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!

Soaring Eagles: social skills stars

My class is Boston College this year! As part of our closing meeting, we will use this tree and shout out students who have displayed exceptional social skills for that day. Since they are the Eagles, we will write the students' names on eagle cut-outs to motivate students to display our social skills. 

Sensory Table Game

The sand and water tables are in a corner of our classroom this year and will have large magnetic lowercase letters in each. I got this oil drip pan from Wal-mart and painted it with chalkboard paint and added fun Duck tape to the edges to finish it. I then used a chalkboard marker to write all of the uppercase letters onto it so that students can match uppercase and lowercase letters while they are at the sensory tables. I love that they will be able to collaborate as a group of four instead of just two at each table.Can't wait to let the kids use this during centers this year!

Chalkboard Table

This year I am attempting to make my sand and water tables more collaborative. To accomplish this, I am placing this chalkboard table between the two so that they can make their observations, sort, or do some sort of work related to whatever goes into the tables at different points in the year. 

The best part was that I did not have to buy anything for this! I used the $10 IKEA table that I already had in my room, chalkboard paint for the top, and duck tape to finish the edges and make it a bit brighter. 

I look forward to having more pictures of this corner later once there are children utilizing the space!

Letter/Number/Sight Word of the Day

This year I attempted to talk to every student during centers time and practice letters, numbers, or sight words depending on the student. If there was one they struggled with it was his/her special letter for the day. I attempted using post-its to stick to the students or writing with washable marker on their hands but neither worked the way I hoped. Instead, I am going to use these basic badges with yarn to make them into necklaces so that students can wear the letter of the day for reinforcement that can be easily changed out by adding a different index card inside of it!

Centers Signs

Centers Signs:

To allow students to move through centers independently and so that there are never an unsafe number of students in a center, I created centers signs that have dots on them showing how many students are allowed in the center. I then attach velcro to the centers signs and students use their centers tickets with velcro on them to move to any center at any time as long as there is space.

If you're interested in using the centers signs that I created click here! 

I Like to Book

To support our young readers and writers, we did a shared writing activity where the students created a patterned book to share their interests. The students had a writing paper that said ___ likes to ____. They filled in the prompt and drew a picture to match the words. I then copied their words onto chart paper to use for shared reading. Students were able to focus on following a pattern, using pictures as clues, and using the beginning sound as a clue in reading. They loved reading it so much that I hung it in the library where they continued to read it over and over, practicing their one-to-one correspondence!

Chicka Chicka Boom Boom Tree

This palm tree was one of the most exciting centers in our classroom! It began as a tree used for whole group lessons where we sang as we added new coconut letters that we learned to the tree, matching lowercase letters as we did. After we learned all of the letters of the alphabet, the tree was moved to the back of a shelf to become a part of the Math and Literacy Center. The uppercase letters were glued onto the tree with velcro and the lowercase coconuts had velcro on the back, in a pocket near the tree so that students could complete the tree independently. They would sing as they completed the task and help one another find the correct letters! 

The coconuts are from here! http://www.sparklebox.co.uk/literacy/alphabet/food.html#.UddxZHBxJ4E

Manipulative Word Wall

This has been one of my FAVORITE parts of my classroom! The word wall in our PK classroom could be manipulated by the students so that they could take words down that they wanted to write when they visited the writing center. To create this, I attached felt to the wall at a level that all students would be able to reach. Next, all words and letter cards needed to be laminated and the rough side of velcro was attached to the back. Students then could take their names off the wall or any word that they wanted to use in their writing. One warning, students loved to take words down so it required some regular maintenance to keep it tidy.