday!

We have been learning about Canadian coins this week!

I will blog about this in more detail this weekend but here are two centres that were especially popular!

In Kindergarten we focus mostly on identifying the coin names and values.

I made these coin patterning cards to practice coin recognition and patterning at the same time ;)

I called this one "Feed the Piggie" :)

At this centre the students first picked a card from the 1 tub (I labeled the tubs 1 & 2 so the kids know which one to take first) scanned the qr code to listen to the sentence (or the high kids just read it) and then placed the coins "in" the piggy bank.

For an extension I had them write the number of coins in all in the piggy bank.

I added an option for writing the amount (how many cents/dollars) are in piggy bank too for my high kiddos.

My coin pack (which will include both of these activities) will be posted to TpT hopefully tomorrow and a detailed post of all the activities included are coming soon!

My ECE added these prompts to our sand table this week.

She is just SO smart!

And the kids just LOVED these!

My kids are weaker in writing so I decided to incorporate more writing by adding a writing day to my shared reading routine.  So instead of the schedule that I posted before

(You can see more info on that here)

now we do...

Monday: Introduce new sight word, add new sight word to word wall, fill in the sight word in the poem, listen to the poem being read

Tuesday: Choral reading + introduction of a new reading strategy

(We are using these).

Wednesday: Shared Writing

Thursday: Actions

Friday: Fluency

This week our sight word was "are" so we completed these "We are ____" sentences as a class!

Then the students had the option to create their own "We are ____." sentences during centre time. 

That's it!

I hope you had a great week!

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