Popcorn Words FREEBIE

The other day on Facebook a teacher asked for ideas for making their alphabet flash cards more engaging for her students. I don't remember the curriculum, but this teacher was required to use a specific set of flash cards daily and her students just wilted every time she pulled them out. I thought back to when I first started teaching and didn't have a Smartboard - I used flash cards for my sight words. I shared what I used to do back then to keep my kids engaged, and several teachers loved the idea and asked me to share it:

When using flash cards, create extra cards with pictures of a bucket of popcorn on them. Insert these randomly into your deck of cards and when your students see the popcorn card they're allowed to jump to their feet and hop in place while saying "Pop, pop pop!". This was always engaging for my students because they couldn't wait to get a to a popcorn card, so they watched those cards like hawks! Simple idea, but an easy way to make flash cards more interactive!

Now that I have a SmartBoard however, I've gone beyond flashcards to PowerPoint shows. I created a show for my sight words, and again, I've inserted some fun "popcorn cards" into the show. Then I realized that you can't shuffle the slides in a PowerPoint show like you can a deck of flashcards, which makes making it random a bit more difficult. Luckily there's YouTube videos for everything, so I taught myself how to make a macro that will jump to random slides. Now when I hit the "play" button on my slides, it randomly jumps to any slide in my presentation.

I've saved my Popcorn Word slideshow and I'm sharing it today with you. It's set up so that you can type in your own words, so you can use whichever sight words you want. Right now I just have it looping the first 20 Dolch sight words over and over. If you need more slides to make a longer show, you just right click the slide and hit "duplicate". Easy peasy lemon squeezy! I used Comic Sans and Century Gothic for my sight word fonts because I wanted to make sure the letters were kinder friendly and I think most people have those fonts by default.

When you play the slideshow, you'll notice that you have to click the "play" button on the lower left hand corner to jump from slide to slide - this is what makes the slideshow random and will keep your students on their toes! When you're ready to end the show, just click Esc on your keyboard. Make sure that when you download the file you save it as a pptm (PowerPoint Macro-Enabled Presentation) so that the macros work.

Here's a caveat - before you use the slideshow, make sure that you teach a signal to your students so that they know when they have to sit down after "popping" up. I bring my hands up to my eye level, palms down and then bring them down to my lap in a silent signal for my students to sit. This means I'm not competing with their "popping" noise, and even the students who aren't looking right at me when I give the signal catch on when others start to sit. Generally they "pop" for about 20-30 seconds before I make them sit down again.

We use this slideshow daily, and it only takes a few minutes - sometimes I even use it as a brain break between other activities, because it allows may students to make noise and get some energy out! Its a good reinforcement of sight words, and my students always love it. Hopefully yours will too! Just click here to download the show for free from my Google Drive!

Math & Reading Centers for Halloween/Fall! (FREEBIE!)

Halloween Math & Reading Activities

I took a trip to Target recently, and got inspired by some of their Dollar Spot goodies! I've spent the last few days getting some fun centers ready for my kiddos:

I found these mini Halloween clothespins and knew they'd be perfect for my Halloween Counting Clip Cards!

The kids count the cookies on the card and then clip the clothespin on the correct number.

I place a sticker on the back of the card corresponding to the correct answer. This way my students can flip the card over and get instant feedback on whether they were correct or not!

I also have a Fall Counting Clip Card set that doesn't include Halloween images. 

 I couldn't find any mini clothespins for this set, so I spray painted some regular clothespins! Again, I placed some fun Fall stickers on the backs of the cards so that this activity is self-correcting for my students!

 Next I found these mini erasers! They're sold in sets of 60 for just $1 and make perfect math manipulatives! I put a couple of bags into a pencil box and use it as an early finisher activity - my students pattern with them, count them, sort them, make shapes with them - you name the math skill, you can do it with mini erasers!

 I also use them as tokens for my Roll And Cover games! 

 

 The students each pick a type of mini eraser as their token, and then roll the dice and cover the number they rolled. For my more advanced students, I have mats that use 2 dice or even 3 dice! 

I also prepped my new Scarecrow Alphabet Match-Up Cards! These are so easy to differentiate - some of my students work on matching upper to lowercase letters.

 While others work on matching letter to beginning sound picture.

Sometimes they even match all 3 at once!

I have a few students who need extra practice with rhyme recognition, so my Pumpkin Rhyming Match-Up Cards are making their debut in centers this month!

And here's your freebie - some cute number cards to go with the web coasters also from Target! 

I cut the rings off some spider rings so that I had some colorful spider counters and now my kiddos have another high-interest counting activity! Not only can they use the cards to add spiders to the webs, they can also put them in numerical order and I can use them to test for one-to-one correspondence! 

If you want to grab these cute spider number cards, just click the picture to download them for free from my Google Drive! 

Now that I have some fun Halloween/Fall centers done, I'm going to be focusing on my STEM Nursery Rhyme series, so if you're one of the patient souls waiting for the next one, know that they're in the pipeline!

Fun Ideas for Kindergarten Centers

Easy Learning Centers for Kindergarten

I am always on the lookout for interesting and inexpensive learning centers for my students. Whether I create my own with Dollar Tree Deals or stalk the Target aisles, summer is my time to find interesting learning activities for my kindergarten students to enjoy! Especially when looping, which I've done several times, it's important to have fresh ideas! I can always rely on Oriental Trading to help me change things up in the classroom! OT was kind enough to send me some products in exchange for an honest review - I've used everything in my classroom! Here's are the activities that I've found that I've found are ENGAGING and really help me teach key skills as my students PLAY!

ABCs Rubber Duckies - oh my goodness! Can they get any cuter?! Not only do I love them, so do the kids! I used these to help review the alphabet, then placed them in Letter Center for the kids to explore and they have had a blast trying to put them in ABC order, finding the ducks that spell their name and matching the ducks to different objects that start with the letter on the duck. I think I'll go ahead and buy a second set, so that we can use them to form even more words!

I love this All About The Number pocket chart! I added it into our calendar time, for a quick daily number sense review! The tens frame and tally mark part are dry erase, so each day I have students come up and fill them out according to our number of the day. One of the 1st grade teachers came in and saw it and loved it since her students last year struggled with "one more, one less" and this chart teaches that concept easily! My chart has a misplaced apostrophe, but they've since fixed that issue! 

What makes playdough even more fun AND helps justify it to admin? Counting Mats! These are laminated mats so the play dough doesn't stick, and the kids love how colorful the mats are. These are also great conversation sparkers, so my students have been improving their vocabulary as they chat with each other about which mats they're working on!

For example, as this little sweetie was working on the #8 cookie jar mat, we talked about favorite flavors, times when we baked cookies and then worked on some number sense, counting how many cookies there were, how many were in the jar, how many were outside of the chair and how many would be left if some sneaky teacher ate 2!

Do you still teach 3d shapes? They took it out of  the Oklahoma kindergarten curriculum (which I found out AFTER I had gotten these 3D Geometric Shapes, grrr) I'm still going to use them, because while our only call for me to teach the 4 main 2d shapes, I feel my students can handle more! These are great little manipulatives - and the box had more than enough for a complete set for all of my students! One of the first ways we used them was to learn sorting by more than one attribute!

And finally, this Following Directions Farm Game is perfect! It fits into my Farm Theme lesson plans so nicely, and I can use it in small groups and one on one! Not only is it great for the kids to practice following directions (put the cow next to the corn) it also helps them work on positional words! The thing I'm most looking forward to is getting my students talking after they have created their own scene with the cutouts. They're going to describe where they placed each figure and then practice giving each other directions based on the picture on the card!

Oriental Trading has definitely helped me start off the year on the right foot! I'm already looking at some more items to buy - my friend Kristen of Kristen's Kindergarten has been sharing some OT products in use on her Instagram page and has me saying "Oooh I need that!" lol!