My Kindergarten Classroom

Here are some pictures of my classroom from this year!

In my class we call sight words "heart words" (because they are words you need to know by heart!) I have a heart word walk on the floor of my class with the words in order of how we learn them.  We use this as a center where students pick a word then match it to a word on the heart word walk.

I also use the heart word walk to track the words that my students can read. When they can read all the words in one color, they get that color heart on the bulletin board. The words that they are working on are on an index card before their picture.

I keep a writing binder for each student and add their work to the binder as they finish it.  It helps me stay organized instead of having big piles of paper around, and kids are so excited to take all of their writing home at the end of the year.  It is also a great way to highlight writing progress to parents.

To reinforce place value, we keep track of the number of books we have read in a binder. Each time we read another book, we add that to the number we have read, and we build it with 10s frames. We are already at 172 in 96 days of school!

I track my students STEP reading levels on a bulletin board. They are so motivated to move up to the next level!

If you are inspired by any of these pictures, considering supporting my classroom on my Teachers Pay Teachers page!

Math Centers!!!

In this Ice Cream Scoop Place Value game (which you can get on my TpT page!) my students love learning how to show numbers in different ways!

Here is the link to my TpT homepage where you can access all of my centers.  Enjoy!

Bulletin Boards!

"Voracious Readers Can Go Anywhere"

Favorite Books Bulletin Board

The Crayon Box That Talked bulletin board

We survived Hurricane Sandy!

We have a class timeline where we put pictures of things we do each month!

We went apple picking!

Then we made apple sauce with the apples we picked!

reading bulletin board!

At the big books center we are working on the word THE.  Students go through the big books and every time they find the word "the" they write it on an index card.

I bought clear spoons and colored spoons and wrote uppercase letters on the colored spoons and lowercase letters on the clear spoons.

Then at the Spoons literacy center, students match uppercase and lowercase letters.

The new school year starts on Monday! This is my welcome board.

I made this reading strategies bookmark so my kids can remember their word attack strategies during independent reading!

I went to the hardware store today and stocked up on paint samples.  I used these ones to make a poster to teach about different shades of colors.

Changing seasons

We went to the Arnold Arboretum in the fall.

Then we went again in the spring.

We found the same tree we took a picture with in the fall, and took another one in the spring.  It was a fun way to really see how the seasons change!

The first poem of the year that we memorized was The Crayon Box That Talked by Shane DeRolf.  In art, my class made crayons to wear at arts performance night.  Then they performed the poem for the whole school!

Playdough!

We made play dough and had so much fun!  This is the recipe we used for no cook play dough:

1 cup salt

1 1/2 cup flour

1/2 cup water

2 Tablespoons oil

A few drops of food coloring

Work samples

At the end of the year, my students made posters for next years incoming kindergarteners teaching them how to be a good friend.  It was a cute way for them to share everything they learned about friendship this year!

I am excited to use these posters next year to talk about being a good friend!

Around my classroom!

My students were mixing up pentagons and hexagons, so I wanted to find a way to make it stick that a pentagon has 5 sides and a hexagon has 6.  I started graphing their birthdays so that 5 year olds were pentagons and 6 year olds were hexagons.  On their birthday, they were so excited to become a hexagon!  No one mixed it up anymore!

We learned about endangered, extinct and unthreatened animals.  We read about an animal (where it lives, what it's predators are etc.) and students made predictions about which category that animal would fall in.  Then we graphed it.

We read The Lorax to start our unit on protecting the Earth.

 Everyone in the class has a job.  I use community helpers from our community to name each job.  I change the jobs every Monday.  The jobs are: president, superman :) (backup), waiter/waitress, maintenance worker, gardener, teacher's assistant, mail carrier, news anchor, doctor, electrician, police officer, DJ, meteorologist, mathematician.

We did an author study on our favorite authors.

I use ice cream scoops to track heart word progress.  The heart words are in groups of 10 on different colored ice cream scoops.  When scholars can read all the words in that scoop, they get that colored scoop on their ice cream cone.  When everyone can read all 100 of their kindergarten heart words, we earn an ice cream party!

We memorized part of Oh The Thinks You Can Think and performed it as a poem for the school!

Practicing stretching out words.

I love taking some time in the summer to re-organize my library!

Organized library, phew!

Measurement posters