This year, my classroom theme is Mary Poppins. It has been my favorite classroom so far in my teaching career. It’s not in your face, but it’s also pleasing to the eye. It is my happy place. One of my absolute favorite aspects of the room is actually outside of my room – our hallway display board! It’s so simple and so vibrant. It’s easy to create and (seriously, the best of all) it can be kept up all year long! I’ve had questions about this board from the second I put it up, so here we go! You will need: black bulletin board paper, bulletin board paper in a bright color of your choice, a fun border, bulletin board letters or white paper to print your letters on. Step 1: Tape a long piece of black bulletin board paper to any type of Smart Board or onto a wall if you have a projector. Step 2: Find a Mary Poppins silhouette image online (by searching “Mary Poppins silhouette” on Google Images) and enlarge it to your entire computer screen by zooming in on the picture. Project this on your Smart Board or wall. If your paper does not fit over the entire image (see Continue Reading
When I taught third grade, my students whined and complained when I asked them to write. They struggled to write when directed and when working independently. They lacked experience in sentence formation and frequently struggled with spelling. It pained me to watch them get frustrated, and it pained to me edit their work and ask them to write it over yet again. I was determined to make my students enjoy writing, and to produce quality writing in the process. We are daily writers in Kindergarten. I strongly believe that if you encourage writing from the get go, students will naturally write. No stress, no frustration, no tears. I intentionally integrate writing all day long. This has developed a love for writing in my kindergarteners. (DISCLAIMER – The first month or so of kindergarten is rough. I get that. Believe me, our first unprompted writing sample was no fun. I had criers and quitters. However, I teach writing in a teacher directed format during the first month or so, and then move toward independence. I differentiate in my classroom and within activities every day. The activities below are just samples. They are not necessarily completed by my entire class.) Each morning, we begin with our morning journal. The Continue Reading
We’ve been working on informational writing for the past week or so, and today I taught a mini lesson. Here is the process in images… First, we read a big book called Red-Eyed Tree Frog. Then, we decided to write about it! I created this chart with the kiddos. As I wrote, they tried to guess what words I was about to write and chanted them out loud. They thought it was hilarious…although I’m not quite sure why… Gotta love 6 & 7 year olds! I picked a few students to write example sentences on Post Its for each part of an informational writing piece: introduction, key details, and closure. They then came up and put their Post Its on the chart. We read all of the Post Its and talked about why some were “super duper” and why others needed a tiny bit of fixing. Then we put them in order. Other volunteers came up to write those Post It sentences onto our chart paper. We used different colors to color code our paragraph into three parts. These parts matched our anchor chart. Believe me. Give a scented marker to a kid, and BAM instant hard work! And of course Continue Reading
We learned about Meerkats last week and worked on the format of informational writing. One of my firsties gave me this beautiful drawing. She called them “carrot tails”. (Look close for the humor…I couldn’t believe my eyes!) LOL What crazy/inappropriate pictures have your kids drawn in class? Leave a comment below and then head back to Sugar and Spice to link up with other teachers!