Playdough and Nursery Rhymes! (Freebie)

I feel like I have been neglecting this little blog lately - blame it on the beginning -of-the-school-year-not-enough-hours-in-a-day syndrome! I think I need another 3 day weekend just to help me get caught up on everything! There is just not enough timeto spend  with my husband and kids and still get all my work done too! Speaking of husbands - my sweetie and I celebrated our 14th anniversary yesterday! We went to Olive Garden for dinner and will be going rock climbing on Saturday! Its my first time rock climbing so cross your fingers that I survive intact!

One thing I've been working on is getting my small group rotations established. I am lucky enough to get two tutors for 1/2 hour each afternoon for reading help. I am trying to figure out the best way to utilize them in my room and still keep noise levels within acceptable limits - with 26 kids and 3 adults, it can get noisy fast, even when everyone is on-task! When I figure out the magical solution I will be sure to let you know!

We've been working on short a words this week and I created some playdough "strips" to help keep my kiddos on-task at playdough center. I try to always ensure that the kids know exactly what I expect of them for each center - in this case they stamp out the word family in the playdough before any playing! I'm sharing them tonight just in case you'd like them. I made strips for some common short a, e and i word families:

 Yesterday the techs stopped by my room to give me yet another tease: they installed the projector for my Smartboard! Unfortunately the laptop is not wired and the wireless router is so far down the hall that we can't pick it up, thus I still cannot use my Smartboard for any of my youtube videos, or websites! Yet another work order has to be turned in to see if we can get a router installed on our end of the hall or if they will run wires to each individual classroom!

I did invent a new version of the quiet game today using the Smartboard though - I needed to run across the hall to see if there were any extra snacks since my class was short two cups. We received a grant that provides free fresh fruit or vegetable snacks Wed - Fri. Today's snack was cut up strawberries in a cup. Somehow I ended up with 24 cups for 26 kiddos! I utilized my students' love of writing on the Smartboard to hold them all in place while I tracked down the missing snacks. We played it just like the regular quiet game, but this time they got to write their name on the board when they were "picked" - even my chattiest kids were perfectly still and quiet just for the chance to write on the board lol!

I also finished up my Nursery Rhyme pack today - I started making it when I thought I was going to get to teach K this year, but set it to the side when I was switched to 1st. Well I pulled it back out because I have several sweet n lows who still don't have rhyming down and are having difficulties tracking print. I figured the nursery rhymes would help with both issues so I created a full page, color poster for each rhyme plus a blackline reader for each as well. There are 9 rhymes included, and I just posted it for sale on TPT tonight - I'd love to know what you think of it!

Have a good night everyone, I'll try to post more this weekend!