Herding Kats in Kindergarten

Boooo! Times 2! and a Favor...

Did you miss me? So did my husband and kids! I've been so busy with preparing for conferences and then doing parent/teacher conferences both last night and tonight that I've barely had a chance to eat let alone blog! Conferences are mostly over - have two more after school tomorrow and then it's done!

No big surprises, although I did have my first parent ever break down in tears. I am a sympathy crier, so as soon as she started I had to choke back my own tears. She was crying because I told her I was very concerned with her kiddo's progress. Apparently she's heard this in pre-k and K but no one ever actually did anything for him, so he's skated along on the border for 2 years. I assured her that we are going to figure out what is going on and she was happy to hear that we are actually going to move onto testing and find something to help him.

While I've been busy I've been boo'd by several different people! My friend Kaci from Mrs. Hoffer's Spot was also boo'd, so we are combining our posts! Here are the super-kind, amazing bloggers who boo'd us - go check them out!

Tania from:

Melissa from:

Lisa from:

And Sara from:

Heidi from:

There are actually two linky parties for being boo'd - one from Sara over at 2nd Grade Pad and the other from Tori at Tori's Teacher Tips. Check out both because you'll find some wonderful blogs looking through all the links!

We are going to exercise our perogative and pull from both linky's rules (haha Greg, you're rubbing off on me! I'm in charge just cause I say so!) so here are some of our favorite October things:

1. Oh the books! Absolutely love these for October read alouds:

2. A few October appropriate products from my store:

And one from Kaci's:

3. Some of our favorite October activites:

Source: theeducationcenter.com via Kaci on Pinterest

Source: herdingkats.blogspot.com via Jennifer on Pinterest

Source: teacherspayteachers.com via Jennifer on Pinterest

Source: littlebuggietutu.blogspot.com via Kaci on Pinterest

And here are the bloggers we are boo'ing in turn!

Staci from Going Nutty!
Janaye from Tales of Frogs and Cupcakes
Lisa from Teaching Kindergarten Kiddos
Nicole from Who's On First
Erica from The Eagle's Nest

Alright, I am hitting the hay early tonight - two late nights in a row and my firsties will be running the class while I am drolling in a corner somewhere (although heck, I have some little girls who would make fabulous mini-mes lol - give them some stilts and you'd hardly know the difference!)

Before I sign off, can I ask you a favor? I am writing a grant for activities/materials to promote listening skills. If you know of any sound effect books where kiddos need to listen for their parts to do a certain sound or say a word (like in "The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything") or cds or anything like that, please Rustle Up a Response below. I am wearing out Google trying to find all these things, but I bet you all know plenty! Thank you in advance!!

One more thing! Kaci is having a fabulous giveaway for a personalized Thirty-One bag and a bunch of other great prizes - including your choice of anything from my TPT store! Make sure you head over and enter!!

Candy Corn Graph Freebie!

Whew! What a Saturday! Sleeping in, playing with the kids, reading some of the new books I just got from Amazon:

Seriously cute but I wonder how much a kinder or firstie will get out of it - my third grader really liked it and understood it, but I think most of the jokes went over my youngest son's head. I will try it out in class and let you know! At the very least the kids will enjoy searching for Pigeon in this book - he's pretty well hidden!

But, my absolute favorites, and must-haves for your classroom are:

So cute - and I am going to make my classroom tree into a word tree - right after Halloween because right now it's covered in spiders and webbing!

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A while ago I shared a picture of some goodies I got while grocery shopping - new flavors of candy corn!

I have found 6 flavors so far: Original, Indian or Autumn, Caramel, Chocolate Caramel, Green Apple and Caramel Apple. Yum! I have to admit I have not tried all of them yet - going to taste test them in class with my students, but of the ones I have tried, the Caramel Apple is my favorite. Each bag comes with about 130+ pieces, so I can give each of my 26 kiddos about 4 of each kind. I plan on doing this on the 31st since it's a 1/2 day for us. Sugar those kiddos up so they can go home and drive the parents batty until it's trick or treating time! (By the way, it's only a 1/2 day for the kids - teachers get to stay and do in-service training again.)

So, in order to make this a legitimate learning experience, I'm tying math into the eating of all of this sugar. We will create a graph of our favorite flavors, and then do a little writing piece. Here's what my graph looks like:

(My daughter colored in some candy corn pieces so I could see how they all fit together on the board.)

If you'd like to make your own graph, here's a freebie for you! It contains all of the pieces to set up your graph on a poster board, plus a regular paper sized bar graph in both color and black and white in case you want the kiddos to color the graph in to save ink :) Also included is a more than, less than worksheet that you can fill out as a class and display next to the poster graph. I always post my graphs in the hallway so that classes walking down the hall to PE/Music or the cafeteria can stop to look!

Just click the picture below to grab it for free in my TPT store !

Analogies and Dice

Yesterday I shared with you some of my purchases from MPM School Supply. Well, my kiddos have looooved the dice and the number balance. In fact, today I sent the number balance with one of my groups for tutoring and both tutor and students were thrilled! The tutor reported it was one of their best sessions ever. Not only does it clearly show the relationship between numbers and that "equal" means the same amount on both sides of the equation, the number balance is so fun to use that the kids are highly motivated to experiment with numbers and addition. Love it!

I am also loving two other parts of our whole group Math time - I throw these in at the end of calendar time. First up is analogies. I know, I didn't necessarily think "math" when our reading coach offered me this book, but it is fabulous! She was going through some of her old books and came across one that she used to use several years ago as part of a different curriculum. She passed it on to me to see if I'd like to use it.

I decided to try it, just to fill in a few minutes one day and because I felt guilty for having a book and not using it lol. We complete a few every morning and about 10 of my kiddos are super at them - I barely finish writing it on the board and they are raising their hands to answer. Then I have 10 who can answer some of the easier ones, especially the ones involving shapes and colors. The other 5 are completely clueless at this point, but I'm hoping that with daily exposure they'll eventually catch on.

Analogical reasoning is a higher order thinking skill. I'm hoping it helps my firsties to learn to solve a problem using the solution to a similar known problem. Talk about applications! We are studying the commutative and associative properties of addition right now, plus learning to solve for unknows in all positions of an addition equation (x+3=5, 4+x=7, 5+3=x). If my firsties develop their analogical reasoning it should soon be second nature for them to know that if 6+4=10 then 4+6 must also equal 10. Of course, analogical reasoning also helps students make inferences about texts, make comparisons between texts or characters and make predictions based on prior knowledge.

So far we've started off with just a couple a day, and I have to admit that I have no idea whether adding in analogies will help with our reading comprehension or math skills, but it's very engaging for my students at this point. They are very eager to try to solve each analogy and very proud of themselves when they "get it".

The other new thing we've added to calendar time is dice play. I have many different dice now and we do different things with each kind. We don't do each one every day, I just pick and choose what I want to emphasize or have them practice.

Here are my newest dice:

Place value dice to 1000, word dice, and foam dice with 7-12! Can you just imagine all the math fun we're going to be having?

Since we do this whole group, I like to use my Elmo for this:

I roll the dice under the Elmo. Sometimes I have kiddos come up to roll too.

It's hard to see from this picture, but everyone has a bird's eye view of the dice on my Smartboard!

My kiddos each have their own marker and dry erase board and follow along as I choose a student to come to the board to write the answer. In this instance we were doing place value with my new place value dice, but sometimes we just roll two dice and make up addition sentences, roll two dice and make two numbers (ie 13 and 31) or roll dice to compare numbers (7<12). We also do graphing with the dice from my Roll & Graph packs.