Book Talk Tuesday!!

It's Tuesday!! Time to mark another day off of our Countdown to the Last Day of School!  We now have 8 days left!!  (single digits, woo-hoo!!)  Yesterday was EXHAUSTING with our all day long, outdoor Green School Celebration, which I will be posting about tomorrow.  Why not today, you ask??  Well, let me tell you.  Today is the first day of the Book Talk Tuesday LINKY party hosted by Mrs. Deanna Jump!!  I am SO VERY EXCITED to be participating in this LINKY!!  I can't wait to share with you all of my favorite books to use in the classroom (or at least as many of them as I possibly can!!)  I'm going to start off with telling you about a few books I'm reading for my own professional development this summer.  I haven't really had a chance to delve into them yet, so I don't have a lot of information to share with you, but I will be posting about these books off and on all summer, so make sure to keep checking back with me!!

Last summer I immersed myself into The Daily 5 by those amazing sisters Gail Boushey & Joan Moser.  If you have not yet had a chance to check out their awesomeness, you really should!!  Since I read their book last summer, I started the Daily 5 with my kinders this year.  They LOVE it!!  I'm so excited to get it up and running at the start of next year (had some issues getting started this year due to losing my mom right at the beginning of the school year).  So my hopes are that, by reading these PD books over the summer, I'll be able to get my newest focus up and running at the start of next year.

This summer I'm going to be reading up on Writer's Workshop and how I can use it in my kindergarten classroom.  There are TONS of materials out there about this program, but the two books I'll be focusing on are below.  Click the pictures to go to Amazon.com if you're interested!

The first one is Launching the Writing Workshop by Denise Leograndis,  Something I'm excited about with this book is how it is broken down into what you should do daily for the first four weeks of school to get your littles ready to be proficient writers.  I'm also excited that the author included photographs of how each step is tackled in her room, from set up to the last day.

I find these photographs to be SO HELPFUL when I'm trying to understand.  I enjoy having visuals to help with my learning process.  I love how many anchor charts that the author uses, and that is a great way to help students foster ownership of their learning.  Ms. Leograndis is a third and fourth grade teacher, so I will need to adapt some of her lessons to fit the needs of my kinders.  Make sure to check back on Book Talk Tuesdays to see and read about how I'm doing this!! 

In order to help gain a deeper understanding of how writing works with the younger learners, I will also be reading this book:

I am hoping that this book, Scaffolding Young Writers by Linda Dorn and Carla Suffos, will be able to gain a better understanding of where my littles are developmentally with the process of writing.  One of the things I'm excited about with this book is there are plenty of real samples from students as well as plenty of charts that help to determine where students fall developmentally in the process of writing.  I'm hoping that this book will help me to adjust the lessons from the book by Denise Leograndis.  Here's a sample of one of the charts inside this book.

This summer I will be able to dive into these books and begin to develop my lessons for the first four weeks of school.  I hope that you will continue to check back with me to see how I am doing with my self-assigned professional development summer reading!!  (Having to be held accountable via my blog will encourage me to get the reading done!)

Next week I will be Book Talking about one of the children's literature books from my library!  Have a wonderful evening!!

PLEASE don't forget to jump over to Deanna Jump's blog and check out the Book Talk Tuesday linky party!!  Link up and share some of your favorite books, or just cruise through the MANY fabulous educators that have linked up too!!

Professional Development

Yesterday was the official first day back for teachers in my county.  Students in grades 1-12 start school on Thursday, and students in pre-school through kindergarten start next Tuesday.  Early childhood teachers use those three days to have entry conferences with our kinders and their grown-ups.  Yesterday, today, and tomorrow are days my county designates as professional development days.  I'm sure that most, if not all, schools have professional development days.  In my county, we attend back-to-school meetings to get the latest updates, as well as meet with other grade-level teachers across the county to discuss changes in curriculum.  Many schools are starting their first year with the Common Core Standards, however my school is going into its second year of Common Core so we feel more comfortable with it this year.  Not that we feel like we've mastered it yet, but we're working towards that goal.  I was wondering how other schools handle the beginning of the year.  Do you have days designated at the beginning of the year for professional development?  And if you're Early Childhood, do you have days set aside to have entry conferences with your incoming students?  Or is this something your school does over the summer break?  I would love any feedback!!

   I've been working hard on getting my room ready for this year's group of students.  So far I have a total of 19, 10 boys and 9 girls.  I've been working a little bit each day in my room to finish getting it set up, and I am almost finished.  In my classroom, I have a lot of different items that have a student's name on them.  Things like locker tags, mail box tags, BLURT! board tags, behavior chart clips, etc.  I laminated all of those items so that I could get as many years' worth of use out of them as I can!!  I brought all of these things home with me today in order to clean off the Sharpie marker so I can write this year's names.  I decided to clean them off using a Magic Eraser instead of the EXPO spray (which I LOVE too!!).  I had not realized just how many things in my classroom need to have student names written on them...needless to say my fingers turned black before I finished.  I have included pics so you can get a visual of what I'm talking about here.

 Doesn't it kinda look like I suffered a REALLY bad case of frostbite??  It got under my nails too...ick.

Here's all of the different things that I use in my classroom that need to have a student's name on them.  Don't forget that each item you see is one of 19!!

  For those of you starting with your kiddos tomorrow, have a SUPERFANTABULOUS year!!