Now that the wonderful world of Pinterest exists, I've been getting some great new ideas on activities and organization for the classroom. I thought I'd share a few of my latest!
<--A bench made out of storage crates from Walmart, flipped upside down and topped with body pillows. The kids love it and it's a great incentive for good listeners!
<---I decided to purchase "Hot Dots" with my classroom donation money for the kids to use at Word Work during our Daily 5 Routine. They love the talking pen, and I love that it corrects their wrong answers and praises their correct ones!
I saw this idea for organizing crayons by color. I bought the tiny black buckets from the Target $1 section (love target!) and tied the corresponding color of pipe cleaner to the top so that when crayons are found, they can be returned to the proper bucket. This cuts down on all that wasted time that my kids were spending searching for the right color crayon.
I found a recipe for puffy paint on Pinterest. I just used 1/2 shaving cream and 1/2 Elmer's glue, stirred it together, and gave the children a foam paint brush. You have to let them dry for a few hours, but afterward you can touch the puffy paint without messing up the artwork. These polar bears were so much fun!
The Little Old Lady is very popular in kindergarten so I decided to make a sight word game out of her! I found a printout of the old lady and wrote a poem to go with it, then I glued her to a box and cut out a hole so that she could "swallow" the sight words.
"There was an old lady who swallowed a word.
How absurd, to swallow a word! The word was ___."
Feel free to use the poem! I, of course, had to explain what the word "absurd" meant, but it was a great vocabulary learning moment!
I keep cut out the sight words, laminated them, and put ten in an old single-serving Blue Bell container.
I recently purchased a few $1 CDs for rest time/journal writing. During these quiet times of our day, I find that the children are more relaxed and focused if I play a calming CD for them. The Dollar Tree had a great selection of meditation-type CDs, though their favorite is my Best of Enya cd. I don't blame them, that's my favorite too!
Another Target Dollar Section Find: Being the daughter of a band director, I have always found it important to incorporate music into the curriculum. I found these precious instruments for $1 each and had to have them! I recently went back to Target and found star-shaped tambourines, maracas, and more "girly" drums to add to my collection. We've been using these instruments during our reading small groups to help us break apart words into syllables. We beat the drum/shake the tambourine/etc. as we say the syllables in different words. The kids get so excited when they see me grab the yellow bucket because they know they get to play an instrument!
