New Product Giveaway

Hey friends!! I've been working really hard on getting some back to school TPT products up! I have been creating some activities to help address the beginning of the year kindergarten skills. I'd like to share with you the three activities I just finished!

I found a whole class set of BINGO daubers at The Dollar Tree, in every color I could think of! I grabbed as many as I could, and then decided to create some activities to go with them! I know my kinders LOVE using BINGO daubers, and these packets are perfect for incorporating into daily learning. But if you don't have BINGO daubers, no worries! You can have your kiddos use crayons or markers! Here's a closer look at these activities.

Dot-A-Letter packet focuses on the uppercase, lowercase, and beginning sounds of letters. There are three different dotting mats, and each mat has its own set of cards. Laminate the cards, cut them out, and put them in a bin/bucket for students to pull from. As they pull each card they'll find the corresponding letter on the dotting sheet. The sheet with lowercase letters on it has uppercase cards to go with it, the sheet with the uppercase letters has lowercase cards to go with it, and a second lowercase letters dotting sheet has a set of beginning sounds cards to go with it. This will hopefully help you to differentiate in your classroom! 

If a student is using the uppercase mat, he will pull out lowercase cards and search for their matching letter buddy to dot it. There is also a lowercase mat with uppercase cards to find the letter buddies matches. Finally, a third lowercase mat has students pulling cards with simple word pictures on them. Students identify the beginning letter of each word and dot it on the mat.

The Dot-A-Number packet has the same flow as the Dot-A-Letter packet. For the Number pack, there are two mats with several sets of cards to go with each. The first mat focuses on the numerals 0-10 while the second mat focuses on the numerals 11-20.

Students have several card choices to use for the two mats. They can pull a numeral card to match up to the numeral on the mat. They can also pull a ten-frame card, a number word card, a finger set card, or a number combinations card. I tried to include at least two combinations for every number. You can mix and match these cards, the more ways students can recognize a number the better! The dotting mat with 11-20 has the same types of cards that the 0-10 dotting mat has.

Finally I created a pack to work on colors and color words, Dot-A-Color. This one is slightly different than the other two. There is a color word dotting sheet that can go with several sets of cards. One set of cards has the matching color word, another set has real-life objects that match each color, and the third set is colored paint splatters (there is a black and white version of the paint splatters cards too, in case you want to save your ink and color them in yourself!). There are also several different dot by code sheets included. Each sheet has a key using four pictures coded by color words. Students must read the color words and find the matching pictures on the mat to dot in with the same color.

I think these activities are going to be a huge hit in my room this year, especially since they get to use the BINGO daubers! I can't wait to try them out!! If you'd like to try to win all three, enter the Rafflecopter below! I'll announce winners this weekend!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Don't want to wait? No worries! These three activities are 50% OFF ALL DAY TODAY!! That means that you can scoop all three packs for a grand total of $3 for TODAY ONLY! Follow the links below to head to my TPT store and add them to your cart! (If you buy them and then win them, you can pick a product of equal value from my store!)
Dot-A-Letter Pack
Dot-A-Number Pack
Dot-A-Color Pack

I'd love to know what you think! Leave me some feedback love in the comments!

Peek at My Week (Week 3): Lesson Plans and Activities

Tomorrow is Monday...the weekend is over.  <sad face>  I start my third week of teaching tomorrow, but it is my first five-day week of the year.  Tomorrow marks Day 8 of kindergarten for us, and I have to admit that things are going REALLY WELL so far!!!  <knock on wood!!>  I'm excited to link up with the ever-amazing Deedee Wills for her Peek at My Week linky party.  It's so much fun to see what other educators and bloggers are doing with their lesson plans and how they spend their week!  Make sure to click on the picture at the end of my post to hop on over to see who else has linked up!!

This is the third week of linking up with Peek at My Week, but it is the first week I've been able to share lesson plans.  At my school there are 4 kindergarten teachers, and we all split up the workload. I am SO VERY GRATEFUL to be able to do this!!  We take turns typing up the weekly plans and creating the daily SMART Board routines.  Isn't it just fabulous to be part of a team??  I haven't been able to watch DeeDee's fabulous video tutorial on how to display one's plans with links to activities, so I'm just going to have to settle for showing you a screen shot of the plans and then providing links to any activities that were used.

This first page shows our morning plans for the week.  During the morning is when we work on calendar and ELA activities, including word study, whole group reading, and guided reading.  As per our contract, our plans must include a daily objective taken from the Common Core, an activity, and how we are going to assess that activity.  The style/format we use is up to us.  My team types them up in a Word template.  We have used the same one for many years, and it works just fine for us!!  :-)

The second page of our weekly plans shows what we do for math, including whole group, guided math groups, number of the day, and number talks.  During the afternoon is also when we attend special and when we have our science/social studies block.  We do two days of science and two days of social studies, since every Wednesday is 2:00 dismissal for all elementary schools in our county.  The students leave at 2, but teachers remain until the end of their duty day.  We use this time for professional development, staff meetings, team meetings, and working in our rooms.  Every Wednesday of the month is designated for something different.

Here are the activities I'm using this week that can be found on TPT.

This activity pack created by Caitlin Clabby of Kindergarten Smiles is AMAZING!!!  We have already used several of the many, many activities provided!  This week we will be working on creating the 'Monster School Rules' book.  Last week we worked on coloring the cover and assembling the pages for the rules of 'Whispering Mouths' and 'Walking Feet'.  This week we will work on the rules 'Listening Ears' and 'Boss of ME!'  That last one is, hands-down, my favorite go-to rule for the entire year.  Whenever one of my kinders runs up to me to tell me what so and so just did/said/etc, I say 'Who are you the boss of?  That's right, you are the boss of YOU and no one else."  Love.

All these week during ELA guided reading groups, we will be working with this little easy reader I made.  It focuses on VERY SIMPLE shapes, color words, number words (for the number of sides of the shapes discussed), and some simple sight words.  We are going to work on reading this book all week, as well as identifying the shapes by their name and number of sides and understanding that a shape's name doesn't change regardless of it's size or orientation on the page.  If you'd like to use it, click on the picture above to download the reader FOR FREE!!!!!

On Friday during our guided math groups we will be teaching our kinders how to play this simple game I created for the partners of five (some folks call them combinations or fact families).  Our kinders will work in pairs and use a cup of 5 double-sided counters to spill out and sort onto five-frames.  They will then search for that number sentence on their game board and color in the square.  When all the squares are colored in, they count up their color to see who had the most.  Oh year, this one is FREE TOO!!!!  I'm just feeling generous this weekend.  ;-)

This week we will also be reading MANY wonderful stories, including David Goes to School by David Shannon and Chrysanthemum by Kevin Henkes, just to name a few.  We are also going to be working on rhyming skills as well as introducing the letters 'P' and 'B'.  In our district we follow Linda Almarode's LiPS program.  We will also be having lots of number talks for the numbers 3,4, & 5.  It's going to be a super busy week in Room 130!!!

I hope everyone has a fabulous week.  Don't forget to hop on over and see who else has linked up for Peek at My Week linky party!!

Oh, quick question!!  How do you introduce the letters of the alphabet to your littles?

St. Patrick's Day Activities

It's Tuesday!!  St. Patrick's Day is less than a week away!!  Since it is my favorite holiday, as well as a reminder that spring is right around the corner, I wanted to make a few activities to incorporate the holiday into my classroom.  I needed a new activity for my Pocket Chart Center, so I made two that had a St. Pat's Day theme.  One is a Language Arts and the other is Math.

This activity has students reading sight words to check behind them to see if there's a leprechaun hiding there.  After I printed out the cards, I glued them onto sheets of construction paper.  I used colors that matched the groups I have.  Red, blue, and green are the colors of my groups.

My students pick the set of cards that match their group and put those into the pocket chart.  Then they hide the leprechauns behind them and take turns reading the cards to check behind them and see if they can catch the leprechaun!

The other activity I made for the pocket chart was for math. 

In this activity, students choose a numeral card and have to find the matching set.  Once found, they can check behind the set to see if there's a pot of gold hiding there.  They can continue searching for pots of gold until they find them all, and the one with the most cards is the winner!  :-)

Tomorrow I'll be sharing all about my newest rhyming activity.  On our kindergarten assessment, as a grade level we showed a deficit in rhyming skills, so I'll be making several activities to try and help address that need!!