Jennuine Teaching

It's been a long time since I've linked up with Farley for a monthly currently. I have been somewhat out of the blog scene for a while and with my new blog name, I figured this new year would be a great restart. Listening: Currently I am in my craft room/office. It is in the front of the house so I hear all of the cars driving by. I am also sitting next to my portable heater and dachshund Pippin because it is FREEZING in my house! Loving: I am loving the fact that I am on winter break. This school year has been... different. it took a while to get in the swing of things, but now I'm loving it! I can't wait to see what the rest of the year has planned for me and my students! Thinking: There are so many things that I want to get done before I go back to work. Things for work, personal things, things around the house, and I still want to get some more relaxation time in too! Is it summer yet. ;-) Wanting: To be warmer. My room is the coldest in the house and ...

The holidays are just around the corner, but I am finally on winter break! What did we do in December you may ask? Well I will show you. :-)  We decorated a Christmas tree with ornaments that went home as parent gifts. We got an elf named Kristoff who shared many laughs with us.                   He even became the topic of many stories in our classroom.   "We have an elf. I can't believe that elf is actually here. Oh my gosh!" We had a Grinch day complete with Grinch hats! It also happened to be my birthday which was awesome in itself.   We studied reindeer and had a reindeer week. We also made root beer floats!   We had a spirit week and one of the days was ugly sweater day, but my favorite was DISNEY DAY!!!   I rearranged the back of my room to make a second teaching area.   H a p p y H o l i d a y s ! !

Happy Thanksgiving! I hope everyone is having a wonderful day with friends and family. Today I just want to share an activity that I do every year and that is disguising turkeys. I usually do this in class and with my second graders they did an amazing job. This year I wanted to make it more of a take home project for my kinders and I love the way they turned out.

It's November and that means it's Mo Willem's month! I introduced pigeon to my students as well as duckling and they loved them. I ran out of time to read the other books so I will have to continue after the holidays, but Mo Willems was definitely a hit. We read a lot of pigeon books and even used him as our introduction to writing how-to's.  Pigeon also taught us how to include speech bubbles in our writing.

Just like the title says, we're reading! Guys, this is amazing!! Only a few months ago, my students didn't know their letters names or sounds and now... WE'RE READING!! Okay, I am hooked, I understand why kindergarten is so amazing! I am so proud of my little readers. Most, if not all of my students were able to complete this activity on their own. They built the word with letter tiles, colored the beginning letter and the -at family, and then read the word. When they were finished with the assignment, the had to come and read all of the words to me and they did!! You can find this activity HERE . This activity I was sure they weren't ready for. I saved it for Friday after we had practiced our -at words numerous times. I tried giving it to them sooner in the week, but they just looked at me and were not having it. By Friday they were ready and guess what... they did great on it! They loved it! Especially when they were able to use their own spinner. You can g...

October has been a fun month. We did a lot of fun projects and learned about pumpkins. I didn't blog much throughout October because it was conferences, fall break, and Halloween craziness. My school didn't dress up for Halloween, but there was still excitement in the air. Here are some of the things we did in the month of October.  The kids got to feel inside of a real pumpkin an take home a seed of their own. About half of them had never seen the inside of a pumpkin and 1/4 of them were afraid that something was going to come out of the pumpkin and grab them if they stuck their hand inside. I reassured them that it was just a harmless little fruit.   Life cycle of a pumpkin was a great way to introduce life cycles. They loved being able to personalize their jack-o-lantern face.   We also made the cutest little craft that I have been wanting to do ever since I saw my BFF hang it up in her classroom. She's so awesome she even created a freebie. You ...

You know those mornings when you wake up and there is no way that you can make it into work? What's even worse than those mornings are when you have no sub plans ready and you either have to wake up early to create some or even worse, teach through it! I have a solution for you.

My schools is working with a local university to increase small group instruction. With small group instruction comes centers. I have done centers many ways throughout the years and I've even gone without centers. I thought I would bring back centers in kindergarten and with a little practice, they have been doing an amazing job. I think the reason for this is our center wheel. I will show you how I make my center wheel in the video below.  I'd really like to make my centers early on for next year. That way I can have them organized and sorted by month. That way when it's time to switch out centers, it's just a matter of taking out the old and putting in the new, instead of recreating a center all over again. This is how I have my centers organized. Very simple and easy for the kids to manage on their own.

It's been about 2 months since school started and my room is a mess. I finally had to just take the time to clean it up and get it organized. I feel like I will be organizing the rest of the school year. At least my classroom will be clean and organized for next year... I hope!  I'm not sure if you can see the time on the clock, but that says 8:17 PM!!! Yes, it was a late night, but well worth it. I'm sure I will need another one in a couple of months.

Can I just say how awesome kindergarten is? It really is. This week I had my yearly observation. Since we are kindergarten, we ended up going first which I actually prefer. My lesson was a reading lesson. We read a story about fish in the ocean and we identified the colors that each fish were. The students then had to pick their favorite color and finish this sentence prompt "I see a _______ fish." I then saved those prompts and on Friday we created our own fish and took out the paint again.

If you love being crafty or just love creating things for your classroom, then I suggest looking into a die cutting machine. I have been using the Cricut in my classroom for years. This year I have the new Cricut Explore in my classroom and I am so excited to put it to good use. The first thing I wanted to create for my classroom was a behavior chart. I have talked about my behavior chart before and you can view that post HERE . In the video below, I show you how I use my Cricut Explore to create my own custom behavior chart.

I have given free time almost every Friday in my teaching career. I think it's important for kids to have fun in school and giving free time is a great way for them to express themselves. I especially think this is true for kindergarten. At the beginning of the year I gave free time every afternoon. The kids could go to the dramatic play center, puzzles, blocks, computer, and other stations. As they year is going on, we are having less time to participate in free time. I still make sure to include it every Friday afternoon though. Here are a few pictures from our free time. Look how happy they look!