Christmas Season

        It's that time of the year again! CRAZY kids excited for Christmas! I love this time of the year because we get to focus on CHRISTMAS and the holidays! It creates a different environment when Christmas music is played and doing Christmas crafts makes it extra special for the students. We also have 2 WEEKS off from school which is something else to look forward to!  

       The only problem going into these final 2 weeks is how do we ensure that we are staying on task with our teaching, learning, and procedures in the classroom? Not only are the students feeling antsy, but so am I! At this time, I have to keep reminding myself to maintain a "sane" learning environment I cannot slack on procedures, etc. We have had a big discussion with the students about how even though, we have JUST two weeks left, we still need to do our "job" and continue to learn new things. I love how one of the other Kindergarten teachers came up with the idea of a "naughty/nice list" for our students in our classes. If we see naughty students or nice students - we have them write their name on the list - that way, when Santa comes and checks the list every night, he can see who is naughty and nice! ;)

       With that, I hope all of you have an enjoyable holiday season and MERRY CHRISTMAS to everyone! Catch you in the New Year! 

Fall Has Arrived!

         Well it's finally October and I'm happy to say that this year is going pretty good so far. With the added time I'm spending at school with co-coaching volleyball this year, I feel like I have to balance my schedule. Also, with our Indiana Teacher Evaluation - RISE evaluation, I'm becoming more and more stressed with SLOs and observations. One way I do de-stress is by working with technology. I'm becoming more and more comfortable with creating my own interactive board (mimio) lessons and other lessons to go along with reading, writing, math, science, and social studies. My favorite thing is creating lessons for students to "check-in" in the morning. So far I've made a generic one with pencils, pumpkin-themed one, and a beach ball one. I will be making many many more! My next favorite thing is finding free resources online! I love looking at pinterest, teacherspayteachers, and mimioconnect.com. 
        One of the big accomplishments, so far, of this year, is our AMAZING collaboration with our Kindergarten team to create an "intervention time", or like we call it, "success time", where we have arranged groups based off of what each individual student needs - uppercase letters, lowercase letters, sounds, sight words, and (as in our case) readers that are already working in guided reading groups. Last year, we had this intervention time, but, we hadn't started it until November and we only were able to meet 3 days a week. This year we started about 2 weeks ago (and have already noticed HUGE growth with our students), we are able to meet all 5 days, AND we have more instructional assistants to work with our groups! 
        Our school district is pushing PLC (Professional Learning Communities ) and it is making a big difference to take ownership of ALL of our students together and work as an entire school team to have successful learning on all levels! Something else we are doing as a district is pushing our students towards their dreams and showing how our students are enriching the lives of others. Now, on a kindergarten level you might say that's not realistic because at this young of an age students either have dreams like "becoming a superstar" and "becoming a princess", or their dreams are constantly changing; but when we talk to students about their dreams - we can show them why school and learning is so important to their future. As a district-wide Kindergarten team, we decided to display, in the classroom, pictures of students with their dreams written out - so that students may see what they are working for. As for enriching the lives of others - in my classroom, we are constantly talking about how we can be "bucket-fillers" (from the book, "Have you Filled a Bucket Today?" )
         That's all for now! Keep checking for future updates from my Killer Whale Kindergarten Class!

New Year, Old Me!

Well I have one year of kindergarten under my belt now and I'm feeling a little more relaxed and comfortable in this grade! I can't wait to meet my new students tomorrow and begin the learning process all over again! When planning for the first week/couple of months, I had forgotten where all of the kindergarteners start out! It's amazing how much they grow throughout one year and all I can think about is where we ended the year...amazing readers, mathematicians, and so much more mature! As we start out this school year, we will be working on a letter of the alphabet per day (learning the sound, what it looks like, and how to write it). To go along with that, I am going to zone in immediately on sight words also! This is something I want to push the students toward right from the beginning! I am also going to go about introducing my centers a little differently this year. Instead of introducing several in a day and expecting the kids to be successful, I am going to try introducing one center per day. We will go over what the center should look like, the materials that will be used, what things we can do at the centers (including making an "I Can..." chart), and what skill(s) we should be practicing at the center. Each day I will add a center and we will practice them and along with that we should become more on-task with what we are doing during center time! During Writer's Workshop, last year I hopped right in teaching lessons. This year, I am going to start more with drawing with a purpose and showing details! Math was such an exciting time last year with the various parts - Calendar, Math in Focus lessons, and our math center time. I was told several times by students that their favorite part last year was math centers so I can't wait to delve right in and get started! With Science last year, I was really glad that I jumped right in with the program because it was really interesting and it definitely fit our kindergarten terminology and it was geared towards the students with making it very interesting and exciting! I am really excited to use more of the technology that goes along with the program this year! I'll try to keep you up to date about our National Geographic curriculum! Social Studies will still remain a little tricky because I still don't have all of the Big Books to go along with the program, but my colleagues have been AMAZING with loaning whatever I need! (I also can't wait to do our "All About ME" unit and learn more about the students!) This year's schedule is SO AWESOME! All of our grade level's specials were scheduled in the afternoon which will provide consistency in our classrooms and allow a common collaboration time (PLC time - see below)! This past week I attended a PLC (Professional Learning Community) conference. It was very encouraging to see that our Kindergarten Team was on the right track with taking ownership of all of the students, realizing that we are working on each student in our school rather than just the ones in our classroom! One thing I want to work more with this year, is focusing on intervention time. I think that if our entire team works together and separates the students into groups based off of their needs in various standards = our students will be so successful in their learning! Along with teaching this year, I will be co-coaching our elementary volleyball team and I am very excited to get started with that! I think that's all of the updates I can think of so far, but I made it my goal this year to get on and write more every month - hopefully I stick with it!

Full Day Kindergarten

So here I am... A few of months away from my first year of teaching Kindergarten completed and I am so excited to see how the students have progressed throughout the year. The other kindergarten teachers and I have been talking about how this year has been different from years past just because our students are a lot further along than years past with half day kindergarten. We are actually having a problem with trying to find assistance to help us with guided reading groups throughout our classes! It's a good problem though! Our students are high enough that they are beyond phonics and need help with reading. Another thing that I have been doing is working on adding things or changing my literacy centers to keep students interested. One problem with this, is I am having trouble with management during the center time because students are becoming so comfortable with their centers and with their center buddies. I need to figure out what to add to keep students working and have them try their hardest. So far, picking a student, at the end of center time, to get a prize is working somewhat, but I want the students to want to work hard and have fun while doing centers without having to give a prize. But overall, having the kids for full day is paying off and instead of teaching them how to read in first grade, we are now doing it in kindergarten.:)