A Manic Monday Freebie

Happy Monday!

I have just begun my 4th week of school today.  I have to say I have one of the best classes ever.  I was sitting at a table today, just watching them.  It was so wonderful.  Everyone was on task doing what I had asked them to do.  There was a hum in the air of little ones hard at work.  I was very impressed.

Because of my good fortune of having such a terrific class this year, I have decided to share the graph I made with my class last week as a freebie.  The students graphed their favorite color.

Here is a picture of it:

Click here to download my freebie to make this graph.

Check out the other freebies at Manic Monday.

Thank you for visiting my blog.  I hope to see you again soon.

A Reason to Write - Parent Journals

Well, I have survived my first week of school.  It was only 4 days but, that is long enough for my little kinders.  I love my class.  They are doing a wonderful job of learning all of the rules and  procedures.  Most of them are catching on very quickly.  We are going to have a great year!

My school is focusing on teaching writing this year.  I know that when my students have a reason to write they are more likely to want to write.  So after much careful thought and a little luck while looking for a file on one of my jump drives, I found an idea I had used several years ago.  I had my students write in Parent Journals.  A Parent Journal is a spiral notebook where the students write (or draw) a note to their parents/grandparents/their family.  Then whoever the note was written to writes a note back to the student and returns the Parent Journal the next day. I had my students write in the journal on Friday and take it home.  Hopefully, each of my students brings the journal back on Monday.  The the students can share their journals and responses with each other.

Here is a link to the note I attached to the front of the spiral notebooks.  It is in Word, so that you can change it to suit your needs.  

Parent Journal Letter

I have linked this freebie with Manic Monday at Classroom freebies.

If you are unable to open the letter, please email me or reply to this post and I will email it to you.  Thank you for visiting my blog today.

My Bulletin Boards

Woohoo, I woke up this morning and checked my blog to find out that I have 100 followers.  YAY!  I'm so excited that 100 people have chosen to follow my blog.  Thank you so much for your support.

I promised earlier this week to share my bulletin boards that are in my classroom with you.  So here goes....

I made this bulletin board based on one that I found on Pinterest.  It is on Mrs. Saylor's log.  One of the teachers across the hall let me borrow her Dr. Seuss bulletin board stuff and I printed out the words and attached them to Dr. Seuss scrapbook paper that I found at JoAnn Fabrics.

Here is another one....

This is my Family Tree bulletin board.  My aide cut out the apples on our die cut machine and she made leaves for the tops of the apples and wrote each students' name on an apple.  I took pictures of my students and their families at our Meet the Teacher/Ice Cream Social night.  I am going to print them out and put them on the tree so my students can see the pictures on the first day of school.  I'm hoping it will help some of my kinders not miss their families so much.

This is my job board.  I have the students' names on hands attached to popsicle sticks.  Then I put the popsicle stick in one of the job's pocket to show the students who is doing which job each week.  I purchased the banner at the top at The Dollar Tree.

This is my Parent Information board.  My classroom theme is children's literature so I found The Very Hungry Caterpillar fabric on Ebay to use for the top and bottom border.  The banner at the top I purchased at The Dollar Tree for a $1 of course.

Thank you for taking the time to visit my blog today.  I hope to see you again soon.