City Dog Country Frog Activities and Mentor Text lesson ideas are here! Find reading comprehension and writing ideas to use with this amazing book by Mo Willems. City Dog, Country Frog Mentor Text I don't remember the exact moment I fell in love with City Dog, Country Frog by Mo Willems. I think it was actually a love at first sight sort of thing. I love the theme that two individuals who are so different can still find a true ...
Spring
Are you ready for April?
April kindergarten activities and lesson plan ideas! This blog post is filled with Spring classroom ideas for read-aloud, spring literacy centers, spring math centers, and more! Plus a free lesson planning guide for you! April Book Activities We sure love books! Here are a few that we love to teach with in April. Tops and Bottoms by Janet Stevens. You can see a blog post on this book with a free file: Tops and Bottoms ...
Sheila Rae the Brave Lesson Plans
Sheila Rae the Brave by Kevin Henkes is a beloved book in my classroom! Check out my Sheila Rae lesson plans! Close Reading/Comprehension Sheila Rae, the Brave is a great book to use for close reading. My students loved hearing it again and again! This is a book from the June Guiding Readers set, but it can easily fit into any month. Just like all of Kevin Henkes books, the illustrations are PRICELESS! This ...
Easter Bunny’s Assistant Lesson Plans (Free Download)
These Easter Bunny's Assistant Lesson Plans are filled with reading comprehension ideas for kindergarten and first-grade. Reading Comprehension Lessons Do you love The Easter Bunny's Assistant by Jan Thomas? We sure do. This is such a fun book for spring! After reading the book in our Guiding Readers units, we work on Cause and Effect. and the student's complete their version as well. We follow up ...
Tops and Bottoms Lesson Plans
Top and Bottoms Lesson Plans for Janet Stephens book are here! This is one of those CLASSIC reads. The illustrations are precious! and we love using this book in our Guiding Readers units. As with most weeks, we conduct a retelling of the text. You can find the retelling cards HERE. Video Here is a video of the book. I do love the video versions, but they do not take the place of the book. ...
St Patrick’s Day Lesson Plans
St Patrick's Day Lesson Plans for Kindergarten. We love the book, Jaime O'Rourke and the Big Potato by Tomie DePaola! St Patrick's Day Reading Comprehension/Close Reading We spent the week working on this fun book by Tomie DePaola. It is a perfect book to get us in the mood for St Patrick's Day! In addition to using this book as our close reading text, look how fantastic the illustrations work for writers workshop! ...
Insect Lesson Plans for Kindergarten
Insect lesson plans for kindergarten are here! Last week I was able to work with a kindergarten classroom as we immersed ourselves in all things insects! Insect Lesson Plans: Close Reading We started insect week by reading Insect Detectives by Steve Voake. This is a fantastic book! We spent our time contextualizing the vocabulary. When we discussed the fact that insects have 3 body parts, someone chimed ...
Ocean Week Lesson Plans (AKA Shark Week)
Do you love ocean week as much as me? Here is a little ocean week AKA Shark WEEK flashback. This might be my favorite theme to teach all YEAR! I can't get enough! Perhaps it is because I lived the majority of my life in San Diego or I first considered a career as a marine biologist or maybe because ocean week is a signal that the end of the year is right around the corner. Regardless, I seriously love talking about the ...
The Giving Tree and more!
I had a fantastic week last week in kindergarten! We read The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein! Then spent the week diving deep! We made connections with the text and this will friend gave herself an A+! HA! Don't mind if I do! And we did a little craft with our Giving Tree sentence study! Some were more abstract than other! Precious, just the same! You can find all of these Giving Tree ...
Earth Day Lesson Plans with a FREE File!
Earth Day is right around the corner, so this week we will be incorporating some fun math and literacy activities in anticipation! Here are a few gems I rounded up for Earth Day. Earth Day Popcorn Treats from Simple Like That. Earth Day Slime from Little Bins for Little Hands We can reuse magazines to make this fun craft from I Heart Crafty Things. These are cute little planters for Earth Day! They are from The ...
Kindergarten Lesson Plans! Yippee for Spring! RD
I am BACK with my kindergarten lesson plans... AKA Peek at my Week! I took a few weeks off, but I am super excited about this week! Why you ask? Because I am going to be pushing into a kindergarten classroom for the next 4 weeks. I will be teaching their whole group reading, writing, and math lessons! I can't hardly stand it! So, SO happy! We are going to start our week out with hilarious ...
Tips for the BEST Kindergarten Round Up!
Kindergarten Round Up is always exciting for me. This is where we do our kindergarten screening assessment on our incoming students and learn more about them. I loved walking down the hall and looking at the fresh little faces that might make up my future class. Reconnecting with parents from previous years and meeting new little friends. Here are a few tips to make this year the BEST Kindergarten Round Up ...
Getting Organized for April
April is right around the corner! Here are a few things that will help you get April off on the right foot. Before you know it, you'll have mastered organizing the kindergarten classroom for April. Listening Station I get a lot of questions about my listening station. So here is a quick tour! I keep all of my books and CD's in this tub. I print out the response pages and supportive materials and place them in ...
Oviparous Animals Lesson Plans ~ Peek at my Week
We have always loved learning about oviparous and viviparous animals! Here are some oviparous animals lesson plans for your kindergarten class. Last year we loved learning about oviparous animals during our April's Guiding Readers . We spent the week digging deep in the book, Chickens Aren't the Only Ones by Ruth Heller. We wrote about our Schema. And documented our new ...
Looking Ahead to March! With a FREE file preview
Here are some March Kindergarten math and literacy stations! Kindergarten math centers are an essential part of our day. I love using math center to help reinforce and practice key skills. I updated this unit last year. In fact, I updated ALL of my Math Work Station files. Over the years, I have tried to improve on products. So, instead of making a whole new product, you can download the revision for no additional charge. How can ...
Peek at my Week-Easter!!!!
We had a great week last week learning about oviparous animals. We jumped ahead to April's Guiding Readers so we could read Chickens Aren't the Only Ones. Chickens Aren't the Only Ones (book) can be found HERE. Here is our schema chart. Then ALL... MONTH my little friends have been circling my book shelf. Asking, "When are we going to read THAT book!" (while pointing to The Easter Bunny's Assistant). The time has come my friends, the ...
Peek at my Week-St. Pat’s Week!
We've got a holiday coming up! Here are some kindergarten St. Patrick's Day resources! I just pulled into the homestead after a wonderful weekend in Indiana! It may have been a struggle for me to get there... but the struggle was worth it. Such a great teacher meet up! I will be brief and abbreviated today. Please forgive me!These resources will be discounted until mid-night on Monday! Here ...
Lesson Plans for Next Week and a Give Away!!!!
It is not too early to think about Earth Day! Here is a super cute pack you could win from This Earth Day packet is wonderful. It has a writing activity, a game board that I will use in small group, a sentence building activity, and a matching game. What a wonderfully easy way to work Earth Day into your lessons... and it is only $3.50... and me! Simple to enter: 1. Follow Teaching with Love and Laughter 2. ...
Peek at my Week – 100th Day
First a Joplin UpdateI got this email from sweet, sweet Erica Thank you so much for your donations of your January games and actvities and an even bigger THANK YOU!! for hosting the linky party. Everyone was so excited to hear about what was being done and about all the wonderful, creative resources we had received. I am still receiving items daily, but at last count we had received 300+ units and activities and 20 gift ...
Math and Art at the Same Time!
How do you fit it all in? How about multi-tasking? I saw this adorable cherry blossom tree on Hand and Footprint Arts & Crafts. Then I thought skip-counting? We do skip-counting!!! Wah-lah! A math station was born. First you will make (or have them make) a tree trunk. Then they will dip the end of a pencil into pink paint and place 5 blossoms together in clumps. Finally they count by 5's and ...
Happy Easter Time-Me Station!
So I have been thinking about fluency lately. This made me think of the recent workshop I attended by Dr. Tim Rasinski. From this I created the Time-Me station FREEBIE that I posted on TpT some time back. This has been wildly popular with my kiddos. I thought I would add some Easter themed clip art and Wah-lah! There are 90 high-frequency words taken from the Dolch and Fry lists. I also included 36 of the Fry ...
100th Day of School
So today is our 100th Day of School! I am pumped! We ordered these t-shirts from a local business. I know you can purchase them through a large company, but we sure L.O.V.E. our shirts. As a bonus... they were cheaper AND we can support a community business. Our 100-year old self-portraits are up! This idea came directly from Deanna Jump's 100th Day Math and Literacy ...