July 8, 2009
· Filed under Idea, Website Updates · Tagged Pre-K, preschool, literacy, kindergarten, letters, letter sounds, alphabet, phonics
I have made some new Letter Sounds A-Z Printables (in both Color & Blackline). These could be used in a variety of activities.I have added these to the Literacy Printables page on my website. Click the pictures below to download the PDF files (these are large, so it may take a while).
A few ideas:
- Print them on magnetic paper & cut them out for use on a magnetic board or cookie sheet.
- Print them & glue them onto die cut shapes or “Accents” from the teacher store.
- Use them to glue in ABC books.
Add your ideas & suggestions in the comments section below.
June 26, 2009
· Filed under Idea, Website Updates · Tagged fine motor, kindergarten, Pre-K, preschool, sensory table, teaching ideas
Some ideas for your sensory table:
Pom Poms, Bottles, & Tongs:
Children use the tongs to pick up the colored pom poms and drop them into a bottle. This activity is good fine motor practice and hand-eye coordination. The bottles in the picture are Tazo drink bottles, which I chose because the opening was not too small and not too wide. I later replaced them with clear plastic bear-shaped honey bottles since our sensory table is on a hard floor and the Tazo bottles would break if they fell.
Trucks & Blocks with Sand:
Children can build a small village with the blocks and roll the trucks in the sand to make roads around their village.
Follow this link to see more Sensory Table ideas!
June 11, 2009
· Filed under Website Updates · Tagged early childhood, kindergarten, literacy, nursery rhymes, posters, Pre-K, preschool
Website Update:
I have added 9 more posters to the Nursery Rhymes page:
Star Light, Star Bright
Rain, Rain, Go Away
Little Miss Muffet
Little Bo Peep
Here is the Beehive
Every Mouse & Bumblebee
Fall the Leaves
I Had a Little Nut Tree
I Hop on My Horse
June 4, 2009
· Filed under Website Updates · Tagged early childhood, kindergarten, literacy, nursery rhyme, nursery rhymes, posters, Pre-K, prek, preschool, printables
Website Update:
I have added some new printable Nursery Rhyme Posters to my website. These are blackline, but I intend to make color versions at some point. I will also be adding more of these posters within a few days. Enjoy!
May 20, 2009
· Filed under Idea · Tagged end of year, gift, gift for kids, Pre-K, preschool
end of year gift
Since tomorrow is our last day of school (!), I’m busy putting together End-of-Year Gifts for the kids.
I found these cute craft kits at Michaels. The kits have wooden beads with cord to make a necklace. They had all kinds of kits for boys and girls & they were $0.99 each. Then I bought Miracle Bubbles at Walmart: 8 for $4.00, and the jungle cups at Dollar Tree. Anyway, just an idea I thought I’d pass along.
Since our last day of school only lasts 2 hours, we are making mini pizzas with English muffins, pizza sauce, & mozarella cheese. We’ll have brownies for dessert. Then, we’ll have popcorn & a movie.
I will be officially on Summer Break next week, & I am planning to add some new things to the website this summer, so stay tuned!
April 26, 2009
· Filed under Idea · Tagged kindergarten, notebook, organization, organize, Pre-K, teachers, thematic units, themes, web 2.0, zoho
I came across a really neat web 2.0 tool recently called Zoho Notebook. This is something I think would be helpful in organizing lesson plans and activities, particularly thematic units. It can be used to collect and save web clips. For instance, if you find several websites with a bug theme, and you only want to save the ideas from those sites that you like best, you can highlight and copy photos and text from the site and add them to your Notebook. You can also type in your own ideas, so that your Notebook would be a combination of all of the best ideas you’ve collected: your own as well as ideas from the web.
This is how it works: You click “New Book” to create a Notebook, and then begin adding pages to your book by clicking “Add Blank Page”. Within the pages, you can add text, images, audio, video, urls. You can also draw on the pages using the free hand tool, line tool, or shape tools. When you add urls, it actually adds the entire webpage to your Notebook, rather than just a link. Notebooks can be kept private, shared with people you choose, or published publicly.
I have created a sample that I’ve published so you can see the possibilities of what you can do with it. There’s probably more than what I’ve discovered. This is not one of my real Notebooks, it’s just a sample (I would not publish a real Notebook because of copyright issues for the web clips I save from various sites). These Notebooks can be organized in any way, but I organized mine with these pages: Rhymes, Small Group, Centers, Printables, Photos, Videos, Links. Access my Sample Bug Theme Notebook.
Another positive side to this is that your theme unit Notebooks would be online, and you could access them at home, school, or anywhere. Zoho has other useful apps you might want to check out. If you don’t have PowerPoint on your computer, you can create slideshow presentations using Zoho Show.
Please note this is not an advertisement for Zoho. Just something I found, thought was useful, and wanted to pass along.
April 26, 2009
· Filed under Website Updates
I was surprised to find that I’ve been listed twice in the Bucket Contest. Details about the contest can be found here. I’ve recently begun adding more & more teacher blogs to my reader as I come across them. These are a few that “fill my bucket”:
Pre-K Pages: Vanessa is a public school pre-k teacher in Texas who has found ways to teach reading & writing to her students in fun ways. I enjoy following her blog to find new updates to her website as well as well-written posts about teaching. Over the years, Vanessa & I have chatted through email & shared ideas. She is very helpful & very generous.
Teaching 2 and 3 Year Olds: I’ve had the priviledge of getting to know Sheryl through email over the years, have gotten a glimpse into her classroom through photos, and have had many great discussions with her about teaching books & teaching methods. Sheryl is very passionate about her work with children & it shows! She has studied Montessori, Reggio Emilia, & Emergent Curriculum, & incorporates many aspects from those methods into her classroom.
Bakers & Astronauts: This is a blog I’ve just recently come across, & I’m really enjoying what I’ve seen so far. It is well-written & an enjoyable read. I love nature study in pre-k, so I’ve enjoyed reading about their explorations in nature, including details of their “Forest Project”. I like her “Project Approach” style.
Preschool Daze: This teacher is very innovative & creative. I wouldn’t mind being a kid in her class. She is a teacher who is not bothered by messes. Her classroom activities are totally unique & original. What I love about this blog is that it is enjoyable to read– to see what her class has been up to, and I can come away with many ideas & inspirations to use in my own classroom.
The Theme Garden: I also wanted to give a nod to The Theme Garden, although this one is very new & I only found out about it today. It looks very promising & I hope to see it blossom into a great resource. It is a collection of themes ideas from websites & blogs.
Post Secret: While this isn’t a teacher blog, it is one I really look forward to each week. Post Secret is a project begun by Frank Warren. People anonymously write their secrets on a postcard, mail them to him, and he posts them on his blog. It’s interesting to take a sneak peak into the lives of real people & the things they wouldn’t tell the world under other circumstances. (Be warned: obviously Frank Warren does not censor any of the post cards, so anything goes.)
I could keep going… there are other great blogs out there, but I will stop here.
April 5, 2009
· Filed under Idea · Tagged art, children's literature, kindergarten, knuffle bunny, literacy, literature-based, mo willems, Pre-K, preschool
In a previous post, I wrote about the Pigeon books my class made in the style of Mo Willems.
While studying Mo Willems, we also did a neat art activity to correlate with the artwork in his Trixie series:
Mo Willems illustrates the Knuffle Bunny series using a combination of black & white photography (for backgrounds) with illustrations of the people and other objects.
For this art project, I took a photograph of the front of our school, then printed it on cardstock in grayscale. The children drew pictures of themselves and a friend on another piece of paper (we used white construction paper), cut around the people, and glued them onto the black & white photograph. At the time I took the photograph, the flag had been taken down from the flagpole for the day. One of the children noticed this and came up with the idea to draw and glue on a flag for the flag pole. The result was striking and made a great display in our hallway.
This one actually goes very well with Knuffle Bunny Too, because in that book, Trixie goes to Pre-K, and the illustrations show drawings of Trixie with black & white photos of her school.
April 2, 2009
· Filed under Website Updates
I have just completed the process of transferring my website to another webhosting service. I hope I was successful in getting each and every webpage, pdf, powerpoint, and image transferred to the new host, but there’s always the possibility that I missed something. If you come across anything that is missing, please let me know. I appreciate your help!
Thanks,
Karen
Contact Me
March 27, 2009
· Filed under Website Updates · Tagged early childhood, search engine, teachers
There have been many times I’ve done a Google search for a topic, and have wished there was some way I could force Google search to only give me ideas from websites made by early childhood teachers. Not products for sale, or research papers, or any other thing I don’t want to wade through to get to the good stuff.
Now, thanks to Google Custom Search, I have created just the search engine I’ve always wanted. I’m calling it the Early Childhood Teachers Search Engine, because it only searches popular websites that were created by Pre-K & Kindergarten teachers.
Let’s say you want to find Farm Theme ideas… type “farm theme” into the search engine & you will find farm theme ideas only on teacher created websites. Or, you want to search for sensory table ideas, but you only want practical ideas for the classroom, rather than digging through all of the results you get on Google. Type it into the Early Childhood Teachers Search Engine & you’ll find just what you’re looking for.
This search engine is powered by Google, but will only search the following websites:
(Other sites may be added in future.)
www.prekinders.com
www.pre-kpages.com
www.thevirtualvine.com
www.littlegiraffes.com
www.hubbardscupboard.org
www.carlscorner.us.com
www.jmeacham.com
www.kellyskindergarten.com
www.kinderfriends.com
www.teaching2and3yearolds.blogspot.com
Hope you find this useful (I know I will)!
Early Childhood Teachers Search Engine
Subscribe by Email