The set includes cards for numbers 1-20 and are designed to be printed double-sided making them self-checking! I LOVE centers that my students can be independent with - and I know that they love the ability to check their own work...
See the dots for self-checking?!
All you need are some clips - I used these great little ones from the craft store!
I set them out on a little tray with the clips so that my students can carry the whole work to their workspace without trouble.
You can download these cute clip-cards for free HERE!
With spring just around the corner, the time to pack away
the snowflakes and penguins has finally arrived! Just a few days ago, I switched
out one of our math centers for this standards-based St. Patrick’s Themed number
sort.
I love that it has so many different representations of each
number and includes numbers 0-20! Right now, I just have 0-10 out and have the
other numbers in a ziplock bag on the shelf until I see that my students are ready
for them. I also love that it includes an extra page of coins with Montessori colored beads!
Number Sense Math Center
These centers are also self-checking (if you can print double-sided)! I absolutely love that my students can check and correct their own work which frees my time up for individual and small group instruction during our work block.
When it comes to cutting out tons of laminated centers (which most of us have conquered from time to time), cutting out circles is simply the worst! I invested in this 2" circle punch from the craft store and couldn't be happier! It has saved me so much time and painful blisters on my fingers.... It was worth the $15 I spent ... and more!
This weekend, I spent some time updating & adding some new worksheets to my Candy Hearts early math learning packs... then I went to town using them with my 3 1/2 year old! He loved sorting, counting and graphing the hearts - most of all, I think he liked eating them after we were done.
Before we started, I prepared a box of Sweeheart brand candy hearts so that there were no more than 5 of any color. With older kids, you don't need to prepare the box ahead of time! We sorted the colors first - he doesn't know the names of them yet, but was able to match them to the card & put all the hearts of the same color together...
Then we quickly counted each group of hearts - I modeled how to count & touch one item at a time, but he's not there yet. Next, I showed him how to line up the hearts on the graph - we primarily focused on just putting one heart in in each box for now.
Last, we took the hearts off the graph and I helped him to color in the correct quantity of boxes on the graph. He really wasn't into this part and would have just scribbled all over the whole thing had I not had his hand in mine :)
Overall - I'd say great success!And he even got to eat a few of them when we were done!
In just a few days, I'll celebrate my one-year anniversary selling teaching materials on TpT! I can hardly believe it's been a whole year! I've learned so much this year when it comes to creating materials, design skills, photo editing, blogging and much more... I can't thank all my friends, family and customers enough for their support this last year! Here's to another year of creative ideas...
Enjoy %15 off of everything in my store until 11/26!
A (long) while back, I mentioned how excited I was to do a Dinosaur Themed unit over the summer since I never have time to do this unit during the regular school year! Unfortunately, I never did get around to blogging about it. Since yesterday was letter 'D' day in the 31 Days of ABC's, I figured now was as good a time as any to play catch up!
Books! I went a little crazy with the dinosaur books during preparations and ended up having more than enough to choose from for our classroom activities. Here's 10 of my students' favorite books, which include a nice mixture of fiction and non-fiction options:
The #1 favorite, by a long run, was Dinosaur Dig by Penny Dale. Who doesn't love dinosaurs AND heavy machinery in one book? It's a great little rhyming and counting book about dinosaurs digging and building a swimming pool. Somehow, I figured out that I could sing it to the tune of "99 Bottles" - singing songs with books really mesmerizes my students and increases their attention for a story exponentially! My PreK students seemed never to tire of this story and requested it everyday, over and over again.
Here's the rest of our list:
Ten Terrible Dinosaurs by Ken Stickland. -- This book was great for counting, vocabulary enrichment, talking about being kind - we used little dinos and lined them up during the story telling and took one at a time away as we read. We did end up modifying this book greatly to meet the needs of the students as much of the vocabulary was much too hard for my students.
Dinosaur Roar by Ken Stickland -- We had fun acting out parts of this book with toy dinosaurs, talking about opposites, comparing the dinosaurs on each page, using lots of new adjectives & prepositions and exploring new vocabulary words like meek & weak etc.
Saturday Night at the Dinosaur Stomp by Carol Diggory Shields -- This story had great pictures and fun rhyming text, BUT was very difficult for me to read! It includes the full scientific names of many dinosaurs in the rhyming text, so here's your fair warning to practice reading it before trying to read it to your students! We ended up modifying this book lots too in order to share it with the kids so that they could understand the storyline - it was a hit though! How do Dinosaurs Eat their Food? by Jane Yolen & Mark Teague -- This one was an easy to read with great pictures.
If the Dinosaurs Came Back by Bernard Most -- A fun classic that I remember reading when I was little. The kids seemed to enjoy reading this one and thinking of what it might be like if they had a dinosaur as a pet. We painted dinosaurs in single colors to resemble the dinos from the book and added a photograph of each child 'riding' their dinosaurs for a wall display.
Dinosaur Bones by Bob Barner -- Cute rhyming story about dinosaurs. My kids loved the dinosaur tracks at the end of the book and the page with dinosaurs next to each other to compare sizes. The long neck dinosaur was everyone's favorite by far!
Dinosaur A-Z by Roger Priddy -- Great very realistic looking pictures! We didn't read this one very much, but the kids loved looking at the pictures in this one indpendently.
My Big Dinosaur Book by Roger Priddy -- Another collection of great realistic looking dinosaur pictures.
Dinosaurs Touch & Feel by Jeffrey Burton -- This one was a fun addition to our collection because of the touch & feel aspect. Lots of great textures, colors and pop ups to keep even reluctant little readers engaged. Although it was probably the 'youngest' book in the collection, they still enjoyed it just the same!
It seemed that ALL of the books went well with plastic dinosaur figurines as props. The students loved choosing a dinosaur and then copying the dinosaur actions from the books.
Dinosaur play! I managed to round up a whole bushel basket full of dinosaur figurines from yard sales and the dollar store so there were never any fights about dinosaurs since there were so many. I also (again went a little crazy) and made this dinosaur suitcase playset that I saw a tutorial on over at So You Think You're Crafty. Mine came out pretty good and the kids loved playing with it!
Dinosaur Suitcase Playset
Songs! We sang a few different songs about dinosaurs this summer too! We changed up the words to "If You're Happy and You Know It" to "If You're a Dino and You Know" and it was a huge hit with the kids. It goes something like this: If you're a dino and you know it Roar real loud If you're a dino and you know it Roar real loud If you're a dino and you know and you really want to show it If you're a dino and you know it Roar real loud
Action Variations: Jump real high, roar real soft, turn around, wiggle your tail, clap your claws, stomp your feet, show your teeth, go to sleep etc.
Another one of the favorites was Dinosaur Stomp by Dan & Dani - here's the YouTube Video:
Activities! Here are a few pictures of our Dinosaur-a-Summer pictures:
Dinosaur painting like the dinosaurs from Bernard Most's book!
Plastic Dinosaurs in Playdoh make fun footprints!
Printables! We also used some of the games and activity sheets from my Dinosaur Discover early literacy and math pack which can be found in my TpT Store.
Dinosaur Theme Early Learning Activities
FREEBIES! And here are some FREE cut & paste dino activities that I put in my student's communication books for this unit (for at home carryover and reinforcement).
How 'bout you? What other great dinosaur activities have you done with your kids?
There's something that I absolutely love about cutting up old magazines... or perhaps just cutting paper of any type. I find it relaxing, even meditative in some ways. As a child, I had a thing for cutting paper... making a mess, using the entire roll of tape for one project etc. In high school, I had a shoebox full of colorful images that I had carefully snipped out of the pages of my Teen Beat and Bop magazines that I used to make colorful collages. One day, my mother inadvertently threw them all away one day while I was at school!! I was furious! I continued collecting magazine snippets throughout college, and had an entire wall of my dorm room practically wallpapered with my favorite images. Even in adulthood, I still find cutting up old magazines strangely relaxing, mind-numbingly different from the rush of my normal life...
In my classroom, Letter Learning Activities are one of my favorite things to do with old magazines! There's something about the random letters from magazines that makes me smile - its whimsy, wonderful... color, crazy, fun! The mess that went along with bringing magazine activities into my classroom made me cringe and we couldn't always find the letters we wanted with the magazines we had available at the time. I literally had boxes of letters, pictures, words and other paper bits at home - so I was inspired to create my popular printable magazine letters! Here are some of my fun letter sets for printing, cutting and pasting:
Here's a recent alphabet hunt my students worked on:
Download the Magazine Letter Alphabet Hunt template FREEBIE here. I'm constantly coming up with new ideas for my letters! I'd love to hear your ideas...
p.s. here's a FREEBIE black and white magazine letter sheet - perfect for making photocopies!
Lately, it's been difficult to find time to post anything new! I'm doing so many things right now, it's nearly impossible to keep up. As my first semester teaching at a nearby college winds down, spring has sprung in preschool and my own toddler seems to have a touch of spring fever!
During the last couple of weeks in my prek classroom, we focused on the emergence of spring, trees and the funny books "Stuck" by Oliver Jeffers. I came across "Stuck" at a local discount store and for a few dollars, it seemed like a cute story. After reading it to my own child, I realized it was more than just cute, I LOVED it! I held my breath that my prek students would love it as much as I did...
Late that Saturday night, I furiously created storytelling props and a mini-book based on the story, along with a few simple cut-and-paste activities and an original game - just in time for our return from spring break! Up in a Tree - an early math and literacy unit was born! Check out my free printable mini-book based on the story!
Luckily, my students also thought this smart story was laughably funny - even those with severe expressive and receptive language delays thought it was great! Here are some of the thing we did over the last couple of weeks:
Storytelling w/ props on the white board.
With the storytelling props, we practiced oral storytelling, ordering events, naming objects, listening to oral directions w/ 2+ parts, picking items based on attributes/functions, describing& sorting.
Up in a Tree Game - Early Literacy, Math & Social Skills
Close up of game pieces...
We played the game a few different ways, first we only used the object cards & dice for counting practice. Then we introduced the 'special' cards which require the children to follow the corresponding direction: lose a turn, put a card back or share a card with a friend. Adding the special cards made the game take considerably longer & greatly increased the difficulty - the 'share' card was VERY difficult for the children to deal with!
Cut & Paste... funny things in a tree.
The cut and paste worksheet worked well. It took longer than I had anticipated due to the quantity of pieces for coloring, cutting & gluing. We completed it in a couple of mini-sessions with the kids. We even used it for a barrier activity for a couple of students working on following oral directions.The mini book was a huge hit!
We assembled the books for the students on the first day that we read this story and sent it home with a note telling families about our new book. I received great feedback from families about the mini-book - both the families and children enjoyed reading it together, the kids liked being able to share this silly story with their parents (even without the oral expressive language needed to communicate lots of strange details) and the parents enjoyed being able to talk with their child about school activities.
Unrelated to 'Stuck' activities, I introduced a new letter learning activity for my VERY active preKs. I'm not sure what I call it really - perhaps "Letter Stomp" or "ABC Jump" would be an accurate description...
It's really just ABC's on the floor made out of blue painter's tape. So far we've used them to 'jump names' (i.e. jump on the letters to spell name), match letter magnets to the floor letters, match lowercase letter magnets with uppercase floor letter and line up small items along the lines of the letters to 'make' them... we're still adding the rest of the alphabet and it's still evolving.
I've been wanting one of those digital drawing tablet & pen gadgets for a while now, but I'm one of those people who always finds a reason not to spend money on myself - my family, kids and students always come first. My husband finally convinced me to just get something for myself for once, so I did - my very own Wacom Bamboo Capture tablet! I was completely antsy the entire afternoon - like a little kid on Christmas! As soon as I got home, got my son settled and our things put away... I plugged it in. I was skeptical and had prepared myself for a steep learning curve after a warning for the sales guy... surprisingly, it's easy to use! It only took me a few minutes to get used to drawing on the tablet and seeing my lines on the screen. I'm so excited about this thing!
I've been working on my own original clipart for some of my TpT ideas and hopefully my new Bamboo tablet will help me take my ideas digital without so many steps. I was messing around with my tablet tonight and came up with this fun Rainbow Alphabet poster:
Rainbow Alphabet Poster
I've also been working on these foldable 3-D Paper Farm Animals. I'll be adding the whole set to my TpT store soon! Just in time for spring Farm Themes...
from the craft store and couldn't be happier! It has saved me so much time and painful blisters on my fingers.... It was worth the $15 I spent ... and more! 
