Under Construction!!!

Well as you can see, I am under construction.  I am trying my best to do this blog thing myself.  It has not been a fun weekend.  But I am making enough mistakes that when I figure this out I will be able to help anyone else, hehe.  Oh well.  This is the idea of the new look, minus the cute boarder.  Keep watching to see the changes.  I just had to stop writing and try a different download a friend helped me with on the background.  I was having trouble with the boarders.  And he did it!!!!  Thank you Jeff!

Ok, now to school stuff.  Where was Sam on Friday?   He got busy and made some marshmallow snowmen to share with the class.  They were so excited!  I know C asked me 4 times if he could take one home at the end of the day, hehe.

Isn't he cute!

We have been working so hard in our math journals.  I want to thank Deedee Wills for her wonderful product.  If you haven't found them please have a look.  Here is her December one.

Click on the picture to link to her store.

Can you believe it, I remembered to snap a couple of pictures.  Here are some of the little fish working hard.

Here are 3 examples.  I am pretty sure the lollipop one was from her October or November Journal.  Yes, I know, the Christmas tree is sideways, but I changed it twice and if it wasn't sideways the other way.  Just tilt your head and pretend this crazy blogger knows what she is doing, hehe.  Anyway, I thing you can tell how well they are doing.  Thank you Deedee Wills for your awe inspiration!

Don't for get to check out Mrs.Wills Kindergarten blog

Off to finish printing gingerbread centers and then chase after a kid to volleyball.  Y'all keep swimming out there!

Welcoming Sam!

He is here.  Oh, the little fish are so excited!!!  Our elf came straight from the North Pole on Monday.  Our sweet librarian brought him.  

The box was so cold!  You wouldn't believe their faces :)

Look we have our own elf!!!

Each night the elf goes back and tells Santa if you were naughty or nice.

She read the book to us and I swear they never blinked.  Thank you Mrs. C. for coming to share with us and helping the magic begin!  We sat the box up high for our new elf to watch what was going on.  Then we made a list of names and voted.  Our little elf is named Sam.  I never imagined they would be this excited.  I would see them walk by and just stare at him.  Some would whisper, "Hi, Sam."  All of them had to go by and tell him goodbye.

Well the next day they rushed in to see where he was.  No taking our time at breakfast or anything.  Here is where he was the first day...

Just look at Sam!  He got into the chocolate kisses.  They are smeared all over his mouth and paper everywhere.  The little fish giggled all day about it.  We made a word bank and I let the littles write about their elf.  Here is how it went.

My elf is in my basket and he is eat chocolate. (and yes that is a period...)

His nam is Sam

Chocolate

My elf is sit in the basket with... (she was still writing)

I see a sam

My Elf is in a basket he eat chocolate and he fly came in the mail

We have been working on capitalizing the fist word in a sentence, spacing, and punctuation.  As you see, some have the spacing, some have periods, and most are capitalizing the first letter of a sentence.  Not to bad for a couple of weeks.  Two of those students are EL.  

Yesterday when Sam came back from the North Pole he thought his name needed to be on the word wall.  There he sits all proud with Santa right under it.

Today Sam put snow, all the way from the North Pole, on the window and gave us a greeting.  They loved that Sam used his magic!  (thank you Dollar Tree for the snow!)

Ok now for some school related stuff, hehe.  Just look at this!  J is an EL learner in the beginning stage.  Pink is what he knew at the beginning of the year, red is at the end of the first nine weeks, and green was today.  I am so proud of him.  He was swimming today when he saw!

And look at his sounds!  I am so proud of him.

Wow that was a lot of elf.  I got behind, image that me...but I wanted to show you all that we have been doing.  And YES I got out the camera this week and will be sharing some of our math journals with you next. Of course some elf fun too.  Until then, keep swimming out there!

Linking Up!

Ok, this is my first adventure to a Linky Party!  I know, I know, all you veteran bloggers do it all the time.  Still this is my first.  So here it goes.  I get to show you all I bought at the TPT sale.  What fun!

Well I didn't spend as much as I would have liked to, I tried to keep a handle on it.  Here is my first product.

I just could resist getting Deanna Jump's Elf Capades for Math and Literacy Fun.  I am teaching elves this week.  Especially since Sam, our elf, came to our classroom today.

I can't wait to use these.  My little fish are just about ready.  I am sure after Christmas we will be diving into this game!

These are going to be so great with my EL students.  They have problems with comprehension as they are processing the English language.  I am going to use these in small groups.

Just look at those wonderful little faces!  I have a cute idea for January.  Be looking for it!  Aren't they just adorable!

Oh my, I love this!  Goodbye ink...I saw Marsha's blog at A Differentiated Kindergarten and knew right away I would be getting this during the sale.  Check it out!

Ok, this is the last one. Since this is the first year to have an elf in my room, I needed some more umph in my lesson plans.  This is really cute!

I put a link in each of the picture back to their TPT store pages.  I can't wait to dig into all of these.  Thanks for all your creative minds.  I can't wait to see what everyone else got!!!!!

Just keep swimming out there!

Wow, Is it December already?

I really can't believe that November has flown by so fast!  It seems like we just had Halloween.  Oh well...I had a wonderful visit with family.  We spent a couple of days with my husband's mother.  She has been suffering from cancer for awhile now so we ate out for Thanksgiving diner.  Never have done that before, but it was nice to not have to do all that cooking and cleaning up.  We all came back and sat around, dozed and watched football.  Yep you heard me right.  I do love some football.  In fact I am watching the Titans and the Colts right now.

We spent Friday with my family here in Music City for family picture day.  All 18 of us!  It was quite a sight. My brother has four kids, with the oldest being in the first grade (and the news of the day...they are going to have their fifth!).  My sister has four kids. And me with two. This wasn't part of the professional pictures but my husband snapped this under the tree in the lobby. 

Just look at my beautiful daughters.

The one on the right is squatting down, she is six foot tall.

While I was the hills of Kentucky, the land of no internet and little phone service, I got busy and created some things. I finished my Elf unit right before I left, literally.  The family was sitting in the car waiting on me to finish up.  So in KY I finished a Gingerbread Fun product.  The little fish are going to have so much fun.  Here is a look at both of them.

The librarian is going to bring in the frozen box of The Elf on the Shelf to my room tomorrow, right after lunch.  I can't wait....what fun this is going to be.  We are going to be doing all kinds of fun learning with our elf next week.  I will do my best to snap some picture.  I am so not good about that.

The following week I will start my Gingerbread Unit.  We will be talking a lot about characters, settings, comparisons, beginning, middle, and end, and also retelling.  I made huge gingerbread characters last year.  I dug them out last Tuesday before I left for the holidays.  So they are all ready to go!  I can't wait!  Again I will work on the pictures..UGH!  I have to get better at this.  It is just posted everywhere, hehe.

I hope you all had as wonderful of a Thanksgiving break as I did.  Y'all keep swimming out there!!!

Some Days!!!

Well, some days make you question your sanity!  

I had some soft music playing in the background and the little fish were working on a sheet of putting in missing numbers.  I was walking around observing and well someone needed some one on one.  I squatted down beside them and we started counting, you get the picture. Well I heard someone snicker so I stood up to see what was going on and I see her neighbor with his glue bottle, the lid off, it was turned upside down and glue dripping out.  

Yep there it is.  I calmly sent him to refocus and walked away.  I am sure there was steam coming out of my ears.  Why or why?  The joys of Kindergarten, but I promise I wouldn't want to do anything else.  

Well a couple of days ago I posted Pirate Pals.  I gave you a sneak peak last week.  The little fish loved it!  I heard one fish humming our pirate chant as they were working today.  I couldn't help but smile. Here are a few pictures.  I am the worse at taking pictures.  This is all I could find.  I always get wrapped up in what they are doing and forget to snap away.

Ten frames.  I was out of black play-dough so I used brown instead.  I think black play-dough would look like cannon balls.

We had read several pirate books.  Their favorite being "How I Became A Pirate" by Melinda Long.  We also read some non-fiction books about pirates, being very careful of what was read aloud ;)

We used our circle map to create this tree map.  I use a colored coded method.  We write three things under each verb: can, have, are. We then circle can with red and choose one of the three things that pirates can do. Have in yellow, and are in blue in the same fashion.  They then make sentences on lined paper and think they have written the best story EVER!  I have them hanging in the hall with their pirate pictures.  But guess what? NO PICTURE on the camera!  Ugh!  This is our forth writing like this in three weeks. They are doing so much better.  We are working on spacing, starting a sentence with capital letters, and adding punctuation.  I throw these in between Writers Workshop that I model after Deanna Jump.  

Soooo.....Pirate Pals is now on TPT.  I hope y'all enjoy it!

Hey keep swimming out there!

2013 Conference for Tennessee Kindergarten Teachers

I had the most wonderful day learning today!  I had the pleasure to go with my whole, wonderful Kindergarten Team to the Kindergarten conference for TN today.  It was so nice to be around all kinds of people just like me.  

See how excited we are!

We started the day with Jack Hartman.  I bet you weren't ever in a room full of grown men and women dancing to kids songs this morning.  He was great!  Nothing like a grown woman dancing around the stage in a chicken custom before 9am!!!

But the best part of the day was spent listening to Deanna Jump.  Yep you heard me right.  I sat through four awe inspiring sessions of hers today.  If you ever get a chance to go and hear her, please do.  And guess who else was there, my friend Greg from Smedley's Smogasboard!

I was so excited to get this picture!

I also got to meet Elizabeth Hall from Kickin' it in Kindergarten and got a surprise from Kim from Kindergarten Gals.  I didn't even know she was in the picture until I saw it on my camera when I got home.

Too Funny!

Looks like too much fun, right?

Thanks guys for all the greatness you shared today!  I was blessed to be there.  And guess what?  I won something from Deanna!  My name was actually pulled out the bag.  So I get to go shopping and see what I want from her store.  How great is that?  Hmm, now what do I pick off my llllooonnnggg TPT wish list?

I hope y'all had a great of a day as I did.  Keep swimming out there!

Yes, it is me again!  I know 2 days in a row, WOW!

I took my camera out today and took some snap shots.  I didn't get to my scarecrows last week so I finished up today.  My kids loved the book "The Little Scarecrow Boy" by Margret Wise Brown.  I made a giant scarecrow with 6 crows (which I didn't get a picture of) and we found all the ways to make 6.  They really had to think, but loved counting the crows on each arm.  We made addition equations with how many crows were on each of his arms.  It was inspired by Scarecrow Unit: TONS of Math, Literacy, & Writing Activities! by A Spoonful of Learning.  Link below.

After we completed the math, we did a circle map about scarecrows.  Then completed a tree map of what 

scarecrows can, have, and are. 

See, I did take pictures.  They then took the tree map, pick one from each category, and  wrote sentences. We are working on spacing, capitalizing the first letter of the sentence, and punctuation at the end.  And of course the actual doing it.  Whew!  Enough to wear you out.  

They are trying so hard.  This is our third attempt.  I am pleased with their progress.  WELLLLLL.....the crazy flip flop teacher decided that she should use Greg's (Smedley's Smorgasbord) scarecrow from his glyph.  I am not sure what I was thinking after a weekend of Halloween candy and them being exhausted at the end of the day with the time change...but we did it.  Take a look!

Yep that is 20 of them.  All 20 little fish were there today and that was 80 arms and legs to fold.  Whew yet again.  But they worked so hard.  We had a brain break after this.  Shh don't tell, I think it was more for me than them, hehe.  But most of all, we had fun and they were learning.  

Just keep Swimming out there!