Five for Friday . . . Fraturday

I had all intentions of finishing this Friday night. Then I fell asleep - you know the I've-made-it-through-the-first-week-EXHAUSTION, and nothing I write is making sense anymore. So Five for Friday has turned into Five for Fraturday. Normally the first week seems to fly by, but this week seemed to drag on and on and on and on. Did it seem that way for anyone else? I also think it was the hottest week ever too. The heat index the last two days was around 120 degrees. Really!!! How is the even possible? But alas I am at home in my comfy pajamas and happy to say I had the best week ever.

Monday was the first day of school. I am now up to thirteen friends in my class. Every day they do something that just amazes me and makes me feel so lucky and blessed to have this group of friends. We had a lot of fun read Mrs. Bindergarten Gets Ready for Kindergarten. We made a list of all the things Mrs. Bindergarten did to get ready along with ourselves. We made Kindergarten is SUPER hats (found HERE) and I have to say I have a wonderful husband who comes and helps the first day. He helps go through supplies and take photos. It's so helpful to have someone that I can just look at and he is able to know just how I want something done. This year he dressed as Superman to go along with my classroom theme! He is amazing!! Now My friends ask where he is and when he's coming back.

Thursday afternoon, I had the privilege of joining several friends for our county's first Reading Council Meeting of the year. It was held at a popular local restaurant. My friend Betsy and I both ended up texting our husbands and telling them to join us after work for dinner and had a great impromptu double date. I think nights like that might be one of my favorite things to do with friends - laughing and sharing.

This week my friends worked on learning their positional words such as above, below, behind, and in front. We started off with everyone getting two Dixie cups and one animal manipulative piece. Then they had to listen to my directions and move the piece based on my directions. They loved this! It also gave me a really good idea about what each student already knew. We also spent some time reading Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and writing our names. My goal is to add a photo of each student to their page and assemble their pages into a book.

Kindergarteners say the darnedest things. Early on this week one of the ESE teachers was helping keep my friends occupied while I was taking care of some business. She would call a number and my friends would hold up that many fingers. I learned this week that five and five make ten, but when you put your hands together it also makes a butterfly!!! A butterfly! - said with perfect innocence and timing it was great. I also have another friend who would like to go home. This might be the biggest challenge among my friends, which is nothing compared to past challenges. This friend refused to eat, cried, made herself dry heave from crying so hard that mom kept her home one day and picked her up early one day. While this has not helped the situation. Today she was telling me "I need to go to the hospital". She's calling the clinic the hospital. It is so cute, but she thinks if she goes up to the nurse in the clinic she will go home. I'm happy to report that today was successful and we stayed all day (with many a few tears).

This week I joined Blog Hoppin's Back to School 2014 . I made it through the first four days. Head on over and read what is happening in everyone's classroom's this year. 

Don't forget to head back over to Doodle Bugs Teaching so you can see what everyone else has been up to this week too! 

Why Wednesday

I'm linking up with Blog Hoppin' once again! Today's topic is about being organized and WHY it works.

I would like to think that I am very organized . . . possibly bordering on OCD. One of my summer projects was called Operation Organize which pertained to going through tons of resources that I have acquired since starting kindergarten. Here are three of my best tips.

Jump Drives
I actually have three drives which range from 8G to 16G. One holds all of my stuff from when I taught Second grade, the other holds all of TPT documents that I have bought, and the last one is what I call my daily jump drive, which holds lesson plans and any documents I might need each week. I have numerous folders, and am known to keep documents in multiple folders based on the skill, theme, or multiple documents that are a part of a series such as monthly writing centers. Keeping my jump drives organized means I know where I can find any document I might need and I'm not wasting time searching. If I ever lost (or washed) one of my jump drives I would devastated. This last May, God must have been watching over me because I did wash my daily jump drive, but thankfully after a bag of rice it still worked! Thank you God!!!!

Centers
In Kindergarten all of my centers are standards based, but they tend to have a monthly theme. So, I organize centers by the month. Each month has one or two 12x12 storage containers where I may store any important books for that theme and all of the centers that I already have printed, laminated, and ready to go. This saves me tons of time digging around for centers. As you can see, I do dig through each box . . .

Letter Boxes
This was a part of Operation Organize. After two years in Kindergarten, I realized that while I had my letter stuff organized nicely, I was getting one thing from over here and another thing over there. I was spending 15 to 25 minutes each week pulling out and putting away the different resources from all of the locations around the room. While it may not seem like I lot, I knew there had to be an easier way - Letter Boxes! I purchased a bunch of photo boxes from Michaels this summer. Next I sorted through the variety of letter resources. I mod podged two to three letters on the front of each box based on the order it is taught in our district. Once they were dry I placed all of the resources that pertained to those letters inside. So next week when we start with the letter M, I can pull out the first box, and within two minutes everything will be ready. Plus everything for the next week as well when we move on to A and S.

Operation Organize

This last spring, I had this wonderful idea to organize all of my Kindergarten resources I have acquired the last two years. I already knew I was probably going to have to take home most of it, due to one of the district's summer school program being held at my school. Then this happened . . . 

SERIOUSLY? What was I thinking? I had created one giant mess!

Here is what I was able to accomplish from the massive chaos. 

I purchased a LOT of photo boxes . . . as in 35 from Michael's. I know plastic bins would be more durable, but some how whenever I need to go purchase more plastic bins, the style I had originally bought is no longer available. Then I just end up with mismatched bins and drive myself crazy. Michael's always has photo boxes so I can always pick up more if I ever need. So basically I sorted all of my stuff out and started filling boxes. I created a label for each box and used mod podge to adhere it to the front of the box. My favorite boxes are my letter ones. In past years I would have to go to four or five locations to get all of my goodies to teach each letter. This year, I can get one box out and all of those goodies will be in one place! I'm hoping this will be a time saver this coming year!

For almost two years I have been using the plastic scrapbook paper organizers to store anything related to each month. Mostly it holds my centers . . . LOTS and LOTS of monthly themed related centers. While I still need to create some new labels for them, I did take the time to clean them out as well this summer. 

While there are still a few more things to finish as part of Operation Organize, there's something about being organized at the beginning of the year that makes me feel like I can take on anything in the new school year. Does anyone else ever feel that way? 

High Frequency Words and Vocabulary

How many High Frequency Words are you students expected to know by the end of the year? This is a question that is often on my mind. My kindergarten friends are expected to know 127 words. Yes you read that correctly - 127 words! Is this normal?

So, how do I organize all of those words for the word wall? I use an index card box and three packages of index card dividers. I turned the dividers around and numbered them by week. Then at the beginning of the year, I take the time to sort the cards based on the week they will be introduced. This may not be much, but with the 897 other things that have to be done each week, it is really nice to just be able to pull the exact words I need with minimal effort.

I also sorted my vocabulary words a few weeks ago so they are easier to locate too. I love having visually appealing vocabulary cards for my friends, but in the past have been overwhelmed with trying to dig through to find them . . . maybe it's more like try to remember where I stored them, having no luck, and reprinting them again. So as part of my goal to make this coming year a bit easier, I organized all of my vocabulary cards! First I sorted all of them. I wish I had taken a picture for you to see them laid across the entire floor. After that, I took some scrapbook paper I had laying around and cut it a tad larger then most of my vocabulary cards to create dividers. Each divider is labeled with the content area and the type of vocabulary cards in the section. Originally I thought I was going to have two bins of vocabulary cards, but I was able to fit all of my Reading, Writing, Math, and Science vocabulary cards in the one bin. WooHoo!! 

My husband did not quite understand how excited I was to organize my vocabulary cards. He was more excited that it didn't cost him any money. Oh the little things.