Peek at My Week!

Hi all!

I start school tomorrow (I know many of you have started already!) and I am so excited and nervous at the same time! I still get those "back to school" flutters in my stomach every year! I'm sure I won't be able to sleep. Anyway...I decided to link up with DeeDee Wills over at Mrs Wills Kindergarten to show you a Peek at My {first}Week! I am not sure how to add links yet...as I make my plans in Apple Pages... but I will add links below if you're interested in finding some of the resources!

Write the Room September Edition- Myself!
Fallin' Into Fun Literacy Centers- Amy Lemons
10 Addition and Subtraction Math Stations- Amy Lemons
Reading Response Booklets- Amy Lemons
Rock On Fluency Station- Cara Carroll
Super in Second- Abby Mullins

Happy First Week! Good luck to you and your students! I'm off to do a massive amount of grocery shopping!!

Don't forget to click over to Mrs Wills Kindergarten and take a peek inside other classrooms this week via the link below!

Literacy Centers. Here's my plan! What is yours?

Hello! My, this summer is buzzing by so darn quick! I have been very busy creating resources this summer to help ease my transition from K into second grade this fall. One nice thing about my new class will be that I'll be lucky to have a very small class size (14) and also another teacher in the room! I feel very spoiled :) I was so excited to be able to plan for literacy centers this summer because I will be able to devote more time to individual reading groups and my students will also be slightly more independent due to their age. I toyed around with A LOT of ideas people. A LOT. I scribbled all over notebook after notebook coming up with possible plans. I did, eventually, decide that I wanted to be meeting with all three of my reading groups every day...well...four days a week. Here is my plan!

The bee hives move down each day Monday-Friday (like my deck photo?! enjoying the summer sun while it lasts!)

I like using a pocket chart to show the kids visuals for where they'll be going. This helps them to be more self sufficient.  I have 8 literacy centers set up (see above). We'll be doing centers 4 days per week. Each day, we will do 3 rotations. Students will visit two centers... And their third center is my reading group! My differentiated groups are bee themed. The three teams are shown on the hive cards. They go to the two centers beside their card... In that order. However, they also meet with me each day for small group reading. The honey bee team always meets first, the yellow jackets second, and the bumble bees third! I am really hoping this schedule works for us and I expect that I will be tweaking it over time. Do you have different ideas about how to run literacy centers? I'd love if you'd share some in the comments! I am always looking to improve! 

P.S. I absolutely adored Cara Carrol's series of Write On write the room centers for my Kinder class last year. You can now buy them as an {amazing} bundle! Click here if you are interested! 

I searched and searched for something to replace them for second grade and I couldn't find anything that was just right... So I made my own! 

Introducing the first installment of my Write The Room packs for Second Grade! Back to School Edition! You can head on over to my store to check them out! I am super excited to use them in my own literacy and math centers very soon! 

First Year In a Nutshell!

Well...this year flew by! It flew by without me even having a chance to post about what were were doing in Kindergarten this year! This being my first year in the classroom, I was VERY busy this year! Busy as a bee!

We had so much fun. It was amazing to see my little ones grow into readers and writers over the course of this year! Just incredible. Now that we are nearing the end of the year, I am crazy busy with DRA testing and Summer birthday parties and graduation rehearsals! However, I promised myself I would be better about on this blog! I think there are cobwebs forming...

To start...Here is a little recap of the beginning part of our school year...
We had tons of fun in the Fall, playing apple games in our math tubs! Here is a peek inside of our math tub bins! These math centers are available in my TpT store by clicking here!

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Apple-Math-Centers-1262176

I borrowed a lot of ADORABLE apple ideas from Cara Carrol's adorable blog: TheFirstGradeParade. This included her apple tasting "graphtivity." as well as her "Great Apple Investigations" packet, which you can find in her TpT store! How cute is this little apple man!? The kids used our current sight words (I, like) and sounded out the word to fill in the blank for their favorite apple food! 

We then filled in our choices on a life-sized apple pictograph! 

I'll be back soon (before more cobwebs begin to form) to give some more updates from this past year! 

Happy Teaching!

Meredith