Little Readers!

I know that it's been months since I last wrote on any consistent basis but it's just because I've been so busy with my super smarties! Sometimes I look around my classroom and see my students reading and forget that I teach PK! 

Since they are doing so well this year, I've started to put some new things in place for them. We have this poster hanging in our library. 

I also use this anchor chart for shared reading and guided reading groups so that they are constantly acknowledging what strategy that they are using so that they can continue apply various reading strategies as they learn new ones. To help, I made a small version to send home as well

Sight Word Goals

So I have long been looking for a way to help my students have goals for themselves in the classroom and I have finally found a way to do that! In our room we want all students to leave knowing a list of 25 words, a mix of pre-primer and primer words, before kindergarten. Each word has a laminated page hanging somewhere accessible to the kids in the room. As the kids learn their words they ask to tell us the word and put it up on the wall. It shows everyone who walks in that they have mastered that word. They get super excited to the point that they want us to walk around the room with them during centers to try to get their name on as many signs as possible. So far it's working well

Book Bin Labels

I created a few basic book bin labels to start getting my students to realize the differences in types of books. To keep it manageable for my lil ones, there are not a ton of categories. Free here!

Build Plan for Blocks Center

I apologize for the lack of posts over the last two weeks but with the first day being tomorrow, things have been busy busy trying to get everything JUST right for the lil ones about to show up!

One of the most important pushes in our early childhood classrooms this year is the push for more writing! To help with this, I created this play plan for our blocks center so that students can begin to plan what they want to build, what materials they will use, and who they want to play with. This will also hopefully help students with their critical thinking and planning ability.

Find the free document here!

Chicka Chicka Boom Boom

A skill that I have discovered that the prekindergarten students are lacking when they come from preschool is their knowledge of lowercase letters. To support this, we always try to incorporate this into their knowledge of uppercase letters. One of the things that they love about learning letters is the book Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. We chant and play games related to the book so I created a file folder game that includes matching coconuts with the letters on them. To check out the compete file click here.

Calm Down Corner

As I created my calm down corner for my classroom this year, I realized that I had picture cards that demonstrated various emotions with words other than happy, sad, and mad which will be very helpful to help students with expressive vocabulary. However, I did not have any images that would show students how to calm themselves down without teacher support, a skill that students must learn in order to be successful in school. To fix this, I created a set of images that demonstrate different techniques that students may use in order to help themselves return to class.

Click here to get the complete file.

Morning Greetings

I have a collection of morning meeting greetings that I use each morning to begin the morning meeting. Students are each given an opportunity to choose which greeting to do  each morning. The greetings can be printed and put on a ring to have where you do your morning meeting so that the choices are always available. They can be found here!