Boots

This was kind of random, but I am working at a preschool that is in an Elementary school right now, and when I was walking down the hall today I saw this outside of one of the rooms and thought it was amazing. We have a lot of days when kids need to bring boots to school for either rain or snow. Most teachers have their students put their boots in the hall along the walls, and it can sometimes get really messy, with boots everywhere and all mixed up. This teacher has small numbered stickers along the bottom of the wall, where student can put their boots in their own spot. Great way to keep the halls looking neat and organized!

Chester the Raccoon

Since it was the first week and a half of school, we read The Kissing Hand by Audrey Penn in class. The students talked about Chester Raccoons fears and how he felt better when he had his mother's kiss in his hand. We then had the students use simple shapes to create their own Chester the Raccoon in the art center. They used crayons, glue sticks, and construction paper.



After they were finished I displayed them in the hall with a Chester's kissing hand in the center.

This is a bulletin board display that we put together to showcase the language and reading skills we had been working on. It contains the repetitive poem that we choral read at circle time. We added pictures to the sentence strips to help the student's make a connection between the words and the meaning. We also spent a few days focusing on the words that rhymed in the poem.


After we had practiced the poem for a few weeks we had the children draw an illustration of one of the lines of the poem. They got to choose their favorite line, and used crayons and markers to create the illustration.

My Bookshelf

Well, I recently moved back to my hometown. I have been working on unpacking and all of the fun things that go along with that. Today I finally got to finish my bookshelf. Our new apartment has these really great built in shelves in the guest bedroom, and they worked nicely for both my personal books and my children's books.


The bottom two shelves are a mix of picture books, children's series such as Harry Potter and A Series of Unfortunate Events, poetry books, and the cardboard magazine holders from IKEA that I bought last year. I have wanted to organize my childrens books for a long time. My cooperating teacher during student teaching used magazine holders like these to organize her books by genre, topic, and author, and I wanted to do the same. Anything non-fiction, or curriculum based is on another bookshelf that I am almost finished with.

These three are collections of books by certain authors. It's a little fuzzy because I took these with my phone, but they are Kevin Henkes, David Shannon, Leo Lionni, Tomie de Paolo, Ezra Jack Keats, Pat Hutchins, Patricia Pollaco, Audrey Penn, Eric Carle, Margeret Wise Brown (my favorite) Jan Brett and Mo Williams. Basically any authors that I have been trying to collect and who I really admire and enjoy.


The rest are sorted by topic. Counting books, alphabet books, color books, days and months books, Underground Railroad books from a unit I created in college, Job and Emergency books, senses, emotions and health books, seasons and holiday books, and finally sign language books.


Whats nice about organizing the books like this is that when I need books about a certain topic, or by a specific author, I won't have to sort through the whole pile of books. I also want to work on a card catalog for the rest of the books so that eventually I can have an easy way of seeing what books I have about certain topics.

Family Trees

During the first week of school we spent time learning about our students. One of the activities that we did was creating a family tree. The students named the people in their families, drew pictures of each person, and then put the tree together.

Elephant Ears

For the letter E week we learned about elephants.

The kids practiced mixing colors to make gray and pink paint. They painted elephant ears and named their elephants. Once they dried we took pictures of our little elephants with their ears and a paper trunk.









At circle we learned facts about elephants that were on shapes. When the shapes were put together they formed an elephant.

Playing with the Baby Chicks

This spring our school had chicken eggs. I don't have any pictures of the process, but we got to watch them go from eggs to chicks. It was really cool for both the kids and the teachers. After the chicks hatched they were in an incubator in the hallway for a few weeks where we could watch them. Once they were big enough we set up a pen in the yard. The kids got to sit in the pen and watch and play with the chicks. It was a really great experience for them.



They loved getting to pet the chicks! My co-teacher in the 3's class, Ms. B, was making sure that chicks knew she meant business. :-)

We took the pictures of the kids with the chicks and hung them along the door frame to make sure the parents saw them. I added a sign with the date. The chicks have now gone to live on a farm. Hopefully they won't end up as my dinner someday.