Orange 'Ya Glad Its a Blog Hop?

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I have two products to share with you! The first product is a paid product- my Ocean Adventures Unit.

Your students will be able to review key concepts from the Kindergarten Common Core Standards while completing ocean themed Math and Literacy Centers and activities! I also have a science ocean animals extension unit!

The second product is a free product! This product is a Sunglasses Long and Short Vowel sort. Long and short vowels are such a tricky concept for some kinder babies. This activity is perfect for whole group or small group!
To use this activity whole group pass out a card to each student before they arrive in the morning. When students come in they will have a card on the desk. Students should figure out if their picture has a long or short vowel. On the way to the carpet the student should place their card in the pocket chart!
I usually do this a few times a week with each theme. Below is a picture of our Easter sorting in action!

Click the picture to download this freebie from my TPT store!

If you download this product please consider rating it or showing some love in the comments!

Thanks for stopping by! Up next...

If you want to start at the beginning of the hop so you can get all the goodies head over to Tamara's Blog!


Don'y forget to show some love and become a follower at each stop!

Five for Friday-- April 26th!

I am linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching for Five for Friday. It's going to be short and sweet this week so I can actually post on Friday.

1. I dusted off my old teaching portfolio this week to take some pictures for some TPT friends. I took tons of pictures of the inside and will do a post on it later if you know someone who is interviewing soon maybe there is something they could use!

2. I had to take a day off this week. I was able to set my room up before I left on Monday. The kids had so much Earth Day fun I am not even sure they noticed I wasn't there.

3. My fiance is a 5th grade teacher so this week he was finishing off the last of the FCAT tests. I "made" him a celebratory dinner on Thursday when his testing ended. You should know that when I say made I really mean ordered from Outback and put it on real plates.

4. This was the parking lot when I left today. On a Friday. I need to not be the second to last person to leave on a Friday. I will leave before 6:30 next week. That is my goal.

5. Tomorrow I am participating in a K-2 Blog Hop with some other awesome Florida bloggers! Stop by each of our blogs for some free goodies!

(5 and a half). You should know my clock says 11:54! SUCCESS!

Check out Doodle Bugs for some Friday fun!

Teachers Taking Care of Teachers

Please consider checking out Kreative In Kinder and donating twenty five dollars to help the teachers in West, Texas. Once you donate the 25 dollars you will get a collection of goodies from the best of the best on TPT! 

Kreative in Kinder is the first blog I ever started reading and the first TPT purchase I ever made. Crystal is such a amazing person! Thanks so much for setting this up!

Plants!

The writing says " I can plant seeds. Water them everyday. Get a pot. Put soil in. Then put seeds. Water"

The writing says:

"My plant sprouted. It looks good. I will water it."

"My seed has not grown yet. I hope my seed grows. I want my seed to grow."

Check out my Plants unit on TPT if you are looking for some plants activities for your class!

Featured Teacher

I am the featured teacher over at Mrs. Payton's Precious Kindergarteners! Click the picture to check out my post! If you hope over to her blog you may win my CVC word packet! Thanks so much to Mrs. Payton!

Five For Friday- A Busy Week!

I am linking up with Five for Friday with Doodle Bugs Teaching!

1. My team and I decided we needed some more word work activities. We wanted things to pull out for centers, use during morning work, grab quickly to use in small group while we pull other kids for assessments and the list goes on.  So I worked until the wee hours of a few mornings this week to get these two packs done. Needless to say I am one tired girl!

The first pack is my CCVC/CVCC Word Pack which is modeled after my CVC Word Pack. I am hoping that between these two packs my classroom will be differentiated in tons of ways! Next is my "Build It" Pack. With this pack students can build CVC, CCVC, CVCC, and CVCE words using a variety of manipulatives. My students are loving these with letter tiles, magnetic letters, and these amazing little letter legos from Lakeshore.

2. This week we talked about the weight and used our balance scales! The students really enjoyed doing an investigation the first day. I lined up various objects on the carpet and had the students write the objects down from heaviest to lightest. Then I let them come to the carpet one table at a time to lift the objects. Then they could go back to their seats and fix their lists. Then I gave each group a set of objects from the carpet and a balance scale and they went crazy began working.

I did this lesson using the inquiry method and let the conversations at the tables drive their understanding of the balance scale. The groups were able to determine that the size of the object doesn't necessarily correlate with the weight and how to interpret the balance scale.

One little boy told his group to "Sit down and I will explain." His whole group sat down while he explained "See I will put the feather on. Now I put the paint on. The paint is heavy. I know because I felt it. A feather is light. Because feathers are light. The scale goes down when something is heavy. Thats why the scale goes down under the paint."

Those periods are no exageration. He was so matter-a-fact. It really makes me wonder if I sound like that when I am trying to get my point across.

3. I found these cute little watering cans in the dollar section at Target. They were three dollars each but I didn't figure that out until I made it to the register and I already had big plans for them. I used them this week to sort long and short vowels during an activity from my Flutter Into Spring Unit but you could use them for plants and gardening too.

4. Next week is FCAT for the students in grades 3-5. The K-2 teachers adopt a classroom during the week of FCAT. We will sign our name to this poster and hang it outside out adopted classes' classroom. We will also bring the class pencils because they are so sharp, smarties because they are so smart and butterfly bookmarks because they are flying by success!

5. We get to pack our classrooms this year because our school is getting new flooring. I say "get" like it is a privilege because I am actually more excited then I thought I would be about this. I like to have things organized and I like to organize-- I just have a terrible time keeping things organized.
I decided to stay late one day this week and tackle some of my closet. Can I just say construction paper storage makes me crazy?!?! I have a cabinet inside my closet so I made a snap decision to put the construction paper in there. I hate to admit it but it was mostly because if it gets out of control again I can just shut the door.

As if this week was not crazy enough I have my bags packed and waiting by the door. I am heading on a short mini weekend vacation with some teacher friends to go visit some friends in Orlando. I am looking forward to a weekend of shopping and girl talk! And I am all ready to start Earth Day when I get back on Monday!

Kite- A Craftivity! -

It happens every year- we get to that one point in the year where I start to realize we are wrapping it up. Sometimes I notice it and sometimes I don't.

Well it hit me like a ton of bricks on Friday when most of my students had finished their FAIR test. The last Kindergarten FAIR test they will ever take. WAIT WHAT? Insert panic here.

Not that they are not ready. They are. I know they are and they know it. The panic ensues because it makes me wish-- wish for more time, more crafts, more fun, more games, more of the stuff that will make Kindergarten memorable. 

Every year I worry that my focus was not balanced enough. I worry that they did not have enough fun. This is probably something we are not even suppose to admit. 

So I am determined to do a writing based craft each week until they leave me (tears.) Maybe I will even be awesome and upload it to TPT.

 If it was not obvious enough I have a special attachment to this class. 

This is our craft and writing activity for this week! We are going to make spring kites!

I think you could make it work for k-3. There is a blank graph they can make and then do writing on a separate paper for your 2/3 kiddos!

You can grab this at my TPT store for only $1.25 but if you comment on this blog post I will send it to you for FREEE! I am feeling super nice so maybe the first 7 people!?!

Five for Friday- Rainy Day

I am linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching again! Click the picture to head over and link up! 

1. This was the view today as I pulled into school. It has rained here in "sunny Florida" for two days---straight. Two days of inside recess with me supervising two classes is less then ideal. 

2. Can I just say that my teaching neighbor rocks!! How cute are these? The flowers are hot glued to clothes pins and have magnetic tape on the back. The stems with the words clip right on! With her permission I am going to try to remake these this weekend so the team can have them for centers next week.

PS- She claims this was an idea she had from "the dark ages." All I know is if this adorable center is from the dark ages I want to go there!!!

3. We are working from my plants unit over the next few weeks and we made these cute little circle maps to kick it off. My kids had tons of background knowledge about plants and we added some to our circle map after a short video to introduce the new topic. The students made their own circle maps using large tracers and construction paper. 

Don't you jus love the way she spelt "roots" as "rowse?"  

4. I busted out my workout shoes everyday this week! Tomorrow morning I am going to check out a gym that I am considering joining because it has no contract (so I can quit if I want!) and it is close to my house. Would it make me a gym snob if I said I refuse to join if they don't have tiny tv's in their treadmills? I would really like to watch my own shows at the gym but I am not sure that is going to happen. 

5. After some discussion with my team we decided we needed two things going into next year. We needed to teach basic vocabulary words to some of our kids. I am not talking the words "banter, " "flutter," or "stagger." No- those are the words our reading series wants us to teach. I am talking back to the basics.

We also decided that we need an alphabet reference packet. We needed to be able to pull from this packet to do beginning sound sorts, long and short vowel sorts, phoneme blending, and everything in between!

I made this Alphabet Reference Cards packet to help with those needs. There are 800 cards total-- 400 with the word included and 400 without the words. I am hoping this is a packet I can add to every month with new pictures! I hope it will save the team some time and hassle next year!