Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Teachers are Heroes Sale and new TPT products!!


Don't miss the BIG sale on Teachers Pay Teachers!! TPT is honoring teachers by having a special sale in recognition of their superpowers both in and out of the classroom. Lots of teacher-authors will have resources on sale and you can get an extra 10% off by using the promo code HEROES at checkout. I can't wait to clear some items from my wish list.

Also, I wanted to share with you 2 new products that we posted on TPT. We live in Texas and have had two snow days so it gave me the opportunity to finish up these 2 units. The first one is a Write-On Phonics Cards unit that can be used in literacy centers or at your small group teacher table. Click here to check it out.

And the second one is a FREEBIE!!! It's a counting 1-10 center for Pre-K and Kinders. Students count the objects on the card and match it to the number word. There are also 2 product pages. Click here to check it out!

Happy blogging friends - Love Cindy & Sandra

Monday, February 23, 2015

President's Day, a Freebie and so much more!

Hello Friends!!! We're back for another installment of the happenings in our dual language kinder classrooms. Every time that we think about blogging we say to ourselves, we don't have enough to blog about...wrong!  Maybe we just have too much to blog about and get behind lol!

We had another fun filled week in Kinder! First we did some Presidents day activities.  We worked on these pictures for our presidents book using directed drawing to draw Washington, Lincoln and Obama. The kids did awesome! Don't you just love how detailed Washington turned out? I did a full body directed draw and Sandra did head shots.


After drawing their illustration the kiddos had to write 2-3 facts they learned about each president. After reading George Washington's Teeth the kids were fascinated by the fact that he only had 1 tooth. Most of the student's wrote about that lol.

 

We also made this Barack Obama craftivity that we downloaded for FREE from TLC Lessons. These lessons are great for our kiddos to practice cutting, following directions and reviewing positional words.  They were so excited to do this lesson and although it did have a lot of steps most of it was easy for them.

On Wednesday we had some SUPER cool visitors at our school!  I might be a little partial, but I think the Fort Worth Zoo is amazing! The next best thing to going to the zoo is when...the zoo comes to you!  They brought a crocodile, an opossum, a great horned owl, a porcupine, a frog, and wait for it...A PENGUIN! Now anyone who knows us knows that we absolutely LOVE penguins! She was super cute! It was sooooo exciting!! Oh and the kids loved all of the animals too! Lol!

On Friday we started our pen pal letters to our amazing adopters: Ferro, Akzo Nobel and United Way.  We have a pen pal for each class and each week one student gets selected to take or pick up the mail. They get to wear a mail person costume and they go to each class and pick up the mail from the mailboxes and then they get driven to the adopters and deliver the mail. Our students love it and our adopters love our kiddos just as much as we do. My class made a book and we used it to introduce all of my students to our new pen pal.

 Sandra's class wrote a letter and drew self portraits to introduce themselves.

And last but not least!  We posted a new unit on TpT and a cool freebie as well.  We made a syllable unit with some of our favorite things we use to teach students to read and blend syllables.

Click here to go to our TPT store to purchase these!
We also revamped a syllable assessment we've been using for years.  It's an easy way to check your students' syllable fluency.
Click here to download this at our TPT store!

Can't wait to share this upcoming week with you!  We'll be doing a Dr. Suess author study!

Happy blogging friends!
Love Cindy and Sandra

Monday, February 16, 2015

100th Day & Valentine's Day...Another busy week in Kinder!

Hello everyone this year has definitely been a whirlwind of fun and learning.  This past week was especially busy for us! Hip Hip Hooray, it's the 100th day of school!! We were non-stop busy working on our 100th day activities all day. There are so many activities to do on the 100th day and here are a few we did in our classrooms.

 First off we celebrated the 100th Day of School, by dressing up like NERDS! Of course, we are 100 days smarter lol!! In the past we have dressed like a 100 year olds, but we decided to switch it up this year.

Since this was the first year dressing as nerds not many of our students dressed up, but we had tons of fun making things to wear and doing lots of activities.

100th Day Snack

Fruit Loop Necklace
100th Day Hats and Glasses

 
Counting Stickers by 10's
 
Watching Emily's First 100 Days of School

100 Picture
One super cool activity the kids really enjoyed was using the number 100 to create a picture.  This is an idea on Pinterest that I've always wanted to do with my students.  After creating their picture the students had to write a sentence about what they made.  My little ones had so much fun doing this activity!  Here are a few examples!

Now on to Valentine's Day!! We celebrated our Valentine's Day party on Friday and it was awesome! This year we decided to collect cereal boxes and make superhero themed Valentine boxes. We stayed Thursday to wrap them thinking it was going to be a piece of cake...well it took waaay longer than we thought but they turned out really nice!  Our students absolutely LOVED them so all our blood, sweat and tears was worth it.  Next year we plan on making this a home project lol! 



Froggy Craft
We read Froggy's First Kiss and made a craft from First Grade Blue Skies
Valentine Cards
Last year I got a free unit on Teachers Pay Teacher from What The Teacher Wants called Non Food Valentines and cards. I love it and so do the kids. This year I gave the boys little cars and the girl's yo-yo's. Last year the Whoopee cushions were a big hit.


Party Time!!!
We decided to do hot dogs, chips, Capri Suns, mini cupcakes and cookies and everything was super simple to set up and clean up. It was one of the easiest party's to date. It was so wonderful and the kids had a great time. 
 

That's it for now!! Thanks for reading our little blog!

Cindy & Sandra