Indiana Goes Back To School Blog Hop

I'm really excited to participate in my first blog hop! I'm teaming up with other Indiana bloggers for this great back to school blog hop with a raffle to win a $75 gift card at the end!

Ever since WalMart and Target put out their back to school displays, I have been thinking about my incoming class of kinders.  Don't get me wrong, I LOVE summer vacation, but I also love teaching and planning!  I am looking forward to using my Cupcake Ten Frame Match in my classroom as a station during math.  It will help me assess my students' math abilities- counting and matching a number to a group of objects.

I can also use this activity for my first quarter assessment-- our report card tests the kids on counting to tell the number of objects to ten for the first quarter. Click on the image above for your FREE copy!


I love cupcakes!  My classroom currently has a cupcakes and chevron theme going on. I am really excited to get my chevron alphabet cards up on my walls! Visit my TPT store for D'Nealian and print alphabet cards!  Click on the images below!

Your next stop on this blog hop is with Jenny at Ignite Learning with Conscious Discipline.

Don't forget to enter to win the giftcard giveaway at the end of this blog hop!  Thanks for visiting!

Favorite Pins Friday Linky

I have to admit, I am addicted to Pinterest.  I love finding classroom inspiration, hair styles, recipes, ideas for the home, and much, much more!  It is fun to go back to my pins and see what I thought was important during the week. So, here they are:

This would be a great math center to have the kids work on 2D shapes!

How awesome is this?! I remember getting cards with glitter inside them and being so excited and thrilled. I would love to bite into a cupcake only to find sprinkles!

My class last year got so excited about wiggly and lost teeth.  This tooth subtraction is perfect to practice subtraction with numbers to 10.

Everything is Disney at my house. Isabella, my three year old, loves anything Disney Princess. We talk daily about going to Disney World. My husband and I can't wait to take our girls there, but we think it would be better to wait until Olivia is older. (She's only 10 months old as of tomorrow.) Cinderella is my favorite princess and I just love the castle back-lit with the fireworks. I had to pin this when I saw it!

I found this amazing math board inspiration through a math linky party. I think this would be a great way to teach number sense during the calendar time.  If only I had more space to add to my calendar area...

Link up with The First Grade Parade for this fun Favorite Pins Friday Party!

Skip Counting Gold

I missed yet another day of school!  My older daughter and I both had high fevers on Friday. I am ready to get healthy. Four more days until Spring Break... I'm hoping that the time away from school will allow us to get healthy! 

I wanted to post these pictures Friday, but I was sick at home.  It feels a little late to talk about St. Patrick's Day, but it WAS only yesterday.

The kids made these pots of gold last week. We have been working hard with skip counting, or counting by twos. They wrote numbers to ten counting by 2's on their gold coins. I got this fabulous idea from Mrs. Phillips' blog, Kinder Doodles.

We have been using frog manipulatives in math and frogs are a part of our daily number corner/calendar which is a part of our math series.  This frog and toad eye chart was perfect for practicing counting by 2's! The students had to create a frog or a toad. We worked together to make this chart. I was proud that the students recognized the growing pattern: the frogs increase by one each row and the eyes increase by two.  This week we will do more with frogs, toads, and patterns.
 

3D Shapes

 I can't believe that tomorrow will be Friday! (And I'm pretty excited about that!) Between being hit with the flu last week and having it move through my house, and the snow day and delay this week, I feel like I'm just trying to catch up!  This week has flown by and I feel that there are not enough hours in the day to get anything done, blogging included! 

My class has been working a lot with 3D shapes. Last month our calendar featured 3D shapes. Each day we decided if the object was a sphere, cylinder, cube, or cone. 

We talked A LOT (like every day) about the names of the shapes, the number of faces, edges, and vertices. The third quarter report card assesses knowing the name of the 3D shapes, while the fourth quarter report card assesses the number of faces and edges.  I used these see through 3D shapes each day when we talked about the geometric shapes.

The kids love this video on YouTube.

 

We sing it almost every day. And it really helped reinforce the 3D Shapes! I have begun testing for the third quarter report card and almost everyone correctly identified the 3D shapes! :)