2015 Teacher Tool Gift Exchange

Last Saturday I attended the 2nd Annual Spring Teacher Blogger Meet-Up at the beautiful French Lick Resort in French Lick, Indiana with over 100 of some of the best teacher bloggers out there, and I must say if it is even possible, it was even better than last year's meet-up. Seriously, it was AMAZING! Next week all of us teacher bloggers who attended the meet-up this year will be letting you all in on all the fun we had last weekend, but this weekend we are going to share one very special, and exciting, part of the meet-up... the teacher tool gift exchange! {A big thanks to Miss DeCarbo for hosting the teacher tool gift exchange linky!}

This teacher tool exchange goes like this:

Each blogger is encouraged to put together a gift of their favorite teaching tools and to bring it with them to the meet-up. This year we had so many bloggers attend the meet-up, we broke up into grade levels to exchange our gifts. The wonderful Amanda Pauley from Mrs. Pauley's Kindergarten read a teacher right/left story she wrote. In this story, every time that Amanda said the word left, everyone passed the gift in their hand one person to the left, and then every time she said right, we passed the gift in our hand to the right. At the end of the story, whichever gift is in your hand is the one you got to keep! We then sat down and went around and opened our gifts for everyone to see, and we got to hear from the person our gift came from about why the items were their favorite teacher tool.

{Above is the group of Kinder teachers in our group for the gift exchange.}

{Above is all four groups we split into by grade level for the exchange.}

My gift this year for the exchange was a combination of several things I cannot live without. I, of course, forgot to take a picture of my items before exchanging them; however, I did take this picture to post on my Instagram prior to the meet-up of my wrapped teacher tool gift...and Max, who loves the camera, had to get in the picture. 

I wrapped up several pads of sticky notes because the organizer in me labels just about everything in my classroom. I also can be very forgetful, I'll blame it on the fact that my mind is working on several things all the time all at once, so sticky notes are my saving grace to making sure I do things I need to remember to do. I have learning that if it doesn't make its way onto a sticky note, it might not happen. So, gifting pads of them just made sense. 

I also gifted a pack of Papermate Flair pens. Along with my labeling obsession, I like to color coordinate when I label, and my favorite way to do that is with flair pens. 

The final thing I added to my gift was a $5 Starbucks gift card. Unfortunately there isn't a Starbucks in my town; however, if there was, I would be getting a hot chocolate every morning to make it through my day. (Hot chocolate because I have not acquired the taste for coffee...yet. I'm working on it.)

I can't for the life of me remember who received my gift, but I hope they are enjoying it and finding the items useful. 

Now, onto the gift I received...

My gift came from Crystal over at Kreative in Kinder.

I received all of the goodies above: pencil pouch full of colorful gel pens, two packs of sticky notes (yay!), a small notebook, colorful duct tape, and a Glade air freshener. 

I have already explained why I would be so excited about the sticky notes and colorful pens, but what you also may not know is that I keep a small notebook next to my bed in case I come up with any teaching, blogging, or TPT ideas at night because, if I'm honest, some of my best thoughts come to me when I'm lying in bed trying to fall asleep. My brain rarely shuts off. I am excited to have another notebook I can use when my first one gets filled up!

I use duct tape all the time in my classroom. More specifically, I use it to label a spot on the carpet where particular students need to sit during our morning meeting or read aloud time. Right now, in particular, I am using duct tape to put spots on the floor during our class play rehearsal time to show students where they need to stand during the play so that everyone can be seen and heard. I recently ran out of duct tape, and I was still needing some for the first week of April when we perform the play in the cafeteria for our school and our parents. Now I have some!

I also got pretty excited about the Glade air freshener because I am lucky enough to have both a boys' and a girls' bathroom in my classroom, and let's just say, they don't always smell the greatest. Every time I spray my room with air freshener, I pay special attention to both of those bathrooms. I am now able to open the air freshener and not worry about those less than pleasing smells from the bathroom. 

Now, head over to the other blogger's blogs who attended the meet-up, and find out what teacher tool they received during the exchange. You might just get a great idea for your own classroom!

An InLinkz Link-up

Five for Friday! {St. Patty's Day}

It is Friday. Know what that means? It is time to link up with Kacey from Doodle Bugs Teaching for this week's Five for Friday.

The weather the beginning of this week was my absolute favorite. It was warm, sunny, and not a cloud in sight. At the end of the day on Monday, everyone, including me, in my class was itching to go outside. I grabbed my sidewalk chalk, and outside we went to practice our spelling words and for much needed vitamin D time. After finishing our spelling word practice, we still had time before going home to channel our inner Picasso's all over the sidewalk. :)

This entire week we celebrated St. Patrick's Day. We used a literacy and math unit from my teaching partner, Brittany Banister at Mrs. Banister's Kindergarten Kids, and we made several different crafts to go along with this holiday. Here are a few of the activities that filled our week...

We wrote about who was worth more than gold to us. The first example is from a little boy in my classroom who lives on a farm, and I just love his responses. The second example melted my heart!

"My dad because he lets me drive the tractor."

"My uncle because he talk to me about God."

We completed our first directed drawing thanks to First Grade Blue Skies!

We wrote about what we would do if we found a pot of gold. Some of the responses were just too precious.

We also reviewed for our math test over addition by making these adorable leprechauns inspired by Eberhart's Explorers. 

We graphed what type of potato is our favorite to eat: mashed, baked, or fried.

We ended our week by sending in leprechaun traps to catch that pesky little guy who has been destroying our classrooms in Kindergarten. ;)

Next week is our spring break, so we prepared our bulletin board for when we return. I can't take credit for these adorable umbrella writings, but I did find them on Pinterest from Mrs. T's First Grade Class. I created my own version of the original and altered it a bit to fit the needs of my Kinders. I'm in love with the way this board turned out!

We ended our last day before break by having our annual faculty/student basketball game. My teacher (and blogging) buddies, Brittany and Liz Wimp cheered during the game with me. Made me miss my high school cheer days!

It is March, which means only one thing...it is time for March Madness! I was born and raised to bleed blue, and I am so proud of the success our Cats are having this season. 35-0 so far... GO BIG BLUE!

Everyone have a great weekend!

Work Smarter, Not Harder

I completely understand that my, almost, two years of teaching experience is only a drop in the bucket to what others have under their belt, and far from how many I'll have under my own belt by the time I am finished; however, I would like to think that I have had some of the best, or worst depending on how you look at it, experiences to learn so much from already.

If you have followed me on my blogging journey at all, you will have learned that my first year of teaching was far from a walk in the park, even from being offered the position on. If you haven't been following me for long, here is a rundown of my first year of teaching.

I was offered my Kindergarten teaching position on a Wednesday evening. Why is it important for you to know that I got hired on a Wednesday evening? Well, because my first teacher day of school was the following Monday and students were set to walk through my classroom door on Tuesday! I received the key to my classroom and the go ahead to begin getting my room set up on Thursday. So, I had FOUR days to get my classroom in working order. I'm not even sure that I was able to fully process the fact that I had been offered my dream job until at least Fall Break because I had to seriously hit the ground the running, and I didn't even have time to stop to even collect my thoughts until October. My classroom had been the room that everyone dumped their unwanted teaching items into because they were unsure if the school board was going to approve a third kindergarten position or not, so I had to seriously spend an entire day just clearing junk, for a lack of better term, out of my room. Then, I had to also paint my walls because the paint chipping off the walls was seriously something awful. I look back and I still just can't believe how I even got everything ready for my group of Kinders to walk through my door on that Tuesday morning, but it happened. My room was far from how I wanted it to be, and there were still boxes at the end of the year full of things that I never ended up having time to sort through and organize, but I made do with what I was able to get accomplished, and I just had to learn to let the rest of it go until summer.

So, not only was my entire getting-my-classroom-ready thing a complete chaotic mess, but I also had some very challenging students my first year of teaching. I'm now grateful for those kiddos because I immediately had to learn how to overcome challenges and how to work with students and through situations that college just hadn't prepared me for.

On top of all of the above, we also had 17 snow days in the winter months. SEVENTEEN! To make up all of these days, and at an attempt to save summer break, we opted to add on an extra hour at the end of every school day for several weeks. As if the days in the winter and early spring with indoor recess weren't exhausting enough, try tacking on an extra hour of instruction with your sweet five and six year olds every day for over a month. It was seriously a nightmare for my first year teaching self. I was exhausted both physically and mentally.

Come summer break, I really had to reflect on my first year of teaching and figure out what I could do differently in the years to come because at the rate I was going, I was going to be burnt out really quick. This was disheartening to think, and I knew something had to be done. One of my biggest reflections I ended up having was on how I did my literacy and math centers. I felt like I was constantly having to manage classroom behavior so much during my centers times that first year, that I really didn't get to dive deep into doing centers with my kiddos until, honestly, right before Christmas break. Then after all of the snow days and everything, it didn't get too much better after break either. My math centers really never got up and running quite like they should and how I had always envisioned. One of the main things I started thinking about was the types of centers I had picked out for my class last year. I always had centers that went with our theme for that particular week, but I began to notice a trend. Many of my centers changed from week to week, and I'm not just saying that the clipart on them changed. I mean, the entire type of activity changed. Every week I had some sort of activity for nonsense word fluency because I know the importance of it for our DIBELS testing; however, each week I got them from different sources on TPT and they were always different. Same skill, but different way of going about practicing it. Since the activity changed, every week I was having to teach how to do the center every single week. It got worse when students were absent or "forgot" how I said to do the center on the day that I introduced it, so then here I was again, reteaching how to do the center. Talk about exhausting and frustrating on both students and myself. I decided I needed to simplify this process quite a bit in order to get it to run more smoothly. I decided it was time to work smarter, not harder.

This year I decided that for the most part, I was going to create all of the centers that I possibly could for my classroom. This may seem like much more work on my part, and as far as work at home, maybe so; however, I enjoy and find it relaxing to sit with my computer in front of the tv at the end of the day, so it wasn't going to be so bad. What makes it even better, is my teaching partner, Brittany from Mrs. Banister's Kindergarten Kids, creates similar types of centers as well, so on her planning weeks, I could almost guarantee the centers she was going to provide me with were going to be somewhat the same for each skill that needed to be practiced in centers as mine.

So, what I have done is I have created thematic literacy and math packs for many of our themed weeks we have in Kindergarten. If you have purchased any of my packs, you probably already know that I almost always have the same type of activity for the same sets of skills for both literacy and math, but I just alter them to go with the theme of the pack. By doing this, I am able to begin literacy and math centers much earlier this year because I taught how to do an activity the first few weeks of doing centers and that was it! I haven't had to go back and reteach the centers or teach new ones each week. I just tell my students, you're at syllable sort or nonsense word fluency, and off they go to go work on the skills. I have made the centers progressively more difficult throughout the year, but as far as actually completing the center, it is always done the same so my students know how to do it each week. Here are examples from two of my newest TPT products of how I use the same type of activity on the same skill, but just alter to fit the thematic week. These are taken from my Easter and Ocean packs.

Write the Room: {First Sound Fluency}

Nonsense Word Fluency: {CVC & Blends}

Quantity Discrimination:

Mixed Up Numbers:

These are just a couple examples from my literacy and math centers. I do the same thing with the other activities that are included in the packs as well. By doing the same types of activities, my students already know how to do the activities each week so I am able to get right to work with my small group, and in turn, they can get right to practicing these essential skills. 

I'm always looking for ways to improve instruction and to make my job a little bit easier, so I would love to hear how you work smarter, not harder in your own classroom. :)

Five for Friday

I'm linking up with Kacey from Doodle Bugs Teaching for Five for Friday!

We kicked off Read Across America Week on Monday with "Dress as your favorite Dr. Seuss character" Day. I try to always participate in the fun days that are planned, and this day was no different. I was 'twinning' with my good friend, Liz Wimp from Mrs. Wimp's Firsties, as the Cat in the Hat, while my teaching partner, Brittany Banister from Mrs. Banister's Kindergarten Kids, was Sam. 

None of my Kinders dressed up on this day, but they still wanted to participate, so we made Cat in the Hat hats to wear all day! Are these not the sweetest faces?!

Not only did we kick off Read Across America Week on Monday, but we also had a very special visitor come to our school. Glenda Ritz, our State Superintendent of Public Education, came to take a tour of some of the schools in our district, and she made a visit to our school and read a couple books to our Kinders and Firsties! I can't think of a better way to kick off a week of learning!

One of my favorite Dr. Seuss books is The Sneetches. To get our classroom hallway ready for Read Across America and Dr. Seuss Week, we read The Sneetches and talked about what makes us stand out like the Star-Bellied Sneetches. I whipped up this bulletin board with pictures of each of my Kinders and their writing of what makes them stand out. I love it so much that I probably will keep it up until right before Easter. 

On Wednesday, a winter storm blew in which not only sent us home early from school that day, but also slapped us with two snow days. I love snow, but enough is enough! I need my summer to add the final touches on my wedding in July!

Thanks to these snow days here lately, I have been able to catch up on some quality TPT time. I have been able to create products that I have been wanting to do for quite some time, but have just lacked the time or motivation. I can't wait to be able to use these in my classroom this spring!

 

Have a great weekend!