Hello weekend!! I.am.exhausted. 11 and 12 hour days are tough…imagine a week of those after a wedding and a week on a cruise. My body can’t handle this kind of strenuous work. I could NEVER do manual labor. There I admit it!
Our first week back in Monsters, Inc. after fall break was a very pleasant week! I was worried about behaviors because of the break and the fact that I was gone the last 3 days before fall break. But my little monsters totally stepped up to the plate and really put on their best monster-ness this week. I didn’t even have to scream….I mean raise my voice! The first day back everyone earned their way off the chart and we even earned our 10 compliment popcorn party that became a cupcake and candy corn party! I had homemade cupcakes (16 cupcakes. 16 little monsters. And Mr. Greg doesn’t have to grow his muffin top!) so those cupcakes went to good use! And to top it all off, we had an assembly yesterday that got them WILD but we were able to come back to the classroom and spend an hour in centers growing our brains! More on said assembly in a minute!
When I first started teaching kindergarten, someone told me to “watch for the pumpkins” because October is when 5 year olds start to really settle into routines and procedures and things go a little more smoothly. Ya know, I have to admit that I agree. Every year, October seems to be when things smooth out for us. Especially center time. I guess the pumpkins have arrived!
Well, enough babbling from the newlywed dude, here is what you really came to see! The one, the only, Saturday Kindergarten Post!
This week we did not focus on the letter C and we really hit counting from 1-10 HARD. I know it’s October and we’re still counting 1-10 but they just weren’t getting it. Or at least that was my impression. After this week, we’re moving on. Apparently the pumpkins showed up in math too because all but 2 of my monsters can count to 10 with one to one correspondence, can ID numbers to 10 and can count sets up to 10. Finally. I was starting to doubt it would happen anytime soon!
This week we learned all about bats! I love bat week! It is so much fun and the kids get so excited! We watched The Magic Schoolbus Goes Batty to introduce bats and read There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed A Bat and Stellaluna! We made KWL chart to figure out what we knew about bats (bats suck your blood is what we know about bats and they turn into vampires!) and we did some seriously fun bat craftivities! We made paper plate bats! We made hand print bats! And we did the cute bat craftivity from A Cupcake For The Teacher!
Check it out here!But my favorite bat art project that we do is definitely our cylinder bats! It’s also one of the hardest because the monsters have to roll the paper into a cylinder…shove their arm through the cylinder and keep still until the glue dries. Yeah. Keep still. Monsters. Uhhuh. And when this doesn’t work you staple the cylinder for them! And guess what? They get to make a 3D shape so you’re hitting a standard! I know, right?! I can pretty much make everything tie into a standard. Anything. Try me.
The bat cave! These hang over the reading carpet so it’s now the bat cave!
My monsters were most amazed at echolocation (but really, who isn’t?!) and the fact that bats were not birds but mammals. I really blew their mind when I taught them that we are mammals too! They actually made the connection themselves when we talked about mammals having hair. Hair. Bats have hair. We have hair. Mammals. We’re mammals! Yeah, it went something like that! Connection made. Learning successful!
We also wrote about bats this week! You can go to
my post from Thursday about my new way of teaching writing. It’s modeled and shared writing and copying of sentences. We turn our writing into a book that goes into our class library. We LOVE that we get to be real authors and illustrators with real books that are in OUR library! Isn’t motivation great?! I wish we had more adult motivation…ya know?! I also decided to try to cutesy up my charts. My KWL chart was so sad so our tree map and shared writing chart got some cute-ness (ya know, cuteness like me!) added to them. Several teachers actually commented on how cute the tree map was!
We really worked hard on our numbers and counting to 10! We used my Skeletons and Ghosts pack that I created after finding some super cute erasers at Target! We made huge gains on our counting. I was so proud of my monsters!
So I have a dilemma…and it really rares it’s ugly head during math! I have a monster who thinks as soon as anyone is finished, she should be finished. So her counting goes like this 1, 2, 5. 1, 2, 3, 6. People, I want to throw skeleton erasers at her! OMG! Her name looks like this: Kame…because she stops the instant she sees someone else finish. WHAT DO I DO??? I thought about sitting with her at breakfast and taking her breakfast (I will give it back to her I PROMISE! Don’t report me!) when the first person finishes! We could then talk about taking your time, finishing your work and so on and so forth. I just am so frustrated. She also wants you to do everything for her…so we’re working on that monster.
We also introduced making 10 on Friday. I was very curious as to how we would do. And guess what? My monster ROCKED it! We are definitely ready to move on to more math concepts. They loved the idea that they could make a number! Motivation=great thing. We used our smartboard spinner to work on number ID and colors. We spun the spinner and whatever number we landed on, we named the number, wrote the number (number formation is a disaster in my room! I really am lame at teaching it! But hey, we’re working on it!) and colored the bat according to the key! Super fun!
You can find that in my FREE going batty math pack!
We also spent the week working on our letters. I have 4 monster that are still a little behind on letters! We used our bingo markers to have some letter fun! I put magnetic letters inside a plastic pumpkin and they pulled one letter at a time. They named the letter for me and then located it on the sheet. Then they got to “POP” it with the marker! My higher kids were introduced to Marsha
Moffat Mcquires I SPY activities! They used magnifying glasses (that might or might not have “fallen” out of the hands on science kit when it was returned a few years ago…yeah, fell out. Left behind. I have a story about the science kit materials. One year a student (that’s a whole blog post!) was attempting to crawl out the window…he then got these beads from the science kit and threw them out the window. This was October. In May the lady emails me and says I need to return the beads. I responded and politiely told her they were lost when said student was attempting to escape. No response. Beads? Really??) to locate letters and then practice handwriting! Check out Marsha’s website for more AMAZING IDEAS!
And of course we made our famous letter hats! You know you want it. You know you long for it! Here it is! The NEWLYWED in his hat!
Here we are wearing purple for NO BULLYING! In our classroom, “bullies never win!”
Our assembly featured the mascot from the Tennessee Titans, T-Rac. Umm, I have a phobia of people dressed up in costume! See how close he was?? I was sweating. A lot. And you know my deodorant issues so Friday wasn’t pleasant in that arena. Twice this mascot ran by me (hello fear!) twice. And hit me in the head. HARD. Twice. But at least he didn’t grab me and pull me to the front like he did another co-worker. That would have been BAD! BAD!
Finally, this is the wedding cake craftivity that my monsters made to celebrate my wedding! Isn’t it cute!!!!!
Shew, what a week!! I hope you find something you can use or an ideas that inspires ya! If not, it’s ok because I’M THE NEWLYWED!
Check out my new product for beginning sounds!
And here’s a freebie for ya!
And be on the lookout for my election pack coming tomorrow or Monday or Tuesday or soon!
