#teachertalktuesday

I'm linking up with some of my favorite teacher bloggers for an Instagram party! I've been on Instagram a while with my personal account, but had never thought of starting a blogging one. The idea is genius- half the time I'm taking pictures with my phone at school, anyway! 

So..I opened up a new Instagram account for my blog! SO excited! My husband makes fun of me for following the trends (like the Color Run...or neon pants..or STRIPES (I loooooove stripes!) but I am excited to be on this bandwagon!

So come follow me! 

 RowdyinRoom300
click HERE to follow me online!

Because I'm new to the teacherblogger instagram... I only have a few pictures for you- but here's the one I posted this morning (I'm sorry Michelle, Rachelle, and Natalie! I've never done the hashtag thing on Instagram! I didn't mean to crash the party early and I can't figure out how to edit it!! I promise I will be back on Tuesday)

 This is the newest product I'm working on- Ella was my guinea pig! She seems to love it!

#kindergartenerintraining

So... follow me on Instagram and hop over to Apples and ABC's or What the Teacher Wants to see all the other fabulous teacher bloggers on Instagram, too!

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24 days?!

Morning y'all!

We have 24 more days left in this school year- I can hardly believe it! January and February always go by so slooooow. It's cold and then there's testing and the kids are getting in that "I'm-beginning-to-get-tired-of-spending-all-day-with-these-kids" mode and they start picking on each other when they've been absolute DARLINGS all year ;)

So, we've begun working on our end of the year keepsake book. I LOVE making these, but you have to start them plenty ahead of time to ensure that your kids do quality work on them and don't rush through the pages. Every day during stations, writing is one of the rotations. Rather than do journal writing like normal, we are working on a page at a time.

Click HERE to check out this pack on TpT! :)

There are pages for Pre-K through 2nd grade and generic "school" pages, too.

If you made it all the way down here, leave me your email address and let me know something special you do with/ for your kids at the end of the year and I'll random-number select 3 people this evening to get the pack for free! :)

The lucky winners are:

Congrats Jennifer, Suzy, and Cecilia- check your inboxes! 

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Ready for first grade!

Hi y'all!

I'm just popping in really quick to share with you my "I'm Ready for First grade" journal. If you read my last post about expository writing, the journals were in the pictures. I had several of you ask for the paper, so here it is!

Several of my students have been using this writing paper since Christmas, and a few are not quite ready for it yet.. but I try to set high expectations! We make a journal for our last six weeks that says "I'm ready for First Grade" on the cover and the pages pictured are included. Even my kiddos who are a little hesitant about it are excited to have so much space to write on!

 Click HERE to snag a copy! As always, I would love to hear if you grab them!

 

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Beetles Expository Writing

We are really focusing on expository writing in my class this last week. It lines up perfectly with our Treasures story- all about beetles! We started the week doing an interactive tree map. I LOVE interactive writing. Do you do interactive writing regularly in your classrooms??

{we fold up the bottom of the paper and write on the back so it stays in the correct column if they run out of room. If you'd like the tree map click the picture to snag it up!}

After the tree maps, we did some journal writing Tuesday about their favorite beetle {fireflies were a favorite in our class!} then Wednesday we made our rough drafts of the expository writing. {Remember writing is a Process with a capital "P" in Kinder!}

This is me conferencing with the students who needed a little more support on using the tree map to create sentences. Sorry for the blurry picture- but I keep leaving my camera on the dining room table!

Waah-la! An *almost* finished product! Hopefully I will have pictures for you tomorrow of the finished product- if you want to see my post from last year about these- click HERE. 

 

We make these little cutie patooties and bring in some Math, too! :) 

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Five For Friday!

TGIF!

I'm linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching for her Five for Friday linky! I always forget until about 2:00 every Friday, but this one I was prepared to snap pictures throughout my day!

 

 First up.. and the one we worked ALL week on- is Mr. McGregor's garden! Now.. we made those little rabbits right before Easter and wrote about what we would've done had we been Peter Rabbit, but we were about to begin a unit on plants so we saved the "garden" to fit right in with our plant unit! This idea is from Julie Lee's Kindergarten. She has a lot more pictures - we basically snagged most of her fabulous ideas for this garden! {The pieces of paper on the vegetables day "My (carrot) is a (root) etc.}

 We have been working REALLY hard on BME stories.. and we're finally at the point of publishing! The excitement is at an all time high and kids are clawing their way through to be able to share their stories in author's chair! This is my favorite part of Kindergarten- things are finally coming together!!

{Beginning page: I flew to the mountains, When I got there I was excited!}

I pull this game out during the Spring season 1) Because it uses little bunny hoppers and 2) My kids are getting tired of the same 'ol same 'ol. We hop the little bunny twice on the number line to figure out which numbers to add. It can be differentiated in so many ways! Read my post about it HERE from last year.

Yes! We sold our house {again!} We won't be closing this time until summer, so I'm excited that I will have time and not be stressed about moving during school.

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Decomposing fun!

Hey y'all!

We've been working REALLY hard on decomposing and creating number sentences lately. I made these decomposing boards and it has been a great visual for my kiddos! I wish I had someone to take a video of me teaching this.. and my kids "teach, ok-ing" it to each other. (Absolutley one of my favorite whole brain teaching tactics!)

I make up a problem (and for some reason my kids are REALLY into Hot Wheels this year..so somehow the problem always ends up with them in it ;) like "Luke has 15 Hot Wheels. Some are red, and some are orange. How could you break apart the whole?" (which we have discussed in full!) Here are some examples:

If you'd like this board, click HERE to snag it up! I'd love to hear what you think. Any fun ideas you have to share for teaching decomposing? I also have this post from last year with these fun books:

 

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Community workers

My goodness it's been a busy week! I know I told you guys that our house had sold... all was well, the inspection went off without a hitch, the 10 days period passed, and we were just waiting until closing. Then we got bad news...the people that were buying our buyers' house (that they had also sold without a hitch) fell through..so our sale fell through, too. Boooo hisss!

So, our house has been back on the market the last week or so and we've had people coming through like crazy. (great, right?!) Except it's really put a damper on our lifestyle! lol! We had to be out of the house all day yesterday for showings (thank goodness we have family in town where we can camp out) So I apologize if my blog gets a little lonely.. it's just because we're crazy busy!

On another note.. STAAR was this week and my little darlings were.. well, a little less than darling. We share a wall with a testing room so we have to be utterly. silent. It's awful! My principal only came around once and asked us to tone it down (I mean...my blog name is "Rowdy" for a reason!) It's so hard because I'm not one of those teachers that requires absolute silence. They get to talk and help each other during stations every day! My babies don't know how to act when I tell them we can't talk! I get stares like "is she serious?!" 

We kept busy, though! We're wrapping up our studies of the regions of Texas and community workers. We made a map of our neighborhood community and placed all of the stores/ places that are right around our school on the map. I love doing this every year. We all put our houses on the map (by relative location.."I live behind the school.. near the park, etc").

THEN, the really fun thing- we get to make little community worker stick puppets and place them on the map (using a little ball of play-doh). We all chose a place in our community and discussed the jobs that people do there.. teachers, janitors, store clerks, bankers, coaches, maids, etc. I love this because it's so relatable to each student... they all have been to these places ad know someone that works in our community (moms, dads, aunts, uncles, ME ;)

There were a few "Mrs. Aldersons" on the map by the school. ha! stinkers!

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Rock the STAAR

So, you ladies (and gents) that don't do standardized testing {obviously us K, 1, and 2 teachers} - Do any of you do something special for your coworkers that are giving the tests??

Last year we started "Secret Angels"- it's kind of like Secret Santa, but on a lesser scale, and more words of encouragement/ pick me up snack/ etc that we do for the 3-5 teacher that we're paired with.

The theme for our school this year is "Rock the STAAR". How fun is that?!

 I saw Gladys' post over New Year's about these {FREE} ADORABLE guitars and I knew that we would have to make them to decorate the halls!

They turned out great! We wrote words of encouragement on the middle lines "Do your very best!" "You can do it!" "Rock and Roll on the STAAR" or whatever they felt was best. {of course.. I didn't get any good pictures of their writing. It was adorable!}

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