Name Puzzles

We have been so busy! I haven't had much time to update. We are getting into the swing of Christmas spirit! Our classroom tree is up, as well as a few christmas lights, we have the christmas music on and tons of crafts and activities!

One of our favorite things lately has been our name puzzles. We have been working hard on reading and identifying our names and our friends by playing fun matching games. During Halloween and Thanksgiving our name puzzles were candy corn pieces with each student's picture, first name and last name. When put together, they form the candy corn peice. This month, we have snowmen puzzles! Each student's picture has been made into a snowman (the smallest and first snowball) and the second snowball is their first name, and finally the last and largest snowball is their last names. I put magnets on the back and let the students match them on the large space as a center. They just love this one! (Will add a picture soon!)

I have also been saving 2-liter and bottle caps to make a new name puzzle. I saw this flying around on pinterest, however made our own version to suit our needs. First, I printed pictures of each of the students, then I made a template on word using the shapes to make bottle cap sized circles. After I printed them out, I counted to make sure I have the correct amount for each student. Now, each student has their own individual name puzzle to help with letter identification/sound identification/spelling. They also have the choice to do their friends as well!



Until we master our name goals, we will keep working on these! They will go home at the end of the year so they can continue to practice.

We will be going on a community trip to the mall soon! Can't wait to take them and have them experience the fun of shopping for loved ones!

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Happy Thanksgiving!

I hope everyone has a relaxing and safe Thanksgiving break! Enjoy your time at home with your family and celebrate all the wonderful things you are thankful for!

We have been very busy this short week, those three days flew by quickly! We have been working on so many different Thanksgiving-themed activities together in our regular education classrooms and our own. During calendar time yesterday, we discussed that we wouldn't be coming to school for a few days and taking a break with our families. It was hard to get this point across, they kept saying, "no, Mrs. Hughes, we have school tomorrow!" They just love school soooo much :)

Yesterday all of our fall-themed art work got sent home. Our turkey's that had patterned feathers, our large candy corn cutouts that the students sorted shapes into three categories (all color coded) to make a candy corn and of course tons of Thanksgiving work.

This week we worked on the story by Alison Jackson, "I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Pie". I have made a large cut out of an "Old Lady" and she is life size! We read the story, re-told the story using velcro peices and putting them in our life-size Old Ladies belly. We had a blast. Then we used peices of the food from the story to work on beginning sounds, and then moved on to making our own book to take home to read to our families. I hope you enjoyed those books! I will upload photos of our "Old Lady" in another blog post.

Yesterday we talked a lot about our favorite Thanksgiving foods. Students colored a picture of their favorite food, cut it out and placed it on our class chart.

After we charted our favorite foods, we counted, tallied, and wrote the numbers for our favorite food (Turkey won!). Then we graphed it on graph paper (to practice our graphing skills). We discussed most and least, and then got started on writing a Thanksgiving book about all the foods we like to eat! The students used the word cards to read the food, and then could take it off the white board and bring to their seat to help them write the word in their book. They then drew a picture of that food.

All of these activities I got from candokinders.blogspot.com as one of her freebies!

 

Have a Happy Thanksgiving!

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Learning Names

We have been working on a few sight words but nothing has been more exciting for the students than learning to read their friends names!
In our classroom, our names are everywhere! I have noticed the students going around the room and reading each others names. I thought it would be a fun center for them to have something to incorporate their friends pictures and reading names while sticking to our theme.  This is also a great functional living skill.
I purchased Nicole Ricca's Fall Fun Math and Literacy Centers back in October. In her unit, she includes a blank template for candy corn cut outs. I simply used a picture on the top white portion, their first name in the middle yellow portion and their last name on the bottom Orange portion. I turned it into a file folder game (my students need a concrete place to put things) and their task is to match everyone with their correct names!
We have had a blast with this one, it has given the students an opportunity to learn the last names, and explore the letters in each others name. I actually had student conversations, "hey, that's not my last name! My last name starts with an M..." It was so awesome that we are still doing this center, they enjoy it so much, and the learning and conversations that are taking place are invaluable!
You can get a copy of Nicole Ricca's unit on her TpT store...WWW.teacherspayteachers.com/store/Mrs-riccas-kindergarten
I hope you find her unit as helpful as I did!

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Coloring Turkeys!

My class has been having a blast with all of our turkey activities as of late! We are still focusing on one-to-one correspondence, so I created another emergent reader to go along with our theme. I have been getting a lot of positive feedback from parents on all of our emergent readers coming home! Some have even said that they read them every night before they go to bed! AWESOME!

Here is our latest:

Each turkey has his own number. The students have to count and color the correct amount of feathers on each turkey. We used this to practice our counting, coloring, and fine motor skills! Not to mention we hit 7, YES 7! Extended Content Standards :)

All while sticking with our turkey theme!

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All About Turkey!

This month our classroom has been working a lot with turkeys! I have been looking for several hands-on ways to teach with turkeys and one of our biggest classroom hits was a matching game that I created.

The students had to count feathers, and find the matching turkey body to re-unite the turkey with his feathers! They loved it! We will be doing more of this center this week. Check out the picture below:

We will also be doing an emergent reader. My class is still working on learning our colors. Coincidentally, the colors we are struggling with are the ones found in fall! I created this emergent reader on TpT to go along with our theme and our goal of learning colors!

 

Here is a link to the store: TpT Store- Rachelle Hughes

 

I hope everyone has a great week!

 

-Rachelle

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Our Calendar Books

Like I said before, this is one of my most treasured creations! After hundreds of peices of velcro and one year of trial and error, my paraprofessionals and I finally mastered the goal of my calendar book!

The reason I created the calendar book in the first place is because my students were bored, and they were not grasping the concept of the calendar what so ever! Now, they have taken ownership of their calendars and this is probably their favorite part of our day. Not only has it been awesome getting them to stay on task, it has helped me visually show them a concept they have not been able to grasp for years: the changing of months.

Everytime a month comes to an end, we say "goodbye" to the month. We wave goodbye, and then change our month title at the top of our page, and then (the best visual to show them we have started over) they remove all their calendar numbers! It has been absolutely ah-mazing. For some reason each of them having their own book, and their own calendar, it has really sparked an interest in this concept for them, and they take care of their books so nicely!

I just put my template on TpT! Here is a preview of our Calendar Books:

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Rachelle-Hughes

Have a great night!

Rachelle


Interactive Calendar Book by Rachelle Hughes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

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Ready to share my ideas!

Working in my classroom, I have had to make so much of my OWN things and work so hard to make so many of my own materials! Most of my materials are classroom management resources, however one thing I am extremely proud of is my "calendar books". They took me over a year (with the help of my very dedicated paraprofessionals) to complete. We have been implementing them full force this year and already, I have seen such a HUGE improvement in my student's motivation to be at calendar!

Each student has their own calendar "book" (a 3-ring binder) that has templates inside that match my calendar. As I go through the calendar, they are also matching/imitating/identifying in their own personal calendar books. They love them!

I am working on putting this template on TpT so that other teachers can also use it with their students. I will post pics on the blog when I am finished posting the template to TpT!

I am excited to share this one, it's been a long but SO worthy process!

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Getting Started

I have been using a lot of things on Teacherspayteachers lately. A lot of the things on there I have been exploring and saying to myself, "hey! I could do that!". Especially because there aren't a lot of cute things out there for my area of the extended content standards. So, I have decided I am going to start practicing and start working on making my own things! One of things we are working on is patterns in my room. Last week, we did a lot of patterns with spiders and pumpkins. I was looking for a really cute turkey pattern activity that we could use with paint dabbers, and I couldn't find one! So, I took it upon myself to make one. It's my first time trying to do something like this.. so I hope that it goes over well tomorrow!

Check it out for free on my TpT store that I JUST created... so nervous! eek!

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Rachelle-Hughes

Have a great night!

Mrs. Hughes :)

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