Create a Math Block I can't say this enough. An effective math block will help you tremendously! It creates routine and structure that you need to make sure everyone is on task. This is what I include in my math block: Engaging Mini Lessons Math centers Independent practice visuals throughout the classroom Use A
These fun and engaging hands on measurement activities will help teachers plan and implement lessons on length, capacity and mass. Includes a FREEBIE!
Follow these five steps to teach a child to read. Helpful for parents, homeschoolers, and teachers that are teaching beginning readers.
Force and motion are everywhere! From swinging on the playground to pushing our toy car across the floor, you experience it every day!
A few weeks ago, I shared my plans for the week of October 17th in my Bats Acrostic Poems Post (click {here} to check it out). Well, I have gotten so many emails asking me to share and editable version with you. Unfortunately, I cannot do that because I cannot share the Scrappin' Doodles graphics in a non-pdf file and my plan book is modified from a model purchased from Ms. M's store, A Teacher's Plan. Fortunately, you can purchase the graphics yourself from Scrappin' Doodles by clicking my link to the left and searching for "school stick kids" and "my favorite teacher." You can also purchase the lesson plan template "Is Everything Here?" from Ms. M. by clicking the picture below. I hope this helps! Please, tell Ms. M. I sent you.
We’re well into week three of our Tomie dePaola author study and knee deep in Strega Nona’s world! My class has fallen in love with the characters in these books. Their folkloric quality, Big Anthony’s bumbling, Bambolona’s brusqueness and Strega Nona’s endearing ways have captured their hearts and their attention. We began this part of […]
This totally free Preschool Assessment Printable is exactly what you need to assess your preschooler's abilities. This set is a great starting point for kids starting at the age of three.
Song Index
Try this fun positional words activity with your preschool or kindergarten students! It's free to download!
Fantastic Kindergarten Homeschool Curriculum choices, tips and resources. Can you homeschool kindergarten without curriculum?
How to solve letters b-d reversal problems with simple tips and activities.
If you have learners who struggle to isolate beginning sounds, these free phonemic awareness games are the perfect fit! Use them in preschool or kindergarten. Use them in literacy centers or small groups. #phonemicawareness #preschool #kindergarten
ALL ABOUT EARTH Get ready for a month filled with so many fun activities to teach your kiddos all about our planet Earth . I teach this unit in April so it coincides with Earth Day. I’ve loaded up this blog post post with read aloud book ideas, free videos you can share with your students,
Music class is an active, engaging, and joyful experience! This is especially true when our musical activities are grounded in creative and intentional teaching strategies. One of the most important teaching strategies has to do with teaching the difference between steady beat and the rhythm of
Most of us teach multiple grade levels. I teach 4 year olds through 94 year olds. I skip 12 year olds through somewhere in the 60's, though. I think that probably needs explaining, right? I teach Junior Kindergarten through fourth grade and also facilitate music and drum circles at an assisted living center every 2-3 months. The youngest were probably my most difficult age to plan for starting out as a brand new teacher and I continue searching for great material to add to my "collection". We all know how it is - in a singular 30 minute lesson with the younger kiddos we might go through 10-15 activities! Interestingly, my oldest sometimes seem the same! I seek materials from various sources; blogs, bools, fellow teachers, and websites. Several years ago I found a childrens music performer named Nancy Stewart. Each month she posts a Song of the Month! You can search by category, year/month, and alphabetically, and even better - all her songs are downloadable, some have visuals to download, and most have the sheet music to download - all for FREE! YES! There are songs for Eid, Christmas, St. Patirck's Day, Diwali, Valentines, seasonal songs and everything in between. Most of the music is original and I have found some really wonderful material! One of my favorites is the Rhythm Stick Song. Nancy so kindly gave me permission to share the song with you here - the mp3 is available on her site - click the link above. Hope you enjoy it - my kiddos do! We also make up additional verses - "With my sticks I run...", walk, hop, etc. My favorite rhythm sticks are the Basic Beat Combination Sticks pictured below. I love these - perfectly sized at 8" long, no splintering, and one is smooth and the other ridged. They are about $3.00 a pair, and an awesome investment! You can get them here from West Music. Have fun with these! Happy New Year!
Song Index
Learn about some of the differences between teaching phonics to ELLs and native English speakers. Also discover some new resources.
Song Index
Zoom Games With Students During Distance Learning shares a variety of games, many familiar from the classroom, that you can play with students virtually.
The Preschool and Kindergarten Geology Worksheet Pack is available for FREE on the blog! Includes tracing, more/less math, and cutting/pasting!
KINDERGARTEN MATH - UNIT 3 I am so excited to have my new Measurement and Data kindergarten math unit posted and ready to share with you. So far this year, my sweet kinders have learned so much in math. We have mastered 1:1 correspondence, reading and writing numerals to 20, counting to 10
You'll find Montessori language resources here for beginning, intermediate, and advanced language, including the pink, blue, and green series!
Music class is an active, engaging, and joyful experience! This is especially true when our musical activities are grounded in creative and intentional teaching strategies. One of the most important teaching strategies has to do with teaching the difference between steady beat and the rhythm of
PRIMARY PHONICS - UNIT 6 We are ready to tackle digraphs ! I can’t believe we are already here. My kiddos were just starting school it seems like, and I remember most students couldn’t even identify their letters. Now we are reading sight words , CVC words , short stories and MO
Inside you will find: * 6 Read and Color pages. * 4 Read and Draw These comprehension activities are ideal for students in kindergarten and first grade. Use this as a listening comprehension activities for your kindergarten students, or have your first graders read the passages and work independently. These are perfect for literacy centers, independent work, morning work, fast finisher, homework and more. Check out the full packet here: Reading Comprehension Activities (THE BUNDLE) This set goes well with my: Reading Comprehension Check (The Bundle) Check out the freebies here: FREE Reading Comprehension Check You may also be interested in: Reading Comprehension THE BUNDLE Reading Fluency and Comprehension THE BUNDLE If you have any questions, please email me at: [email protected] before purchasing *************************************************** Follow my stores for more AWESOME FREEBIES and GET UPDATES on my NEW PRODUCTS!! Connect with me: Teaching Biilfizzcend Instagram Teaching Biilfizzcend Pinterest
Yoo Hoo
KINDERGARTEN MATH UNIT 2 - GEOMETRY I am thrilled to be sharing my kindergarten Geometry Unit with you! The kids love all of the hands-on activities we get to do, and I love how easy it is to keep them engaged. I am sharing so many freebies with you right here on this blog
Need some fun, active learning activities for teaching prepositions in Kindergarten, first grade, or second grade? This post has 5 ideas to get you started!
Co-Teaching can be one of the most rewarding, yet challenging experiences. The co-teaching partnership is kind of like a marriage and usually it's an arranged one! Often, two teachers are partnered up without knowing much about each other. Administrators dealing with staffing issues may not be able to look at teaching styles and personalities before pairing teachers up. Here are some tips on how to make your co-teaching relationship a successful one! 1. Get to know your co-teaching partner. It takes time to develop a rapport. Get to know your partner over the summer, if possible. Attend trainings together. Go out for lunch and chat about your family, interests, likes, and dislikes. The trust built over the summer will make the entire year run more smoothly. 2. Discuss expectations before the situation arises. Talk about what your expectations are for the year and set boundaries. Do you expect to plan everything together? Do you expect to work before or after school? How will you address grading and report cards? Do you prefer to be contacted at home with a question or would you rather wait until returning to school? Discussing your expectations before the school year starts will make your partnership more cohesive. 3. Be open-minded to your partner's ideas. Think about the general education teacher as the curriculum specialist. Chances are, they are more familiar with the grade-level curriculum and expectations. The special education teacher is the modifications expert. They will have great ideas of how to modify the classroom environment and assignments to fit the various needs of the classroom. Each of you brings great things to the classroom. You each have different experiences and training that has gotten you to this point in your career. You may be used to doing things differently than before you started co-teaching. Just like in a marriage, your co-teaching relationship is a give and take. You will learn a lot and gain a lot if you are open-minded. 4. Share your space. Share your students too! Whether you share one space or you each have your own “home base”, it is important for both of you to truly feel at home in each space. Within the main classroom, you each should have a desk or other personal space. The classroom signs should include each of your names. My classroom signs always include the names of both teachers, all of the teaching assistants, and all of the related service providers that play an active role in our classroom. It is important for everybody to feel a part of the team. To avoid using the terms “my room” and “your room”, I named my assigned room the “Learning Lab” and refer to the co-teaching classroom as just our “Classroom”. When you split up into groups, it might be a good idea alternate which teacher leaves to use the other space. Banish the phrases “your kids” and “my kids” and replace it with our kids. Both of you are equally responsible for the students assigned to your classroom. Your students should not feel a sense of belonging to one teacher over the other. When you split into groups or assist 1:1, alternate which teacher works with the different levels of kids. The same goes for working with parents. Communication should come from both of you. 5. Stand united both in the classroom and out! Just like in a marriage, you need to appear to be united. You might not always agree with the other teacher, but it is important to put on a united front and then speak about those differences in private. You always need to back each other up and also support your paraprofessionals as well. Your students will pick up on any disconnect between you and will try to use that to their advantage. Always speak positively about your partner. You need to work together for at least the entire school year so your relationship needs to be strong. The staff lunch room is not a place to talk about your issues. If you do not have anything nice to say, do not say anything at all. A few years ago, a friend of mine was having some trouble within her classroom. Her team of paraprofessionals were disjointed and often went against each other in front of the students. She reached out for some advice and it inspired me to create a product geared towards helping classrooms with multiple adults to work together collaboratively in harmony. I have found it quite useful in my own classroom which has four paraprofessionals. Whether you are new to co-teaching, new to your partner, or have been paired up for years, I hope you find this these tips helpful. If you want more information about co-teaching, you can find just about everything you need in my Ultimate Co-Teaching Start-Up Kit. Thank you for stopping by today!
FREE science emergent reader book about the human body systems. Great science activity for preschool and kindergarten.
Class Openers for Elementary Music. Organized Chaos. Fun ways to establish a routine for the beginning of each elementary general music class as a warm-up and allow student leadership as well.
Music is organized sound. I like to give students opportunities to organize sound and icons for sounds before we work with organizing notation. One of the ways I do that is to create sound songs. We take a basic grid and brainstorms sounds we can make with our bodies (APPROPRIATE sounds *giggle*) and then draw shapes and simple picture to represent them. We draw them into the grid so that they are organized and then perform them for each other. FUN! Another thing I like to do is work with ready icons for body percussion. I introduce this in Kindergarten, but we review it in 1st and 2nd grades and add a composing element to it. Until recently I used a pretty old set of body percussion clip art to create a slide show. Here's what the new version looks like: I used this with some classes this week and they loved it! We talked about one sound to the beat means a quarter note and one picture in each square. After we add barred eighth notes or two sounds on one beat we'll take some time to compose our own. I'll print out little copies of all the body percussion actions and they will place them on the squares in the grid and perform. When we finish or as we begin to use this activity just to review or as a warm-up I'll add some body percussion worksheets to the end of class or to workstations. I'll be using these: Quick enough to do in the last ten minutes of class or at a workstation, I really like making connections to reading and writing AND music. Check out the Body Percussion set HERE.
Help kids who struggle with b d letter reversals with these tips and free printable posters!
15 fun and easy fluency practice activities to get your K-1 students reading at a just-right pace, with accuracy and expression!
Note: This blog post contains resources from our TpT store and our Amazon Associate store. --------------------------------------------- 1. An animated read aloud of If You Take a Mouse to School by Laura Numeroff In this book, the story follows a mouse and all the fun and chaos that ensue when you take a mouse to school. It's known for its repetitive and circular storytelling style, where each action leads to another, creating a humorous and engaging narrative for young readers. The book is loved for its whimsical illustrations and the way it sparks children's imaginations as they follow along with the mouse's adventures at school. 2. Engage your class in a variety of activities inspired by the book: Decorate a shoe box as a lunch box. Try your skill with a yo-yo. Write on the chalkboard. Do a simple science experiment. Build a house with blocks. Write a story book. Read the book aloud to a friend. Kick a soccer ball. Shoot a basket. Have a snack! 3. If You Take a Mouse to School Reader's Theater 4. Writing Activity Have the students create their own sentences: If you take a ___________ to school, ______________ will _______________. Free Writing Paper 5. Review of School Rules Complete the sentences: If you take a child to school, he/she will _______________. Examples: listen nicely, raise his hand, be kind, ask for help, put supplies away, follow directions, make new friends, etc. 6. Illustrations Review Examine the illustrations of the boy and mouse getting ready for school. Student may write or discuss what they do to get ready for school each morning. 7. Favorite Animal If you could bring your favorite animal to school, what would it be and why? Students could bring a stuffed animal representing their favorite animal. Students may research facts about their chosen animal, or write a pretend story of their animal's adventures in school. 8. Print All Around Us As students read the book, encourage them to examine the pictures. Notice there a words and numbers everywhere. Encourage students to walk around the room to notice print in the real world. How about at home? At the grocery store? At the movies? Etc. 9. Math Application Shapes, shapes, shapes! There are shapes everywhere in this book. Have students draw each shape they see in the book on a piece of paper or poster paper. Don't forget to find shapes in your own classroom as well! 10. Mouse Puppet 11. Paper Plate Mouse (Alter the Easter Bunny LOL) 12. DIY Mouse Costume Perhaps the teacher could show up to school as a mouse? Wear gray pants and a gray jacket :) 13. Mouse Trap Online Game Mouse Trap 14. Printable Crossword Puzzle If You Take a Mouse to School Crossword Puzzle 15. Printable Task Cards for Center Activities and Games If You Take a Mouse to School Reading Comprehension Task Cards Have a scavenger hunt or play SCOOT! 16. Printable Craftivity If You Take A Mouse to School Interactive Notebook Activity From our Amazon Affiliate store: If You Take a Mouse to School If You Take A Mouse To School Puppet & Props U-Build Mouse Trap Game You may also like this blog post: Shelly Anton is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. ** This means there are Amazon affiliate links in these blog posts. This does not mean you pay a dime more when you purchase a product through the link. It just means I am trying to save you valuable teacher time by making it easier for you to find great resources for your students, and I earn a few cents for my research and time. Thank you for all you do for kids!
Got a talkative class? Check out these 5 ways to quiet the chatter!
Synonyms and antonyms worksheet for first grade and second grade. Students find a synonym and an antonym for each word.
Life skills are important for all learners. This free life skills checklist shares age-appropriate chores and responsibilities for kids ages two to nine.
These are SO much fun! The full pdf has 20 pages with all the games listed. Hope you enjoy them - if you would like the pdf, send me an email at [email protected]. If you haven't yet checked out my facebook page, there are extras including a video that shows some other activities and teaching tips with hula hoops - search for @ofortunaorff.
I love Pharrel's "Happy" song and I know that my kids do too! Check out how I use this fantastic song to teach musical form to my students.
All About Me activity is a fun practice that brings lots of benefits more than just personal favorites. Various activities can be combined with the theme and best to apply for preschoolers or kindergarteners.
A bookmark for children to use when learning about common digraphs and blends.
