Print and Go! Christmas

Hi there and happy holidays!!!  I hope you are feeling "fat and happy" after a great Thanksgiving  celebration with your family and friends.  My Thanksgiving was absolutely perfect.  The meal was  wonderful and everything tasted soooo good.  My heart was happy to be with my family and to see my sweet niece who returned from the University of Utah for the holiday.  Yippee!

I try to stay away from shameless self promotion on my blog, but alas, this post is just that.  You can also grab a cool FREEBIE at the end.  I have made these sheets for my sweet students to practice some of the knew knowledge from our classroom.  We are working a lot on CVC words, addition, teen numbers, and sight words.  This new Print and Go! packet has sheets for all those skills and more.  I hope it helps you during this busy season. 

I also hope the kiddos in your class LOVE them too!  I absolutely adore my class this year.  They are such cuties.  Lucky me!  I was so grateful when parents told me many of my students love to color and feel excited and motivated to do homework this year (that's what I use these Print and Go! sheets for in my classroom).  I always hope my sheets are fun for young kids.

 I was so glad that I had some time on the day before Thanksgiving to finish them.  I love some of the cute graphics.  I tried to make the sheets represent the secular aspects of Christmas so that they can be used in anyone's classroom.

 You can get Print and Go! Christmas for your class right here: (just click on the cover image below)

And you can go get your freebie on TpT here: (just click on either image below)

Thanks so much for stopping by to grab your freebie.  Follow me on TpT for exclusive follower freebies and early bird discounts.
Happy holidays!
Happy teaching!

Crazy about Owls!

I have been a little cray about owls lately.  I don't do a full unit on them, but my class have had a few little owl projects lately.  I wanted to do something different for our November calendars this year.  I am sooooooo tired of turkeys!  I have been seeing so many fun owl images lately, that I wanted to do owls.  I think the kiddos did a super job!

I used my handy dandy Cricut machine to cut the body templates.  I also made circles of various sizes, flower, and star shapes to create the eyes.  The kids used oil pastels to draw the branches and moons.  They also embellished the owls with buttons and feathers.  Aren't they cute?

 If you are a scrapbook maker, you probably already know about Cricut machines or may even have one.  I was given one as a gift many years ago by a very generous parent.  I LOVE it and use it multiple times every year. It is a computerized die cut machine with multiple settings and options. You need cartridges that are programed with different shapes.  There are lots available.  The most useful cartridge is included with the machine.  It makes getting creative with both art projects and making center activities and games so much more doable.

  

I just have to show you one more cutie patootie owl calendar...

 

If you would like the Calendars for Number Writing product, you can get it at my TpT shop (just click on the image below):

It has calendars with three variations for differentiation, for every month of the year.   It helps my sweeties practice number writing regularly and gives them an opportunity to see the patterns in number order.  Families enjoy the art work.  It makes a great reference at home for counting, count downs, patterns, and other learning.

I also made a fun little owl product to help my kids practice number bond concepts using dominoes.  I had my sweet students do this on the morning of Halloween.  It was still learning, but I have a group who enjoy coloring, so it was fun to make some colorful fall owls.  They did a great job!

Did I already say they did a great job?

You can get this at my Teachers Pay Teachers shop too!  These color, cut, sort activities can come in very handy throughout the school year.    There are lots of versions included so it is easy to differentiate.  They are great for when you have a sub, or anytime you want some fun practice.  They are perfect for interactive notebooks or math journals too!  You can click on the image below to go get it!

Are you as crazy about owls as I am?  Hope these ideas and resources help you have fun in your classroom while saving your ink and most importantly your time!

Happy Teaching!

Fall Fun!

Fall is here!  The leaves are changing colors, the days are getting cool, and pumpkins are everywhere!  It is my favorite season and I love to share my passion for fall leaves with my students!  I love to send my students on a fall leaf walk to collect leaves.  Then we press them for two weeks.   If you don't have a leaf and flower press in your classroom I highly recommend you get one.   Then we make things with the leaves...

I love the leaf creatures my students made last year.  We read this book to the kids first.  I also showed them lots of images of leaf collages on my iPad.  The kids had lots of inspiration and ideas to kick start their own creativity.  Then they set to work to make an animal or person using the leaves we had collected. 

This is a great book and is a good investment for your classroom library.  The leaf creatures were awesome!  I was impressed with the kids' ideas as well.  It was an open ended writing activity, the students told me their sentence and I wrote it on a 1" paper strip.  We read it together, then I cut it up, mixed up the words, and each student has to fix it up and glue it down.  This is a great Kindergarten literacy activity!

 
Some other great books about fall leaves to read to your kiddos are:

 

We also made some fun fall trees.  The kids used oil pastels to draw the trunks and then used cotton swabs to dot on the leaves using beautiful fall colors.  I just adore these!

I love the trees that have dramatic cascades of leaves falling.  So darn cute!

We also do a cute little poem,  The Leaves are Falling Down.  It can be sung to the tune of  the Farmer in the Dell.  We sing it together as a shared reading activity, then the kids do it themselves as a choice after jobs(centers) are completed.  It's simple and it helps  build confidence as readers when they do it independently. 

I hope these ideas will get your creative juices flowing for fun fall projects in your classroom!  If you are looking for more fall projects and ideas, check out my Pinterest board: Festive Fall
It is a great place to go for all things fall related for primary classrooms and families with young children.  There are lots of free printables, arts and crafts, fun food, and other ideas.
Happy fall!
Happy teaching!

Candy Corn Calendars!

This is just a quick little post with our cute calendars for the month of October.  They are a super cute ripped paper craft to make a candy corn.  I used a template in the shape of a candy corn and traced it with pencil onto the black paper.  Then my sweeties went to work ripping the yellow, orange, and white paper to fill in the shape.  They glued each piece with white school glue.  I had several students tell me it was a fun job and I was happy because for once I gave myself permission to be in charge of the art table during centers.  (I call centers "jobs" in my classroom.)  The candy corns turned out so sweet! (no pun intended)

Of course I got this idea from Pinterest.  You can look at the original pin here.  I also saw a cute idea for painting a candy corn with pom poms using clothespins here.  BTW, my Pinterest board for Halloween is a great place to find ideas for activities, arts and crafts, food, and lots of freebies, not just my own.  Here is the link to my board: Happy Halloween! If you don't already follow me on Pinterest, you might want to see my other boards too.  I have lots of great boards for Pre-K through 1st grade.  Here is the link to all my boards on Pinterest.

The only thing I felt really bad about was the fact that I may be reinforcing the sugar thing by using candy as the subject of our artwork.  I teach in a community that is very healthy and I always try to reinforce this in the classroom.  So, the students and I had a very honest conversation about it during the job.  I showed them what the real candy looked like.  Many had never had one before, some had and knew what they were called.  I told them that I would let them try some on Halloween, but warned that they may not like the taste because they are VERY sweet.  We also talked about other sweet healthy treats that we liked.  It was fun to hear about the kids' favorite fruits that were in season.  We talked about how fruits and vegetables give our bodies good energy and nutrients but sugar didn't give our bodies nutrients.  It was a fun time chatting with my smart little students while they worked.

We do a monthly calendar activity in my classroom for number writing and pattern practice.  We do an art project to go with it so it is something the students can hang up at home and refer to as the month goes along.  It is a perfect way to count down to a favorite holiday like Halloween!  You can get these calendars for your classroom by clicking on the image below:

It also includes lots of ideas with photos and directions for seasonal art projects like the candy corn.  I hope you find it helpful for your class.   Thanks for stopping by and reading!

Happy teaching!

It's Pumpkin Time!

Yes, fall is here and it's pumpkin time once again.  Fall is my favorite season.  I love the colors, the smells, the cooling down and shortening days as we head toward winter.  And, yes, I do love pumpkins!  It is always so much fun to do a pumpkin unit with the little sweeties in kindergarten.  These are my photos from last year.  I couldn't find the time to do much of anything but run my classroom last year, so blogging didn't even make it on my "to do" list.  I am so glad I took a few photos here and there, because the kiddos made some cute things.  I just love these punky pumpkins!  More about those later...

This was my big bulletin board with our class pumpkin patch.  Those pumpkins were made with paper bags and crumpled newspaper.  It is a fun and easy art project for little hands.  Just stuff the bag with a wad of newspaper.  Twist the top, paint, and add tape, pipe cleaners, or whatever you want to make the stem, vine and tendrils.  I have seen some very cute ones on Pinterest lately.

This photo is easier to see the final result.  We used tape and pipe cleaners to finish ours.  We did lots of observations about pumpkins during our studies.  We harvested them from our garden at school, measured them, compared them to apples, did a float/sink test, explored the insides, counted and baked the seeds, and cooked them!

We also visited a working farm with over 40 varieties of heirloom pumpkins.  It was so much fun!  And of course, we wrote about pumpkins too!

(My pumpkin is...  big and heavy.)

(My pumpkin is... green and orange!)

Yes, we had pumpkin fun in my classroom last year!  We did lots of centers and learning activities related to our theme.  But my favorite art project were these fun and funky jack-o-lanterns for Halloween!  Inspired by the many I saw on Pinterest, I showed my kids some pictures and they painted the pumpkin independently.  Then I helped them by drawing the shapes they wanted for eyes, noses, and mouths for them to cut out.  It worked really well!

They were absolutely adorable!  Our room looked very festive for Halloween.  So, if you are planning to do some pumpkin activities this year, I have a couple things to share with you.  The little half page writing prompt for a pumpkin observation is yours if you want it!  Just click on the image below to go get it.  You can download it from my Google docs.

And....  this is the prompt page I give my kids the day after we visit the farm.  It is on my TpT store if you want to go get it.  There is one that says farm and one that says pumpkin patch.  Please consider following me on TpT for more freebies and early bird discounts on new products.  Hope you enjoy these little goodies.

Hope your fall is going well and these freebies make your life a little easier!
Happy fall and
happy teaching!