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! 

Addition FREEBIE!

Hey friends! I'm back with a little freebie! It's nothing fancy, but it will really help your kiddos understand the concept of addition!

Introducing....

{click on picture to go to free download!}

There are 7 different versions of these mats. Some have 2 to a page so you can print them onto colored paper, laminate, and then cut them in half to use in small groups or whole group activities. 

There are also work mats with numbered lines for you to use to assess or put in a math station! 

I am so excited to being our addition unit this week! I'm such a nerd! =) 

I hope you all have a wonderful week and enjoy this freebie!!! 

More to come soon!

Addition Math centers

We finished up our addition unit last week in math and are moving onto subtraction!
 Today I introduced the skill by reviewing how addition means "to put together." Then I said this week we are going to being "taking away" or subtracting. I read "Five Green and Speckled Frogs" and had 5 kids come up with frog masks and had them help model "jumping into the pool" as we read/sang the song and I wrote the subtraction sentence on the board as well. We did this 3 or 4 times to let each kiddo have a turn. Tomorrow we are going to do the same activity with Monkeys swinging in a tree! =) Afterwards, we did a subtraction activity page together that talked about "taking away"! They did a great job!

I kept the math centers addition related since they need to be able to complete them independently!

I got all these amazing recording sheets from here: Free addition centers
These are GREAT centers! They were easy to get together and I'm really happy with them!

Addition game and Building Beavers

So we lucked out with the past few storms! The worst of them hit south of us, but we still had a lot of rain that caused some flooding,  power outages, roof damange and TONS of trees down. This picture doesn't even do the storm clouds justice.... they were scary! =(

But thank the Lord we made it through! 

We have been learning how to add in math this month and here my kiddos are after learning how to play Go Fish- addition style. We got this game idea off of Shari Sloane's website: kidscount1234.com

She has a lot of great printables so check her out!

Our school district requires us to post our standards in kid friendly language and I'm finally starting to get the hang of it. Here is our standards we are planning to cover this week!

Last week we talked about the main idea of a story. We created a web about what we learned after reading Building Beavers.... they did a GREAT job!

The next day we compared and contrasted a beaver's home to a people home. They laughed at me b/c didnt' make my boxes big enough for my large handwriting! hehe

I fixed up my writing center this week... I added our word family posters and moved our writing materials shelf closer! They love it!

Other than that, we have been busy little bees and they are working hard! I'm so sad for this year to end in 3 weeks, but really looking forward to starting off next year with a fresh start! It will be my 3rd year teaching and I have SO many great ideas to do that i have to keep a notebook so I'll remember! =) I can't wait!

(I apologize that some of the photos seem blurry- I left my digital at home so these are from my cell phone!)

Spring is in full swing!!!

I can't believe all the storms we have been getting this spring in TN!!!! We've had 2 really bad storms with high winds enough to damage my roof. Tonight and tomorrow they are predicting severe storms with high chances of tornadoes.... which is no fun when you live alone with no basement!!!! I want my mommy! ;) Please say a prayer for all of us in the south that are in the storm's path this week! 

Before the storm hits and most likely takes out my power, I wanted to share a few pictures of some fun spring activities we have been doing in kindergarten!

After spending a week learning about plants and seeds, the kids were able to plant their own seeds. They are growing fast and the kids are so excited! Next week I'm going to let them paint some little flower pots to give to their moms/grandma/aunts, etc for Mothers Day! (We have a lot of kiddos that don't live with moms, so I try to remind them that even thought they don't live with them, they may have someone in their lives that is like a mom...)

Anyways... here a pic of our plants on Friday last week! (We were out of school today for power outages due to the storms last night.... this has been one crazy spring)!

When learning addition I let them color a ladybug, and glue black dots on each wing. Then we wrote our addition sentence on yellow squares to glue on the bottom. 

Back to our plant unit.... we read Eric Carle's "Tiny Seed" and then labeled and glued the parts of a plant and what a plant needs to grow as a fun craft! They loved it and worked so quietly as they glued! 

A little assessment for our landforms unit. Each day they drew the landform we talked about in a corner of the paper.

Our rigor and relevance for the month! They wrote their own addition stories! They turned out so cute!

Our writing after reading "Spilt Milk"....

During our dental health unit I had dental words in their writing center and some of my kiddos did a great job writing! =)