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

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

First post of the school year!!

Can you believe that we are already starting week 11?!? It's already NOVEMBER and this is our very first post! I feel like this school year is flying by and I keep neglecting this blog. Time to get back to the grind and try to blog with more consistency...maybe it'll attract followers (hahaha). Our school year has started off pretty great! I have 18 students and Cindy has 19, compared to last year when we had 25 and 28 this feels like cake. What a difference! I already feel more productive with them and less stressed. Time to be a blogger!!

Before blogging about classroom stuff I wanted to share this wonderful story about my former student Mya. She turned 8 this year and for her birthday she received 2 tickets to the Katy Perry concert and could invite one friend to go with. Can you believe she invited ME?!? I was so shocked and appreciative. I love her so much! I can't wait to see her grow up and accomplish so many wonderful things. Katy Perry was AMAZING!!! What a show she put on...I loved it!!

Thanks for letting me share, now back to business lol. I was so excited to get my new lesson plan book for this school year. I absolutely LOVE it. It has so many cool features and I'm glad I decided to invest in a new one this year. Both Cindy and I bought our lesson plan book at erincondren.com. This is my second year using this lesson plan book and I couldn't wait to get it and start using it. 

This year we switched our class theme to Superheroes. I found this cute bulletin board idea idea at Queen of the First Grade Jungle blog and translated it into Spanish. I think it turned out really cute and I love it. It says Superheroes in Training. 

This school year I started the year with an idea I found at A Cupcake for the Teacher called Magic Playdough and the kids really loved it. The recipe and poem can be found at the link above. I gave the students a ball of white play dough and said if the ball changes color we are going to have an amazing year. They squeezed and squeezed it (in a baggie so the dye wouldn't stain their hands) and it slowly changed colors. The kids thought it was so cool!! I will be doing this activity every year.

Here's a little activity I always do at the beginning of the year. We cut pictures from a magazine that is the color of the day and glue them onto a crayon that I'll post in the room with the color words. This is a really great activity because it lets you assess so many skills. I check their cutting skills, color knowledge, use of glue and working with partners, etc...

We also do this little activity with each letter that is introduced. I have my students come to the carpet with a small dry erase board and marker and we discuss the capital letter and lowercase letter, letter formation and then we practice writing it. Then I have them turn and talk with a partner to discuss words that begin with Aa. As the students call out the words we add them to the chart. We say the word, break it into syllables and then stretch the word to write it phonetically. Later in the year the students will write the words on the chart themselves. The kiddos use these charts to make the book of the week, to write the room and during writing.

Here are a couple of morning messages from this year. We have started calling them SUPER News because of our Superhero theme. We are dual language teachers and do the morning messages in the language of the day. I love the "What Does the Shape Say" one that I found on Pinterest. It's so adorable. I also included 2 anchor charts: Carpet Rules (how cute is our super girl?!?) and How to Color.

One last shout out to my wonderful mother who sent me these beautiful flowers. I just love the colors! Thanks for always remembering my first day of school (like I'd let her forget it) with flowers. I love you so much!!

Thanks for stopping by!!! - Sandra and Cindy