Welcome to my Classroom

After a break from Laura's Lily Pad to get my school year started, complete a college course on Play and Learning, and deal with some family issues, I now am dusting off my blog and sharing my classroom photos of my new Ocean Friends PreK classroom.

I started out the year with an ice cream shop in my dramatic play area.  The freshly painted wooden kitchen pieces were donated by a family from my church and were painted by another member of the church.  My director made most of the decorations when she did this dramatic play area in her classroom in year's past.

This is the view when you enter the room.  I have since added a table and rearranged some things, including moving the easel nearer the door and behind the cubbies.  You can see my question of the day pocket chart on the right side, hanging on our bathroom door.  Student name cards are on top of the cubbie shelf.  

I am hard at work on some new products for my writing center using alphabet stamps.  I am gearing these printables specifically for preschoolers since most of the stamping activities I have found lately are more for kids who know their alphabet and are working on words.  I am excited to test using them in my classroom over the next week to see how the students like them.  My coworker has also expressed interest in them, so after some feedback and any revisions I will add them to my Teachers Pay Teachers shop.  

What Will You Put In Your Cart?

The big Love Back to School Sale is going on at Teachers Pay Teachers on Monday and Tuesday.  I will be participating with 28% off.  Make sure you use the promo code BTS15 to get your entire discount on your back to school goodies.

I still cannot decide which set of Preschool Center Signs I am going to print for use in my classroom.  Anyone have any suggestions?

I have been working on making a Happy Birthday banner for my classroom with an ocean theme.  I finally managed to get it to print correctly from my Adobe Acrobat PDF Reader, so I will hopefully manage to add it to my shop as soon as I write some helpful printing hints.  I don't want any of you to have to deal with the trial and error I messed with last night.

Tomorrow my church starts Vacation Bible Camp where I will be going on a Thailand Trek with 16 preschoolers.  This promises to be an exhausting, but fulfilling week.  Hope I can remember to check in on my shop and hopefully treat myself to something from one of the other great teacher shops during the sale.

Question of the Day Summer Fun

 Question of the Day Summer Fun Set

I really enjoy using a Question of the Day in my preschool classroom.  I make it simple, so it is normally a yes/no or a two choice question.  I place the students names out on a table and each student finds his or her name upon entering the room for some name recognition practice.  Then the student brings the name card to the pocket chart near the door where I post my question of the day.  Generally I read the question aloud to the student, running my finger along the text and showing the two answer choices.  Then the student places the name card in the pocket chart under the appropriate response.

Later in the day, during circle time one student is assigned to tally the responses for some counting practice.  The chosen student gives us the tally and we discuss which number is more or less, most or least, and whether we have a unanimous response to gain some familiarity with those math terms.

One of my goals for the summer is to make up sets of Question of the Day to use for the entire year.  This past year I would sometimes have the questions already thought out and in my lesson plans, but occasionally I would suddenly realize as the first child came in the door that I needed a new question and so they would not always be as well thought out as they should be.

I just completed creating my first set of 20 Question of the Day cards and added them to my shops so that you could use them as well.  The set in the TeachersPayTeachers shop has a preview so that you can print one of the questions to see how they would work in your classroom.  I like my questions to be big, but if you want to save paper you could print two sets to a page which should still be readable.