New school year, new degree, new hair, new blog design

Hey y'all! Im so excited! I am officially done with grad school and can spend more time on school... For now anyways. ;) I've been missing this ol blog and trying to catch up on all that I have missed. So with a fresh new start I wanted to have a new blog design. I just love it! If you're looking for a good designer, go check out Megan at:

I was so glad to find her! She totally read my mind for what I wanted. 

Onto school stuff... My k team and I had our first day with all our kiddos yesterday. So we had to take our annual first day of school pic! One of my teammates' best friend works at her family's local sporting goods store and they've made a few shirts we wanted. These ones are my fav! Our initials are on the front and formed into the shape of an apple. So cute and so soft! 

(Side note: I'm a brunette now! It's not the best pic but you can def tell how dark it is now! I'm still getting used to it.)

On the back we have our school initials and grade level.  We're dorks and made muscle arms to show we were ready for the kinders!

I had to show you these cute activities my classroom neighbor, Bethany did....

Aren't they precious? She made a smaller version of the No David craft. It's too cute!

I believe she found this idea on a blog through Pinterest. I'm totally doing this next week in small groups when we're working on names.

Last week we read The Kissing Hand and made their handprints to go with the story.

The poem I used was found in a oldie from First Grade Blue Skies. I tried to look it up, but I think  she's updated the packet to make it even better and sells it on TPT now!

Later I got out a mystery bag filled with school supplies and introduced them one by one. As I pulled each item out of the bag we would go over the rules of what to do and not to do with them. Then I'd model how to use them with the activity page below. We did it step by step and I gave them about 10 minutes to do each and they were so engaged. They did a great job too! 

 

You can find the activity page on kindertrips' blog under her freebies called "back to school worksheets".

I wrote out the morning message so we could practice echo reading as I tracked the words.

And we wrote our first predictable chart out.

Everything else I did was teach them rules and procedures! It was a great first week and am excited for all the fun activities planned next week. We'll be working on our names, the sight words I & am, identifying the author and illustrator of a story and naming the roles of each, and more rules and procedures! 

Flashback through the year

Thank you all for your kind words on my most recent post! It's so nice to know that so many of you cared enough to leave a sweet comment for me! =)  I'm officially on summer break and enjoying a nice weekend of camping in the country with one of my best friends and her family in middle Tennessee!

Today, I wanted to share some pictures of anchor charts I have made the past school year that actually turned out pretty cute! Most of them I got from other blogs and I will try my best to give credit where it's due!!! =) Don't ya'll just LOVE pinterest?!

I had a sub that day... she did a pretty good job with her illustrations! =) This chart was inspired by this cute one found here!

I tried to draw my best! This chart was inspired by Kindergarten Kindergarten!

How we introduced addition equations! =)

This is what we did at the end of the school year for retelling a story! This was another chart idea from Life in 1st Grade!

We created this venn diagram to compare and contrast what it was like in Kindergarten and what it will be like in 1st grade!

This chart REALLY helped my kinders understand how to find the main idea of a story!!!! Thanks to one of my FAVORITES: Life in First Grade!

This was a great chart to introduce details for a main idea! The kids did an awesome job!

We used the examples found HERE to come up with details for our Main Idea after reading some non-fiction texts!

I didn't have time to make this as cute as the others! =)

We did this several days in a row with different books! The kids really started to get the hang of it! =)

Here's a cute one we came up with when we were learning about digraphs! =)

The kids loved this one! =) Idea from HERE!

Our school librarian gave us this idea!

Loved these two No David chart idea from Cara Carroll! It really helped my kids with making inferences!

This was a graph we made for the beginning of the year for our opinion writing on what was their favorite book and why.

This one was from Cara Carroll! I was so proud of this one I didn't throw it away!