It's been awhile! But, I'm back and ready to blog about the tons of things we've been doing in our class.

I've come to realize that I incorporate a lot of art into my class.  I think it's such a good way for kids to gain confidence and challenge their imaginations.  I literally try to tie art into every subject.  Maybe I just should have become an art teacher...oh well!

I read the kids a story called, "It Looked Like Spilt Milk."  It's a cool short story about these clouds that look like different objects.  In the morning I had the kids smoosh blobs of orange paint and we waited for it to dry until the end of the day.  I encouraged the students to use their imagination when they looked at their blobs and figure out what they looked like.  We used a black marker and added details to complete our pictures.  Most of them turned out really cool!

Team Building Activity

So, I was asked to give a Tribes lesson that promoted teamwork to my Kindergarten class.  A lot of the lessons I was finding were geared more towards higher grades so I decided to come up with one on my own.  Since we had been doing puzzles a lot during free time in class, I chose to focus my lesson around a puzzle theme.  I called my lesson "I am a Piece of our Class Puzzle."  I made a large class puzzle and gave each student 1 piece.  I hid 1 of the pieces before the students arrived that morning.  We constructed the puzzle as a class, and at the end the students realized that a piece was missing!  I had the class search for the piece and explained that this missing piece is like someone in our class who is feeling sad and lonely.  We need to find the piece just like we need to befriend all the friends in our class!


Once students constructed the puzzle, I gave each student a piece of an even larger puzzle.  They got to decorate their puzzle piece so that it reflected who they were.  We put all the pieces together and the puzzle is displayed in our class!

ABC Animal Art Book

I love integrating art into the classroom!  Since the students are learning the alphabet, I decided it would be a fun idea to have them create their own ABC book with an animal art project for each letter.  This is more work than I expected...but it will totally be worth it!  And the kids think its so cool to see their artwork hanging in the classroom.

For a lot of the art I do a thing called "Follow Me Art."  This is an activity we all do together and I tell the students what to draw step by step.  Its fun because all of the students receive the same instructions but their work turns out sooo differently.  Here are some of the Follow Me art pieces.

                             

                             

                         

I have also done "Tear Art" with my kids.

                             

In learning lab groups (groups of like 5 or 6 students) I melted crayons for the dragonfly wings.

                       

Before each art lesson I tell the kids that they are artists!  I tell them that artists work in silence and they keep their work to themselves until they are complete.  This helps the students stay focus and feel like they are real artists.  It's so fun to see what they come up with! 

Discipline Plan

Kindergarten is a hard grade to enforce a discipline plan in.  The kids are still so young and trying to learn so much that I feel bad getting mad at them.  So, instead of my frustration growing throughout the day and then exploding at the end, I decided to make a behavior card chart.  The card chart is a great way for students to monitor their on behavior and have accountability for their actions.  For mine I did green, yellow, red, and black.  The green card means that their behavior is great!  If they have to change to yellow card that means they've received warnings and need to make better choices.  A red card means that they're chances are almost out and they need to write a note home to mom and dad.  A black card is the final straw and involves a phone call and, depending on how severe the behavior is, a trip to our principle.

Here it is!

My mom recommended I try giving out tickets to reward good behavior, so I started implementing this as well.  Once a student gets 10 tickets, they get to choose a treat out of the orange box. 

A Reason to Blog

So, I'm terrible at blogging.  Mainly because I don't have any recipes to post or DIY crafts to share.  But I am student teaching now, so I figured I would post about some of the lessons I have been teaching with my Kindergarten class.  Student teaching has been a difficult challenge and has forced me to be as creative and patient as humanly possible.  The first things I was asked to do was cover and decorate some of the bulletin boards in our room.

This one was my favorite!  

It says "CHICKA CHICKA BOOM BOOM, welcome to our room!"  

The kids love this one as well.

This one is not my favorite and I still need to jazz it up.

But it's our "WOW Wall!"

Each student has a page protector with a gecko that has their special number on it.