Pancake Day is Almost Here!

Are you looking for a fun way to practice sight words with your emerging readers?  Why not celebrate Pancake Day?  February 28th is the date for 2017.

The Tuesday immediately before Ash Wednesday is called Pancake Tuesday or Pancake Day.  It's the perfect day to play this fun game!  Kids use a real spatula to flip pancakes, read the sight word, and then write the sight word.  Great reading and writing practice that is highly engaging for kids.  They absolutely LOVE using the spatula to scoop the pancakes.  I even put a real frying pan and a plastic plate at the center for them to use.

Click here to grab this activity.

I also use this activity on our Pajama Day.  On that day we make real pancakes for breakfast and graph how we liked them best.  Two uses for this fun activity.  It's easy prep too!  Just print on card stock and cut out the pancakes.  I outsourced the cutting to two of my kindergarten kids with the best cutting skills- you know the ones who always want to help you out during their free choosing time.  They were so excited to help make this center!

Here are photos of how we make our graphs.  I show them two different ways to organize the data.

Thanks for stopping by!

Leave a Comment Cooking, Literacy Actvities, Literacy Centers

Rhyming Fun with Green Eggs and Ham

Rhyming is so important as a pre-reading skill so we work on it a lot in my classroom.  I love March because I love Dr. Seuss.  His books are so engaging for young kids and I love the messages within.  They touch on so many deep concepts and really get discussions flowing.  But that's not the reason for this post (stay focused Cheryl).  

I want to share with you one of my kiddos favorite literacy center activities- my Green Eggs and Ham Rhyming Center.  I call it a center because kids can work independently if they can decode CVC words, but you can also do it as a small group activity (which is what I'm going to do this year with my TK kiddos as many of them aren't decoding yet).  

It's a ton of fun.  Kids use a real spatula to scoop up an egg and place it into a small frying pan.  (I use a small plastic frypan from my kitchen housekeeping center).  They read the word on the egg then look for the ham that rhymes with it.  When they find that, they scoop that ham up with the spatula and place it into the frying pan to "cook."  When the eggs and ham are done cooking, the kids remove them and write the words on the recording sheet.  They can then put those two rhymes aside and start again on a new egg/ham match.

This activity is awesome because they are reading simple CVC words, listening for rhymes (phonemic awareness), and writing!    You can grab this at my TpT store.  It's simple to prep and easy to store.  I keep mine in a gallon ziplock bag.

This is a great activity to have set up when you are cooking green eggs and ham with your class.

Leave a Comment Common Core, Fun Stuff, Literacy Actvities, Literacy Centers, Writing

Sight Word Practice

School is right around the corner for me and I'm thinking about fun ways to get my kids reading and writing.  I have a sight word Egg Flip activity that my kids just love but it only has ten sight words.  I have that activity in a center with a real frying pan and spatula and the kids have so much fun cooking up the eggs.  They practice reading the words and writing the words in this center.  You can grab it here for FREE!

I use the Egg Flip Sight Word Center at the beginning of the year.  But what to do when the kids master those ten words?  Hmmm...

Well, since the egg flip is so darn fun, I thought I might as well make a different flip activity with ALL of FRY's 100 sight words, so I made this adorable Sight Word Pancake Flip activity.  Click on the link or click on the photo to get this activity.

The kids are doing essentially the same thing, but this looks different (and we all know how important novelty is for our little learners).  

In this center I have a real spatula, a sturdy paper plastic plate, the recording sheet in a page protector, a dry erase marker, and the pancakes.  That's everything you need for hours of fun!

Kids flip the pancakes (good fine motor development), read the sight words (reading practice), flip the pancake face down and write the sight word on the recording sheet (writing practice), flip the pancake right side up and check the spelling that they wrote (spelling practice), and then scoop the pancake onto the plate and grab a new sight word pancake and begin the process all over again.  Sounds so simple, but the kids are engaged and productive the entire time they are working at that center.  You can pair up two kids- a good reader and an emergent reader so the emergent reader has some support. Feel free to use all the words at once or add them as your readers are introduced to them- you are the teacher so you know what is best for your little learners.

Thanks for stopping by!  You can grab this (and all my products) on SALE TOMORROW and TpT's one day sale.  Don't forget to use the promo code MORE15 to add an extra 10% (I forgot to do that during the last sale- DUH.  I guess I was so excited with all my great purchases, when it came time to check out I COMPLETELY forgot.  Live and learn.  Don't make that mistake- every penny counts, especially at the beginning of the school year!  You can be certain that I won't forget the promo code this Wednesday!

3 comments Fun Stuff, Literacy Actvities, Literacy Centers, Writing

Printing on Scrapbook Paper

Here's a fun tip that I use to keep my learning centers and games organized (and cute).  I look through my old scrapbook supplies and I find sheets of patterned paper that have white on the back side.  I print the activity on the white side of the paper and when I cut it out and put it in a center, it is easy to see what pieces go with what game.  The kids love it because it makes the activity look more like a deck of cards.

It's a really easy and really inexpensive way to spice up your learning centers and help with classroom organization.  If one piece gets separated from the others (which happens all the time in kindergarten), it is easy for the kids (and me too) to find the center activity where the piece belongs.

I love to store my activities in gallon Ziploc bags.  This allows me to simply change one bag with another and place it in my Math or Literacy Tub.

I hope you found this little hint helpful.

4 comments Literacy Centers, Math Centers, Organization

New Year Freebie!

Hi Everyone!

It's almost the new year and I'm sending this small gift to all my blog readers.

I've made a fun little Freebie to help your struggling kids learn letters and sounds.  It's almost January and by now most of my Kinders have learned the majority of their letters and sounds, but there is always one or two kiddos that still struggle, even at this point in the year.

This is a fun (and easy to prep) game that will help those little guys practice in a fun way.  Click on the picture to grab the file from my TpT store.  Don't forget to leave feedback and check out my other Free stuff (because don't we all need FREE stuff at this point in the year).

Happy New Year to everyone.  Wishing you all a wonderful 2015!

Cheryl

Leave a Comment Common Core, Literacy Centers

Rhyming

I work on rhyming all year long.  I assess my kids on rhyming at the beginning of the year and then we work on it all year long.  Did I say that we work on it all year long?  Yes, great.  Kids need to be able correctly hear and identify rhymes, but also to generate them on their own.  By the end of the year most of my kiddos can do just that (and are rhyming experts- if you ask them).

We read lots of rhyming books and we play lots of rhyming games as a whole group.  As the kids gain competency as rhymers I will read a book and pause to let the kids fill in the rhyme.  This is challenging and fun and keeps everyone engaged.

To practice and gain skill as "expert rhymers" I make sure to have a rhyming center available for kids to choose during Literacy Center or Word Work time each week.  I vary the activities but the skill is always the same- rhyming.

This rhyming center pictured below is a favorite of the kids.  They roll the big dice and if they get a rhyme then they complete the recording sheet.  I like to use dry erase markers and teddy bear counters or some other place marker so that we save paper resources.  It's more important for the kids to practice rhyming, than for me to have a worksheet to send home to parents showing what we worked on.  I talk to my parents about that very thing at Back To School Night.  I explain that kindergarten is very hands-on and that they might not see a lot of paper-pencil worksheets come home at the end of each week.  Even though their little one isn't bringing home a lot of worksheets, we are still VERY busy in the classroom learning in developmentally appropriate ways.  As the year progresses, they will see more and more evidence of this learning on paper, but in the beginning of the school year especially, the task is more important than a worksheet.

I have this fun Rhyming Center in my TpT store.  

See below if you are interested in taking a closer look.

How do you approach teaching rhyming in your classroom?  Are your kids self-expressed "rhyming experts" at the end of the year?

Leave a Comment Back to School, Common Core, Literacy Centers

ABC and 123 FREEBIES

I've been busy making some fun centers for my Kinders.  We are busy learning our ABCs and 123s at this time in the year.  I have made a couple of fun puzzles that you can put in math or literacy centers.  They are free on my TpT site- just link to the photo and it will take you right there.

The first fun activity is a number puzzle that goes from zero to ten.  Students put the pieces in order.  They use the dots to help them count and the rainbow colors stair step up to help kids see that each number increases the amount of dots by one.  It looks easy, but it is quite challenging for many kids.

The second activity is for your literacy center.   It is a simple alphabet puzzle, but the letters are lower case, and if your classroom is like mine, kids recognize upper case more easily than lower case, so the practice putting this puzzle together helps them with lower case letters identification.  The puzzle uses super cute Wild Things and is so much fun.  I like to print a copy that I don't cut apart so my kids who need extra scaffolding can use that to help them.  My more advanced learners like to put it together without looking at the completed puzzle.

Both of the activities are super easy to prep and you can have them in a learning center in no time.
If you find them useful in your classroom, please leave feedback.
Thanks!

I hope your kids love these as much as mine do.

Leave a Comment Back to School, Common Core, Literacy Centers, Math Centers

Managing Math and Literacy Centers

Well, it's the third week of school and we are just now starting afternoon rotations.  Each afternoon the kids rotate through 4 areas; they spend 15 minutes with me, 15 minutes with a parent, 15 minutes at a center, and 15 minutes working independently at their desk.  The groups are small (6 kids) and the kids rotate with their group.  

My little Kinders are wiped out in the afternoons.  We spend our mornings on math, reading and writing and after lunch my 5 and 6 year olds need a lot of movement and a lot of fun. That is why I do rotations. The parent will usually do an art, science, or math activity while I will work with the kids on writing, math or literature.  Having parents in helping really allows me to do those messy projects that require small groups of kids. (Thank you parents for taking on the mess!)  I, on the other hand, can do some RTI and reteaching or I can introduce new content to the small groups.

The key to having successful and productive afternoon rotations are the center activities.  Yes, that's right, the centers are the key!  The kids need to work quietly and independently at their center.

Making sure that centers run properly and that kids stay on task takes two things- engaging activities and training.  Here I set up an I SPY Letters center where I trained the kids on the expectations of the center.  We did it in a group of 6 but the next time they see it, it will be an individual center activity.  

I often introduce a brand new center in different ways.  Some centers are so intuitive that they just take a quick intro and the kids are off and running.  Other centers need more practice before the kids are ready to work on them independently.  The I SPY sheets are very intuitive, but I wanted to stress how we take care of the markers, how we clean up when the "clean up signal" rings, etc.  It was more about the procedures than the activity- it is the 3rd week of school after all.  Later in the year when I put in the Word Family I SPY sheets the kids don't need to be trained.  

I set my literacy and math centers up so that the kids can choose which activity they want to work on during their center time.  This helps them stay engaged and on task.  I have differentiated activities so kids can choose to challenge themselves or just have fun and gain confidence doing something that comes easily to them.  It has been my experience that kids don't choose activities that will bore them by being too easy.

I also include a developmental rotation each week, so the kids can have the time "playing" that we all know is so very valuable and necessary.  I have blocks, legos, puzzles, a doll house, a housekeeping center, Zoobs, Wedgits, Lincoln Logs, lacing, felt boards, and other fun and developmentally appropriate activities.  

Our afternoons are action packed and filled with fun.  We get so many different things done during our afternoon rotations- all thanks to our center activities (and our wonderful parent volunteers).

Leave a Comment Back to School, Common Core, Literacy Centers