Monster Name Tags--Freebie!

I'm not sure if I have ever mentioned this or not, but we use High Scope Curriculum in our pre-school classrooms. Last year was our first year with the curriculum, and while we found their assessment piece to be incredibly overwhelming (so we replaced it with Teaching Strategies GOLD this year--LOVE), every other component about the curriculum is awesome.

One of my favorites are Letter Links. Each child has their own letter link and you can find me printing out a gazillion copies of them & putting them on everything in the beginning of the school year! :)

They are made up of the child's name & a picture of something that starts with the same sound. The kids learn to recognize their own name and letter link, as well as all of their classmates within the first few weeks!

Here is an example from their website of what a "sign-in" sheet would look like. The students sign their name in everyday on the sign in sheets.

Among the many other printable options for your letter links, are Avery Labels. You purchase the appropriate size and BAM, you have labels when you click print. I use these labels to make the students new name tags. EVERY.SINGLE.WEEK. I make it sound daunting, but really it's not! :)

Here are our dinosaur name tags for this week.

The students will go over and find their name tag on the carpet and that is where they sit for greeting time.

Next week we will have MONSTER name tags! I typically purchase different accents or notepads at the teaching store for name tags, but seeing as though the closest store is 40 minutes away from me, (yes you read that correctly), I figured I would make some of my own for monsters! Which also means, you get them as a freebie too! :)

Don't forget, I print on fast draft, so the color looks lighter than it is!

You can download them for free from either TpT or TN! All of the adorable monsters used to create these name tags are from Digi Web Studio and KPM Doodles! Check her out on etsy!

Coming soon to go along with the name tags....AHH!! MONSTERS! Unit! Stay Tuned! :)

Cyber Monday Sale!

TpT is having a 10% off sale on Monday, November 28th, 2011 with the code CMS28! In addition, I'd like to offer another 10% off my items! That's 20% that you can save!

Prefer to purchase through Teacher's Notebook? You can find 20% off in my store there too! Now would be a great time to purchase my newest unit: Dinosaur Roar!

Teachers Pay Teacher Store

Teachers Notebook Store

Be sure to stop by my stores on Monday!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Just wanted to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving! I hope everyone has a fabulous day and safe travels if you're traveling!

Dinosaur Roar Prepared Photos

I think it helps to see a unit in action, or prepped and ready to go. I printed, cut, laminated, and cut again, my dinosaur unit. ALWAYS lots of cutting! I wanted to share the photos of everything prepped with you so you get a better feel for the unit. I did this with my pumpkin pack activities, and I think it helped to boost sales! For descriptions of each activity, see the original post here. :)

Number Practice Cards:

Dinosaur Action Cards:

Leaf Counting:

Positional Term Activity:

Dinosaur Fine Motor Game:

Does this help you get a better idea of the unit and it's content? Let me know, I might continue to do this with the units that I post! If you have any questions about it, let me know! Please note that the colors could be brighter on the print outs, but I use the "fast draft" setting on my printer to save on ink, so items come out a little lighter!

Click here to purchase from TpT. Click here to purchase from TN.

December Calendar Cards- Freebie!

I know it's not quite Thanksgiving yet, but if you're a normal teacher, you are already preparing, or are already prepared for when you return from your break and preparing for a new month!

To help you prepare, here are some free December Calendar Cards with an AB picture pattern. Ever since Kacey at Doodle Bugs Teaching made her adorable October calendar cards that I used for a number sequencing activity, I thought, what a great idea! Now, of course I'm not trying to steal Kacey's idea by any means, I LOVE her cards, but my students are only working at AB patterns right now, and Kacey's cards include about 4 different pictures.

Since I don't have any calendar cards for November or December already, I went ahead and made my own AB pattern cards. You can find my November ones here or here for free. And now my Decembers ones too... at TpT or TN.

Be sure to visit Kacey's blog at Doodle Bugs Teaching for her great cards as well! She also has excellent units to share! :)

Mr. & Mrs. Turkey Head

Didn't that title catch your eye, because it caught mine! I can't take credit for this idea, in fact, it's from a blog called Kiki Creates and I found the idea on Pinterest. I think my mom has e-mailed me ideas from this blog before, but I've never stopped to check out her entire blog. I'm now following her blog and love this turkey idea!

Photo taken from Kiki Creates, not my work! 

I wanted to share it with you in case you were looking for a last minute turkey idea for those TWO, yes, TWO days of school you have next week. What's the point really? I will see each one of my classes only once next week. POINT.LESS. But, any who, head on over to Kiki Creates to download this super fun idea!

P.S. I hope she's okay with me sharing this idea on my blog! :)

Dinosaur Roar!

After we return from thanksgiving break my students and I will be having lots of fun with DINOSAURS! Yes, I know how odd to do dinosaurs after thanksgiving, but we are. And then we will be doing MONSTERS! I'm so excited for monsters...but that's another blog post! :)



I have created a Dinosaur Roar pack filled with 24 pages of different dinosaur fun activities to do in your classroom. You can purchase the pack in my TpT store!

**I updated this pack in 2013**

Here are all of the items included in the Dinosaur Roar unit:

Positional Term Activity: Print out one large volcano and multiple dinosaurs. Give each student a dinosaur. Call on students one at a time to place their dinosaur somewhere on or around the volcano. For example, “put your dinosaur on the volcano” or “put your dinosaur next to the volcano” (pg. 3- 4)

Positional Term Worksheet: Students cut out the dinosaurs at the bottom. Look at each numbered volcano and glue that dinosaur in the appropriate spot. The text is provided as a clue to where the dinosaur belongs. (pg. 5)

Leaf Counting: Students look at the palm tree on the page to see how many leaves the dinosaur ate. Students count out that number of leaf cards. Place one leaf card in each box. Boxes help with applying one to one correspondence. (pg. 6- 11)

Number Practice: Students count the dinosaurs on the card and identify the number written in dots. Using an expo marker, if you have laminated your cards first, student practice writing the numbers on the card. (pg. 12- 17)

Number Word Practice Worksheet: Students look at the number and the number word. Connect the dots to practice writing the number and number word. (pg. 18)

Dinosaur Action Cards: Students take turns picking different cards and doing the actions on each one. (pg. 19- 20)

Dinosaur Fine Motor Game:  Photocopy the dinosaur onto different colored construction paper. Use colored paper clips and have student match the paper clips onto the correct colored dinosaur to practice their fine motor. (pg. 21)

Dino Ditty: A fun dinosaur chant to do with your students. (pg. 22)

If You’re a Dinosaur: Another fun dinosaur song. (pg. 23)

Additional activities and crafts. (pg. 24)

You can also grab this dinosaur alphabet matching activity for just $1.25. I recently updated the format of this item in March 2015. Click {here} to download.

This activity includes capital letters on a dinosaur and lowercase letters on dinosaur eggs for students to match up.

As I mentioned, we will be doing Monster's next! I do plan on creating a monsters unit, so be on the lookout for more great activities! In the meantime, let me know what you think about my Dinosaur Roar unit! :)

Rock Star Certificates!

I'm back! Sorry for the mini blogging hiatus and leaving Hadar and Kristin in the dark about the name of a font for a few days! :) I took advantage of our three day weekend, threw in a personal day, and headed to Florida to visit my boyfriend who is in law school. Shockingly, the weekend didn't fly by and it was such a nice and much needed break!

Now, just make it through the rest of this week, and 2 days next week and it will be Thanksgiving break! Hallelujah! I am SO ready for another break and I love this time of the year! Can't wait to plan gingerbread and Christmas activities for the kiddos.. despite the immense amount of paper work that falls around this time of the year with IEP benchmark updates and our classroom assessment data collection!

Upon returning from my trip (at 12:30am thanks to a delayed flight!) I had a request on TpT for some rock star certificates to match my rock star themed word wall cards! I jumped right on the opportunity and made two different reward certificates. The clip art used to make these is from Digi Web Studio!

If you would like to use these in your classroom you can purchase them for a buck on TpT! Just click the link and you're there!

Do you use these often in your classroom? Looking for a different theme? I'd be happy to whip some more up! :)

Capital Letter Practice--Freebie!

I was so bummed that I couldn't share my Pets unit with everyone :(, but I wanted to give out a Pets themed freebie for everyone! I took the capital letter practice activity from my Pets unit, and made this freebie!

Students connect the dots to practice writing the letters, and then they must draw a line to find the matching letter!

Click below to download the freebie! Leave a comment if you use this freebie with your kiddos! :)

Capital Letter Practice

FOG!!

One hour fog delay!! Whoop, whoop!! It's the first delay of the year! Yes. We get fog delays! :)

Pumpkin Kiss Cookies

I made these a few weeks ago. Actually the recipe that made me seek out some Pumpkin Hershey kisses in the first place! These cookies were really yummy. Not so much a cookie texture, but still YUMMY! The batter was light and fluffy too, which I found interesting.

There are only 4 ingredients for these cookies. (That's always a plus too!)

That's one box of spice cake mix.

One can of pure pumpkin.

One bag of pumpkin Hershey kisses.

And one box of Sugar in the Raw. (no you will not need that much & if you have "sanding sugar" use that instead?)

The original website I found this recipe on is: Picky Palate. She had sanding sugar listed, but since I couldn't find any (I probably could have if I had looked harder) I decided to use sugar in the raw. 

You start by mixing your box of cake mix and canned pumpkin. It will probably look like this:

Next, spoon your dough out onto a greased cookie sheet. This is where the sanding sugar/sugar in the raw comes in. Picky Palate suggest rolling your ball of dough in the sugar, but the dough was too sticky for me to do that. I simply sprinkled it on top of my dough on the cookie sheet.

Bake your cookies for 11-13 minutes at 350 degrees Fahrenheit. They look so yummy as soon as they come out of the oven--and smell great too! At about day 2, my sugar had melted on top of my cookies making them a little sticky. (Maybe that's why she suggests the sanding sugar! They didn't taste any different!)

When you take them out, push the kisses into the tops of your cookies. Transfer your cookies to a cooling rack. I set my cooling racks on another cookie sheet, that way I could put my cookies in the fridge after I put the kisses on so they wouldn't melt!

Please ignore my chipped finger nail polish, although you probably hadn't noticed until I said that.

Let me know if you give these cookies a try! I'd love to know what you think of them!

Ladybug Substitute Binder

This summer I posted a free substitute binder pack on TpT. I recently had a request to make a ladybug themed substitute binder! I was more than happy to do so. I had to purchase some lady bug clip art first, so the adorable images used to make this are from Just so Scrappy Too.

Head on over to my TpT store OR Teacher's Notebook store to purchase this substitute binder pack for yourself! If you would like one in another theme, please let me know!

**A set up tip: I printed mine out, taped them onto tab dividers and then laminated them, cut them out, and re-punched holes. Adds great durability, and the tabs on the side make it super easy for your sub to flip through. (Just don't forget to label your tabs!)

Currently I am...November Link Up

If you haven't joined this party yet, go ahead and head on over to Oh Boy Fourth Grade and check out Farley's party! You'll be hooked and quickly find yourself participating every month...it REALLY lets you blog stalk :)

Here is my link-up for November:

Now on to the links for the blogs I'm stalking. Ever feel like your blogroll is getting waaaay too long? Is there any unofficial guidelines in blog land that say your blog roll shouldn't be longer than your blog? Oh well.

rockstar diaries: this is is a non-teaching blog. Not sure if I've shared this one before, but I'm always stalking this ADORABLE little family living in D.C. with their beautiful baby girl and bulldog Kingsley. You MUST check out their adventures!

lawteedah: I found this blog on pinterest actually. Someone had pinned one of her activity packs! She homeschools her children for pre-school and has some great printable resources to share! Check her out!

how about them apples: I forget how I found Randee, but her blog is adorable. I LOVE her blog design! She is a kindergarten teacher with some great ideas! She's still sitting at 172 followers, and I know we can help her reach 200!! Go check her out, you won't regret it!

Now I'm off to link-up and read stalk everyone else! Leave a comment if you link-up too so I can be sure to read stalk yours too!

Winner of the Pets Unit!

And the winner of a free pets unit is...

Congrats! I will be emailing you a copy of the unit soon! If you haven't already, check out her blog at Miss Julia's Class! She is new to the blogging world and just recently won a blog makeover! Can't wait to see the new look!