The Kissing Hand

We're almost ready!  Holy guacamole!  Here it is - my very first post about the first day of school!  We start on Monday and have a full (half) day of school prepared and ready to go!  And I owe most of it to my blogger friends...get ready for LOTS of tags and links to other teachers' sites.  Here is our game plan in all its' glory...

**Before I get started...I found this CUTE scavenger hunt for parents and students to complete when they first come in.  If you do an Open House before you meet your students, this would be an awesome activity to provide while you talk to your families.  We have our Meet and Greet on the second day of school (that night).

Click on the picture to go to
Little Warriors
Download this for free!  Love!!

The first day will be centered completely around The Kissing Hand by Audrey Penn.

We will read the book together and put together a card for our parents.  This was also a blog freebie!

Made by Donna at Peace, Love, and Learning!

Click the picture to go get this cute freebie! 

Here's what mine looks like:

If you are doing The Kissing Hand activities, go check out Little Giraffes' website.  They have a page-long list of things to do to reinforce the book!  :o)

Click on the picture to go

to Little Giraffes' website

I loved this idea - I ordered enough puzzles for all of my students.  On the first day we will get them to put a handprint on each puzzle and stick a heart sticker in the middle (I didn't think to look for these cutie-patootie stickers with the name of the book on them!  Darn!!).  I downloaded the sweet little poem from the website and printed it off.  We will put the puzzle pieces in a paper bag and send them home with the poems on the front of the bags.  LOVE!  :o)


The second day of school we are going to have a Kissing Hand scavenger hunt to get to know the "special people" around school.  This teacher has put together another AMAZING website with great ideas for the first days of school.  There is a link there to download these cute clue cards.  She lets you download them in Word so that you can customize them for your own school.

See!  I told you they're cute!

While we are on the "hunt" for Chester, the students will wear raccoon headbands made from a raccoon picture and a sentence strip.  They are on the same website as the clue cards.

CUTE!  :o)

When we come back to the classroom at the end of the hunt, we will find heart shaped cookies with the final clue (Chester goes back into the book until we read it again another day).

I am SUPER excited to share this with our kinders!  Oh, and P.S. Barnes and Nobles is hosting an online reading of The Kissing Hand read by Audrey Penn herself!  Yes, her veryownself is reading it while the illustrations fill the screen!  LOVE, LOVE, LOVE!  :o)

...be at peace, and all will be well...

CUTE Clothespins!

Happy Saturday!
Handsome and I just finished our lazy movie morning and now it's breakfast-for-lunch followed by some family time this afternoon...  so before we start all of that, I wanted to take a minute to share with you my classroom clothespins!

I wanted to share this VERY quick project with you...

I bought these wooden cut outs at our Michaels store....

Materials needed:

one clothespin per cut out

one magnet per cut out

hot glue gun

Step One: Glue the clothespins onto the back of the cut outs...

Step Two: Glue a magnet on the back of each clothespin...

Step Three: Use these cuties to hang up your examples, handouts, word cards,

...the possibilities are endless!

**Another spin on this idea is to hot glue push pins onto the clothespins instead of magnets.  Then you can use them to hang up stuff on your bulletin boards!

Countdown...t-minus 9 days and counting till I meet my sweet new kinders!

...be at peace, and all will be well...

Awesome Blog!

Please go check out Growing Kinders.  She has posted printables for her Calendar Notebooks she uses with her students.  I started this a few years ago, but because we started Saxon Math and just didn't have the time in our schedule, I had to stop it right away.  Now that I am at my new school and have a little more flexibility in my schedule, I can start it again!  I cannot wait to do this!  PLUS her print outs are super cute! Much cuter than the ones I used before.  She will re-post each month with the new things...LOVE HER!  Thanks Kathleen!  :o)

Who Is My Teacher?

Hey y'all!  Happy Wednesday!  I wanted to share my teacher book that I made last year.  I have made 2 others in the past...I had to re-work them because my life has changed DRASTICALLY in the past 4 1/2 years of teaching!  Think about it...I have only known my handsome for 2 years and I've been teaching longer than that...

Here is my most recent version of "Who Is My Teacher?"  It is inspired directly from a book done by my teaching-idol Dr. Jean!  :o) I attended one of her Camp Kindergarten workshops (this is where my dreams of being a kinder teacher officially started!).  At this workshop she shared her book with us, and I went home the next day and created my very own!

I used Century Gothic font and kept the pages pretty simple.  No borders, no clip art...just words and photographs.  You'll see how I made an OOPS when you get down to the page about my graduation.  It has polka-dots all over it, but the polka dots were supposed to go on the NEXT page!  My handsome was kind enough to point that one out AFTER I had laminated everything...I had it laminated at Staples with their thickest laminate.  I punched holes in the left side and used binder clips to secure the pages together.

My students LOVE this book.  I also put it out for Open House so that the parents can read it too - most of them seemed to enjoy it.  :o)  Plus it is SUPER FUN and SUPER EASY to put together!

Front Cover

I'm going to need to add another page for my sissy!
Totally forgot to put her in my book!  I am a BAD big sissy...

He just got a new job at a new school teaching 4th grade
...need to update this page too! Oops!

I am blessed enough to work with my daddy!  :o)

This is my Hanky-Panky!  :o)

I swear y'all...this is the goofiest dog you will EVER meet!  :o)

See?  Polka dots?  Oops!
PS: those were the signs my family and friends made
when I graduated...they held them up, cheered,
and sounded their fog horns as I crossed the stage!  Love them!!

Would love to see your teacher book if you have one!  Let me know...give me a link or send an email!

Happy Cabinets

Remember that "Organized Chaos" post?  Guess what?  My cabinets are now officially happy!!  :o)  And so am I.  It took all day, but all of my cabinets are organized...whew!  The only way to explain/show is in pictures...

So THIS is my GIANORMOUS wall of cabinets...you know, the ones where I just stuffed all my stuff into throughout the year last year.  This was a two-day project...I cannot believe I am finished!

As you can see in the picture on the right I have waaaaaay too many books...I'm one of those teachers who can't say no to free stuff!  It's my public school teacher roots!  BUT I got all of my books re-organized and put all of the ones that I'm not going to use until after Christmas Break up in the tippy-top cabinets and used the rest of the space to organize our school supplies and paper and bulletin board stuff.

Before and After!

           

Below, the cabinets on the right is now transformed into our Math Center.  All of the manipulatives on are now completely accessible to students.  The next step will be to print out all of the CUTE labels that I have collected all summer from some sweet blogging teachers who gave them out as freebies!  The cabinets on the right hold ALL of my seasonal Big Books, pop-up posters, regular seasonal posters, seasonal bulletin board decorations, and at the very bottom is my stash of pocket charts.  THAT side took me about 2 hours to go through today!  :o)  On the right side is where our "Brain Games" Center is.  The items on the top shelf are the current puzzles/games that the students can play with.  The bottom two shelves are for storage. 

         

Here is where you can literally watch my OCD tendency...  :o)

The cabinet on the far left was going to hold instructional aids (from top to bottom): Math, Math, ELA, ELA, Science.  I was finished, took a picture, done.  THEN I looked at it again and realized that I had MORE ELA stuff.  So the middle picture shows the same cabinet turned into the ELA cabinet.  Writing stuff is on the top and reading strategies is what takes up most of this space.  I moved all Math and Science stuff to the cabinet in the picture on the right.  It also stores our calendar materials since this cabinet is very close to our calendar board.

Now it's time for this teacher to pick up her Twilight book and chill out!  :o)  Happy Monday, Happy Cabinets!

Yankees? Red Sox? Whatever...

Happy Sunday!
I am officially a kinder NERD!  Can I tell you that I just finished my back-to-school letter for my parents, updated my teacher contact information card, typed up my rules/behavior plan, and started an outline to give out to parents at our open house...  Whew!  Nerd Alert!  **Did I mention the fact that school doesn't start until August 22nd?  ;o)

Did I ever mention the fact that my handsome is a Red Sox fan?  Did you know they are playing the Yankees right at this particular moment?  Do you know how I know?  I'm sitting in our kitchen blog-surfing away, and every few minutes there are sighs of relief, clapping, then YELLING, then the sound of something hitting the wall across the room, then more sighs of relief, then more instant YELLING!

We took the most amazing, relaxing vacation to the Catskills in New York a few weeks ago.  We were gone for 11 days.  It was some kinda wonderful!  The beginning of our vacation consisted of a visit to Boston.  The Mother Land.  The Home of the Red Sox.  Lord have mercy....

Let me take a minute to explain that I was born and raised a Yankees fan.  Dad is from northern New Jersey.  He grew up going to Yankee Stadium.  Still takes every opportunity he can get.  I have been a handful of times.  Love it!  :o)

My handsome feels, and maybe with good measure, that since I do not keep up with baseball AT ALL (duh, I'm a GIRL!), that I do not hold the right to be a Yankees fan.  I do not have any grounds on which to talk smack to him when they play the Red Sox.  I admit, I really don't...but oh, it is so much fun!

I thought I would be written out of the will when I married handsome.  I have slowly started to take precautionary measures to be "neutral."

Here's one:

Here's another:

I mean, come on, what more do you want from me?  Yes, that's us.  Where you ask?  Fenway Park.  Did I have a great time?  Of course I did.  I mean what girl doesn't have a great time watching all those boys down there in those beautiful baseball uniforms?  LOVE!  By the way, they make the COOLEST hats in Boston: a "B" for Brenna!  They knew I was coming!  :o)

My dad helped me sneak a certain hat into my luggage for the trip...this was my attempted wardrobe for sightseeing in Boston the next day...

I tried to snap a picture of proof that I wore a Yankees hat while IN Boston...but the reason why I'm not looking into the mirror is because handsome busted down the hotel bathroom door as I tried to document my revenge!  :o)  Oops!

Now y'all know that I love my handsome.  I mean, I married the guy - THAT'S how much I love him.  But my loyalty will never change...so as those sighs of frustration filter in from the living room, I am grinning like a fool!  Let's Go Yankees!

PS: Heading back to my classroom tomorrow - wish me luck as I hopefully finish tackling that dag-on closet and work to organize more corners of my room!  Pictures to follow...

Organized Chaos Freebie!

Yikes!  We are t-minus 18 days from the first day of school!

I need to make a confession...I LOVE to be organized...like border line obsessive about organization...  BUT this past year, my first year in kindergarten...I have to admit I got a little, no make that a LOT disorganized.   There.  I said it.  Don't judge me.

My biggest complaint in years past was that I didn't have enough storage.  I had to invent ways to store things.  But THIS year I had a whole wall of cabinets and I ran with it!  I could hide so much crap behind those big wonderful doors.  Christmas was over?  Just toss it up in the top Christmas cabinet!  Extra water bottles left over from a party?  Throw it in the cabinet!  Done with a bulletin board?  Throw it...well...you get the idea.  I was storage-abusive let me tell you!

I was SICK OF THIS at the end of the year.  I asked our secretary to save the boxes that the copy paper comes in.  I took out all of my seasonal stuff and put it into those boxes.  Then I made some labels for them...and...VOILA!  Happy cabinets!  :o)

Fall Cabinet!

Winter Cabinet

Spring Cabinet!

And here are the labels...

Decoration Storage Labels

So my top cabinets are happy cabinets...but here's what's left to do one day next week...

Yikes!  Pray for me!  :o)

...be at peace, and all will be well...