Wednesday, February 29, 2012

officially obSEUSSed

As many of you are, my kinders and I have been enjoying ourselves some Dr. Seuss! I have to say, I am blown away by the way he is able to present topics that are quite complex in a fun, childlike way. If I were teaching fifth grade, I would be using The Lorax to teach about supply and demand! Buuuut that's not quite a K concept. So, we instead enjoyed a reading of The Lorax to lead into a discussion about wants and needs. Wow, my babies amaze me. We found ourselves in a friendly debate about whether or not a friend is a want or a need. "Friends are a want because you can live without them," one says, to which another replies, "But you need them so you won't be lonely." On we went, with a class discussion that's still making me smile. Anyway, here's the sheet we used to record our wants vs. needs.


This little guy decided that friends fall in the needs category, along with his heart, food and water. On the wants, he has a galaxy tab (??), pizza, to be the king of the world, and a new hamster. How precious is this? Let's look at another one, because they're so darn cute!


This little one's wants include: a baby frenchie, no tornadoes, a fox, and a sister. Her needs are trees, animals, heart and God. I'm melting. I have been trying to figure out where I got this page... please let me know if you know so I can link back! Thanks.

We also made Thing 1 and Thing 2 word families:



I freehanded tracers (can you tell!?) for them to use in making their things. They wrote
"-ing" word family words all over their thing with white colored pencil (except my little friend there who wrote in black). They then wrote a sentence about their thing using a couple of their word family words.

On a waaayy late note, here is our President's Day fabulousness:




[If I were president, I would make more video games. I would make Jesus come back.]


Inside Lincoln's hat! [I would stuff my hat with my pony because I love her]

Saturday, February 4, 2012

free valentine math journals

I'm breaking the one post per day rule in the name of freebies. I have finally had some time to spend stalking and am so amazed at all the wonderful freebies out there right now! For that reason, I felt the need to give back a little more. Click here to get my free valentine math journal pages!



Chrissy, at Read Write Sing, was so sweet to make a list of some awesome freebies. Bless her heart, she also made sure to encourage everyone to show appreciation to those fabulous friends who are offering freebies to everyone out here in cyber world! Go check out her list!

Valentine freebie for your help!

I recently learned that I am moving from Kinder to 1st next year! I am so excited, but I have a lot of things to take care of for the transition. I was hoping for some help from my bloggy friends.

1. I can't exactly keep a blog name that implies I teach kinder when I move to first. I have been thinking about new names, and wiiiissh I could use Here We Grow - which is the name of my TN shop. HOWEVER, someone took this blog name back in 2005 and hasn't done anything with it. I thought I could just contact them and politely ask for them to relinquish the name, but there is no way to contact them via the blogspot page.

Any ideas on how to find this person? If not, any cute name ideas that match the the flower-theme I have going?

2. Please leave a comment with links to your favorite blogs for 1st grade! I'm ready to get inspired!

3. Anyone have experience with switching blog names? Is it better to create a new blog altogether and upload this one to it... or to switch the URL of this one? I don't want to lose my beloved followers in the process!

Thank you allll sooo much for your help. Here is a freebie in advance as a thank you for your advice!

If you haven't already, go out and buy yourself some cute little heart boxes from dollar section or store. These are from the 99 Cents store.


Fill the boxes with letter tiles that spell sight words or CVC words that your want your kiddos to practice. Have them open a box one at a time, unscramble the letters to spell the word and record the answer on the response sheet. If you get these exact boxes, you can use the sheet I'm using. If not, I included a blank sheet for you to program how you'd like. You could easily just write numbers on the boxes with a sharpie and write the numbers on the sheet to match.



Click here for the blank template!



Click here for the template I'm using

Sorry, someone told me once, but I cannot locate the email explaining how I link an image! I'll figure that out again one of these days. I hope you enjoy!