Jennuine Teaching

Writing has always been a struggle for me. Even as a child, I found writing difficult and now that I'm a teacher, writing is definitely my weakness. My goal this year is to master kindergarten writing. So if anyone has any tips or suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments below. My very favorite thing about teaching writing is through mini lessons. I don't always plan them out before hand, I just base it off of what my students need at the time. I saw this lesson on Pinterest a long time ago and I put it in my teaching vault (where all of my other untouched ideas live). My students had been drawing pictures for their writing for a few weeks now and I could tell that some of my students were ready for something more. That is when I decided it was time to introduce labels.  We started by labeling the teacher. The kids thought this was the funnest thing we had done all year. I didn't premake the labels and I had them come up with the body parts. They did an a...

Week two has come and gone and I feel like we are getting into the swing of things. This week we talked about colors. We took out the paint for the first time and they had a blast. Luckily I have an apron that I keep in my classroom now and it came in handy while working with 5 year olds and paint. We read a story called old black fly. It's about a fly who dips his feet into paint and ends up painting everything. I modeled step-by-step how to draw a fly and then called the kids to our art table to add paint splatters.

This week was the first week of school, my first week of kindergarten. After 6 years teaching 2nd grade, I had no clue what I was about to get myself into. The kids are definitely a lot smaller and most of them have never been to school before. So it was a learning experience for all of us. I made sure to leave plenty of time in the morning to get ready. I even packed my car up the night before. I normally have something really easy for the students to work on as they walk in the classroom, but this year we started doing breakfast in the classroom. It was nice for them to be able to eat breakfast as a way to welcome them to school. I thought the most nerve-wracking part was having parents in my room, but they were all really nice, took a few pictures of their babies on their first day of school, and were on their way. Once parents were gone and breakfast way done we started our day. It consisted of lots of procedure, songs, procedure, GoNoodle, procedures, coloring, and di...