A Free Shipping & Discount Code, & A Great Gift for Volunteers!

Bloggy Doggies on Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving!
This has been a wonderful week “off” for me at home, although I spent the first two days working at the HeidiSongs office answering phones and emails, and trying to help my husband out in whatever way I could. After that, I spent the Tuesday night and most of Wednesday creating the handout for my presentation on classroom management that I will be giving at the California Kindergarten Conference and the Southern California Kindergarten Conference in January and February.  Thursday was a day for cooking and giving thanks, and now here we are on Friday!  Time sure flies when you are having fun!
Next week on Thursday, I am flying out to Little Rock, Arkansas for the SDE’s Kindergarten Conference there.  I am hoping to see a few of you there!  If you are a blog reader and will be there, please come up and introduce yourself!  I would love to meet you!

In honor of the big shopping weekend and Cyber Monday, I managed to talk my wonderful husband into a free shipping and discount code that is good this weekend ONLY!  We hardly EVER do this, so if there is anything you want, I highly suggest that you take advantage of it now! You can use both of them at once, and both are good through Monday 11-28 at Midnight.  Here they are:

Thanks11 - 10% off everything in store
Thanks12 - Free shipping

Meanwhile, I wanted to just quickly share with you this idea that I have for a “home made” Christmas gift that I give to my volunteers each year.  I wanted to share it with you now, while you still have time to collect the wine bottles necessary to make it, if you want to do it!  That’s because if you want to give this gift, the first thing you have to do is drink up!  Read on below if you are interested.  Other than that, I will leave you to your holiday shopping and preparations, and will continue with my regular blogging next week.  Enjoy the rest of your weekend!

Wine Bottle Christmas Decoration

Wine Bottle Christmas Lights Decoration
Preparation:
1.  Empty out a bottle of wine in whatever way you choose. :)
The light colored or clear bottles seem to look the best when lit up.
2.  Soak off the labels, and save the cork.
3.  Dry out the bottle completely.
4.  Purchase a very short string of lights; it can be no more than 30 lights long or it will not fit inside the bottle.  (These can be hard to find, so look for these first before you purchase any other supplies.)
5.  Purchase some 1.5 inch wide ribbon.  You will need 3 feet per bottle per color, and you will need two different colors of ribbon per bottle.
6.  Purchase some 7/8” wide ribbon.  You will need 2 feet per bottle, and you will need just one color per bottle of this width of ribbon.
7.  Purchase some decorations to put on the bottle, such as greenery or any other type of holiday “picks” that you like from your favorite craft store.

To Make it:
1.  Stuff the lights down inside the bottle, leaving the plug outside the bottle.
2.  Tie the wide ribbons around the neck of the bottle and tie a bow.
3.  Tie the narrower ribbon under the other ribbons and tie a bow.
4.  Tuck the stems of the decorative greenery down in between the wide ribbon and the bottle.  Make sure that the ribbon is tied tight enough to hold the decorations down.
5.  Arrange everything so that it looks nice!
6.  Plug in your bottle into the nearest light socket and see how it looks.  If you are happy with it, then you are done!

Wine bottle Decoration Lit Up

I usually also attach a Starbucks gift card and a note thanking my volunteers for all of their hard work in my classroom.  I was able to buy all of the supplies for these wine bottle decorations for about $2.50 each when I used a coupon and got everything on sale last week.  (That didn’t include the price of the wine, of course!)  I once gave this gift to a friend of mine that I know doesn’t drink, so I gave her the supplies and the directions for how to make it, along with a bottle of sparkling cider so that she could put it together when she was done drinking it.

The Edublog Awards Nominations are Open!

 
I am making a special post this week because I am nominating Vanessa Levin's Pre-K Pages Blog for the 2011 Edublog Awards in the category of Best Teacher Blog.  I really like Vanessa's blog because she has a great variety of teaching ideas, management ideas, and links to other great websites and resources as well.  As a Kindergarten teacher who often works with remedial students, I have depended upon her blog, website, and expertise to help me get "into the mind" of a preschooler when I have needed to do so in the past to help children that are working far below grade level.  Her website and blog have also been invaluable to me in helping me figure out how to motivate children with seasonal activities that can be repeated in many ways for the different seasons.  This makes lesson plans a breeze, too!  Thanks so much for making my life easier and the children's lives better, Vanessa!
Last year, my blog was a runner up in the category of Best Use of Audio.  Thanks for all of your support and votes! Nominations are still open now for this year's Edublog Awards, so get your nominations in for your favorite blogs ASAP!

The Edublog Awards are Sponsored by edublogs.org/.

How to Teach Kids to Sound Out CVC Words, Plus a Thanksgiving Freebie!

Parent conferences are finally OVER and done with, (hooray!) and the holiday season has begun!  My class has begun learning the songs for our Gingerbread Man musical play that we love to do, and even though we have been working on it for only one week, the children already sound like experts on most of the songs!  I have started prepping some of my holiday projects, and even have started thinking about what I might give as gifts to my parent volunteers!  But I'll tell you more about that next week.  For now, I want to tell you about a new way to give a lesson that seems to be working out very well for my class, at least in the area of sounding out CVC words.

Match CVC Words and Pictures

1.  How to Teach Kids to Sound Out CVC Words
In my district, the teachers have all been sent to trainings on writing “Brain Compatible Direct Instruction Lesson Plans.”  The name of the company that is giving us these inservices is RISE, which recently split off from another company that was known as TESS.  Although sitting through these inservices is time consuming and can feel tedious, the good thing that they make you do is focus on creating a task analysis for each lesson.  That is, the format forces you to concentrate on breaking down each skill into the tiniest of steps for the children and teach it to them one step at a time.  And this is a good thing!  Although I do not think that every Kindergarten skill can be taught using this lesson plan format, I think that many of them can, and that it is always a good idea to think about breaking each skill down into the smallest steps possible and teaching them in a methodical manner with visual aids and a solid lesson plan in mind.  The number of steps should be kept to a minimum for Kindergartners, and should ideally be no more than five steps total. 
That being said, I thought I would share with you today the lesson that I created to teach children how to sound out words!  I thought that it went very well, and my students are actually getting very proficient at it!  I am really quite proud of them, since a large number of them appear to really be catching on quite well to this new skill with very little trouble.

The flashcards are from my CVC Book.

Of course, we definitely have spent a good, long time laying the foundation of phonemic awareness to get them ready for this big step of sounding out and reading words.  This foundation is essential to the success of this lesson because it lays the groundwork for the skill that they are trying to learn.  These foundational activities have included learning to blend onsets and rimes, such as /mmmm/  /at/ = mat.  We also worked on blending three sounds together (with no letters to look at- sounds only!)  such as /s/ /a/ /t/.  These activities lay the foundation to help children get ready to sound words out by looking at letters and making the sounds that they see, rather than just blending the sounds together that others say.  Of course, when you add the stress of having the child come up with the letter sounds him or herself, that taxes working memory even more, so if a child is a little unsure of the sounds, then it is even less likely that he or she will be successful with this activity.  Therefore, to be able to sounds out words well, children must be very fluent with the letter sounds, (meaning that they must be able to say the letter sounds quickly, easily, and automatically when they see the letters.)  If the child in question lacks this skill, then you will need to back up and fill in the missing gaps before proceeding, or you are certainly in for a struggle.Keeping in mind that this very important foundation had already been laid, these are the steps that I gave the children for sounding out the words:

Children are supposed to articulate the "Big Idea," above.

1.  Say the letter sounds.
2.  Stretch out the sounds.
3.  Blend the sounds together.  (Say them a little faster.)
4.  Say the word. 

It was really no surprise that the children did much better with the task when I gave each step a motion!  Movement always seems to help children learn a little bit better, in my opinion and in my experience.  So when they said the letter sounds, many of them did the Zoo-Phonics signals.  Then we pulled our hands apart to stretch out the sounds.  We swept our hands to the side when we blended them together, and then I had them throw their hands out in front of themselves when they said the final word.  The more we did this, the better the children got at it, and the quicker they got at it, too!  If you would like to see a short video clip of me teaching my class to do this with the movements, I posted one on my HeidiSongs Facebook page!  Click here.
After we sounded out all of the words, we matched up the pictures on the flash cards from the CVC book with the correct words.  Then later as independent practice, we did one of the CVC worksheets from that word family from that same book.

It was interesting to me to see that some of the children, when asked to read the word, dropped the steps or reduced them down to just one or two steps almost immediately, while others stuck to all four steps the whole time we practiced!  I allowed each child to decide how many steps he or she needed to read the word correctly.  The only thing I insisted on was that each child should tell me all of the letter sounds that he or she saw first, because if they start off with wrong sound, then they will not read the word correctly.  Also, if a child hesitated, or just stood there helplessly saying that he or she didn’t know what to do, I insisted that he or she start from the beginning and go through each of the steps to arrive at the answer.

In the “RISE” brain compatible lesson, they recommend a teaching format they call the “Model Sandwich.”  In the Model Sandwich, the teacher first models the skill, then teaches the steps, and then models the skill again.  So in following this format, I modeled sounding out one CVC word.  Then I read the children the steps and taught them to recognize the picture icons that went with each one, since of course they are non-readers!  The picture cues for the steps are quite important, then, for making this teaching method work for non-readers.  Finally, I modeled sounding out a CVC word again.  This forms a Model Sandwich:  model, teach the steps, model. 

It's a Model Sandwich Chart!

Another thing that I did to help them learn was teach them the "How Do You Sound It Out?" song that is on my Little Songs for Language Arts CD/DVD.  That song REALLY helps them learn the steps for sounding out a word!  I noticed it quite a bit when I asked them to tell me what the steps were at the end of the lesson.  More children were telling me the steps as they were worded in the song than the way they were worded in my lesson, LOL!  I am thinking that it would be a good idea to someday offer an "open" version of that song, so that teachers could play it and insert any words that they wanted to into the open spaces of the song, because just about ALL of my kids can now sound out and read the four words that we sound out in the song, which are "run," "jump," "swim," and "fly."  I think that is really neat!  Check it out below.



It seems that it is becoming quite common that school districts require that teachers post the learning objective that the children are working on in their classrooms, and prepare the children to be able to recite what that objective is, should they be asked.  However, in the RISE lesson, the children are supposed to be able to articulate both the “big idea” of the lesson (the main idea of what you are teaching) and the objective as well.  Admittedly, these can be a little tricky to distinguish between and articulate, even for the teachers!  So to assist in this I decided to post the “Big Idea” on my pocket chart along with the steps and have the children read it with me.  (I figured that it would at LEAST help ME remember what it was, LOL!)  The children are supposed to begin and end the lesson by repeating both the learning objective, the Big Idea, and the steps.  So here is the learning objective vs. the Big Idea for this lesson, put into kid friendly terms as our administration requires:

Learning Objective:  “Today we are going to learn to sound out words.”
Big Idea:  “Sounding out words is saying the letter sounds that you see and then blending them together to make a word.”

This CVC Worksheet is an example of one from the CVC Book.

 I really don’t know how much young children get out of trying to repeat these things, but I have decided that I might as well try to look at the bright side:  it is not a bad challenge to give those that have the language skills to give it a try!  For the little ones with very limited language skills, such as my English language learners, my students that qualify for speech services, or even those that are a bit immature, this task seems to be completely puzzling!  Perhaps they will get better at it with time.  I’m withholding judgement until I have spent more time training them to do this before I decide whether or not I think I would recommend it to anyone or not. 

I am including the lesson plan for this lesson as a free download for those of you that would like it.

And as an extra bonus, I am giving you the steps with the icons as well!  That way, if you would like to use the pictures to help the children learn the steps for sounding out a word, you can easily do so. 

2.  Turning the Thanksgiving Sound Effects Story into a Drawing Story
Last week, I read a blog entry from “Teach Preschool”’s Deborah Stewart called Thanksgiving time story telling with symbols in preschool.  As I read about this idea, it occurred to me that it would be a great idea to combine it with my existing Sound Effects Story for Thanksgiving!  So I tried it this week and it was a huge hit!  My students were totally enthralled, and just loved it!  I have done other kinds of “Draw and Tell” stories before, and they have always been very well received, so this should have been no surprise.  However, I have never tried to combine the two ways to tell a story.  I have to say that the first method really just enhanced the other!

 So basically, this is what I did:  when I told the story for the very first time, I told it sitting next to my white board easel.  I showed them the picture icons that I am including as a free download for you today, and I drew the pictures as I went along.  I also taught the children the sound effects as I drew.  So I as I drew the stick figure pilgrims, I told them about the pilgrims and then told them to say, “Hi, there!” each time they heard the word “pilgrims,” etc.  I actually ran out of time to finish the story before the end of the day when I introduced it, but he kids were so interested in it that at dismissal time, they did not want me to stop to send them home!  That actually really surprised me.  But what surprised me even more was the fact that the next morning, they came in asking me to finish it, first thing in the morning!

That day I left the picture icons clipped to the white board easel with magnets, and at playtime I had at least eight children all clamoring to draw those pictures on that one small easel, so I got out a bunch of individual white boards for the children to use and let as many children draw as they wished.  They had a wonderful time, and they were all telling the story as well!   I just wish I had remembered to take a few pictures of them doing that.  Darn! 
In any case, I hope that you will enjoy using these picture icons in your Thanksgiving story telling, either this year or next.  :)

Children's drawings are so CUTE!

Another Science Center, Two More New Freebies, and a Round-Up of Thanksgiving Free Downloads!

I had a wonderful time last week at BlogWorld with my husband!  It was a great little one night get away, and just what we needed, even if it was a working vacation and only less than an hour’s drive away from home at the Los Angeles Convention Center!  What we learned was the importance of social networking in order to grow readership of your blog and website, and just how many passionate experts there are publishing such wide variety of material!

So to that I say, “Here, here!  I guess I’ll be needing to spend more time on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and any other new sites I can squeeze into my day!”  That’s okay- I really didn’t want to cook that dinner anyway, and now I have the perfect excuse! Now if I can just stay awake long enough to do it all! Join me, and I’ll “see you” in cyberspace. Can’t wait to chat with you! 
This week, I am conferencing with parents, and I should be done with the last of them by next week on Wednesday.  After that I am planning to set my classroom on "cruise control" as I head on into a wonderful and much needed one week holiday.  Hooray!
Finally, I just had to share this funny little conversation a parent overheard in the computer lab this week:  One Kindergarten girl says to another in the computer lab, as she is pretending to type away at her Millie's Math House game: "Facebook me, okay?  Why don't you Facebook me????"  The other little girl says, "Okay.  Why haven't you friended me yet??????"   Are we raising digital natives or WHAT?????  They can't possibly know what it is they are even talking about, but their games of pretend, imitation, and imagination have now crossed over into imitating their parents on the computer!   LOL LOL LOL LOL!

1. A Fall Reading Book Free Download
Here is a question I received via email.  I love suggestions, and this was a good one.  Keep them coming!
Q:  “I really like your idea of the index cards for sight words with the Halloween book. However, I can't do Halloween.  :(  So I was wondering what you use to make the book. I thought I could make one with Fall pages or else make one for Thanksgiving and be really early. I look forward to your blog every week. Thanks for everything you do!”

A: “ I'll see if I can change it up a little and post one for Fall or something like that. I know it's really a bummer when you are not allowed to mention the holidays!  To make the book, I use Quark Xpress and I draw the artwork myself using Adobe Illustrator.  Both of these applications, though, are on the expensive side for most teachers, and are not easy to learn, I'm afraid!  I don't recommend you buy them without your own personal tutor in the house.  My husband has always used them and already had them on his computer, and therefore taught me to use them little by little over the years.  

Okay, so here is the little printable reading book that I made with a November/fall theme!  Hopefully, everyone will be able to use it.  Well, at least those of us that teach in the US will be able to use it, because it does have some little American pilgrims in it!  For those of you that are just joining us, I posted one of these little printable books a couple of weeks ago with a Halloween theme.  This is how I use these little books to help kids learn their sight words for this small group activity:

1.  To prepare, I make each child in the group an index card with the words that they are to look for written on the card in black permanent marker.  I color each word a certain color with a crayon.  For example, I might color the word “is” yellow and the word “can” orange.
2.   Before I dismiss the children to their groups, I give them the following directions for the books: 
A.  I read the book with the class whole group.
B.  I tell them that they are to try to find each word on their index card and color it the same color that is shown on their index card.
C.  I use my document camera to demonstrate what I mean, and have a child come up and try to point to each word on a page, and read the words aloud.  Then the child will see if one of the words in the sentence matches the words on the index card, and if so, then he or she will take a crayon and color it right there under the document camera so that everyone can see what is happening. 
D.  We do this a few times, and also do a few more with the whole class can responding with a “yes” or a “no” to my question of, “Is this one of the words we are looking for?”  If the answer is “Yes,” then I respond with, “What color should it be?”  Then the whole class can look at the index card and respond.

This is one of the best uses of the document camera that I have found!  By using it, I just turned a small group lesson into a whole group lesson, and now the follow up lesson can be done in small groups with a minimal amount of effort.   Everyone can get started immediately on it once they sit down.  Also, I once I get the children into their small groups, I always try to stop ONE child and listen to him or her read the entire book to me, whether or not he or she is done with the coloring.  Then I go on to the next child and do the same.  This is the best reason of all to do any coloring assignment in Kindergarten, in my opinion!!!  It can allow the teacher to spend just a little bit of time with a single child, because the rest of the children are busy with something else. 


2.  Turkey Feathers Matching Sets - Free Download!
As I was going through all of my Thanksgiving themed downloads from last year, I realized that there wasn’t that much for math, so I decided to try to rectify the situation!  Plus, I still have one little girl with a late fall birthday that is still struggling with developing number concepts past number two, so I thought that I might be able to kill two birds with one stone!  So I went into my file of alphabet turkeys from last year, removed the letters, and added numbers instead.  Then I went to my local craft store and bought some feathers and some more clothespins.  I used a hot glue gun to glue the feathers onto the clothes pins, pushing them down with the side of an old pencil as each one dried, and voilá!  I now have a new matching sets activity with turkey feathers- hooray!

 I guess it's kind of funny that after I had this activity completely finished and this blog entry ready to post, Vanessa Levin of Pre-K Pages posted a similar activity on her blog, done completely with purchased Thanksgiving cups.  So if you would like to try it a different way, here is another route to go!  I guess great minds think alike.  By the way, I LOVE Vanessa's blog, and I highly recommend it!

The children were really drawn to this activity (probably because of the feathers,) and were actually quite jealous of the little one that “got” to do it, and definitely wanted to join her!  So naturally I let them do it, since we were doing it during playtime anyway.  One little girl even clothes pinned several turkey feathers to the back of her shirt and waddled around the classroom, pretending to be a turkey, ha ha!  (Oh, how cute would it have been to have captured a moment like that on video!)  The only thing was that once they pinned the feathers on the turkey tail, they wanted to take it home and keep it!  They were certainly disappointed when I explained that I had to have it back, and that it was just an activity to be done at school and left here each time.  I enjoyed exchanging amused glances with one parent at dismissal time when one child ran to grab “her” turkey before exiting the door!
I am including this activity here as a free download for you today, of course!  One half ounce bag of feathers was enough for the 55 feathers needed for all of the turkeys, 0-10. 

3.  A Science Center:  Simple Machines!

 I had never thought about the concept of “Simple Machines” before until l read about it in NAEYC’s publication of Young Children, in an article by Sherrie Bosse, Gera Jeacobs, and Tara Lynn Anderson called “Science in the Air.”  When I started reading up on it online, I realized that there are TONS of fun things that young children can do with them.  To learn a little more about simple machines and what I might be able to do with them in my classroom, I did a little searching online and found a bunch of videos on www.youtube.com that showed me all kinds of little projects and things that my students could do with them!  All you really need to do is introduce the concept that what they are doing is making a machine, and perhaps read a little book or two, and you are off!  It seems to take very little effort on the part of the teacher; just lay out the materials and LABEL them so that administrators will know what it is the children are doing, because it certainly looks like just play!  (Of course, you and I know that this is how kids learn best anyway, right?)

 I decided to start with “inclined planes” (ramps) and gave the children some wooden moldings that I bought at a hardware store, along with some blocks and some marbles.  I decided to give them the assignment of making a ramp that a marble would slide down into and land into a little ceramic dish that I had set out.  I like the ceramic dish for this purpose because it makes a neat little "ping" sound when the marble drops inside of it!  (If you would like to some see a little video clips of our ramps, click here and here.)  To make it a little easier, I put a plastic basket on its side behind the dish to form a little “back stop,” just in case the marble jumped out of the dish.  Therefore, the assignment was to make a ramp that was steep enough to make the marble roll, but not so steep that the marble would bounce out of the ceramic dish!  We also happened to have some heavy duty cardboard tubes that go with our block set, and one child had the idea of sending the marbles through these tubes as "tunnels," and that turned out to cause GREAT excitement!  We happened to have a dad volunteer on hand on the last day of the week that was helping with this center, and he especially enjoyed helping the children create some fun tunneled paths, like the one you see in the picture on the right.  The kids were absolutely entranced (and also a little hyper and LOUD!) during this activity, and really only got to do it when they finished their art project and at playtime, but I am okay with this sort of arrangement!  The art project didn’t take so long, and they all got to do it anyway.  I left the center out all week, and I will be leaving it out all next week, too, because they are definitely not finished exploring it.  I'll probably let them explore the ramps with some other materials, such as some other triangular shaped Magnatiles blocks and some toy cars next week as well.  By the way, those Magnatiles blocks are a wonderful toy to have on hand!  My kids play with them nearly every day.
As far as simple machines are concerned, I got lucky and just happened to have a couple of puzzles donated recently that had a variety of locks on them, and these are also types of machines, so that coincided well with our unit.  (They were donated by a preschool teacher who decided that it might not be a great idea to teach a bunch of two year old children how to get out of the house without help, LOL!)  I also happened to have a set of toy nuts and bolts, so when I discovered that they were also really a type of simple machines, I set those out as well.  I am hoping to raid my husband’s garage this weekend and find some real locks, nuts and bolts, and bring them in for the kids to fiddle around with.  I think that they will enjoy that, and will also benefit from trying out the “real thing.”  And I am planning on extending this unit on simple machines for at least another week or two, because it sure is interesting and FUN! 


4.  A Thanksgiving “Round-Up” of Free Downloads!
Well, okay.  Not ALL of these are freebies, but MOST Of them are!  (It just depends on how long the artwork takes me to draw, since I do draw artwork on the freebies myself.)  My class is using and reusing so many of these resources that I posted last year during October and November that I thought that it would be worth another mention, especially for those of you that are just joining us.  And anyway, it’s always a good reminder of something that you may already have printed and tucked away somewhere in your classroom, already prepped and ready to go!  I have to say that as I was “pinning” some Thanksgiving photos to my new Pinterest account last weekend, I realized that there are a whole lot of Thanksgiving projects that I created just last year and already totally forgot about.  (I think I must be going CRAZY, ha ha!)  In any case, at least get those freebies and gobble them up while there is still time to use them before the holidays!

1.  Pumpkin Patch Counting Worksheets Free Download
I used this last year more during October, but this year my class reached the point of needing it now during November.  That worked out great, since I found these little pumpkin ice cube trays with ten slots each at the 99 Cents Only store right before Halloween!  I also bought some “Pumpkin Table Scatter” at Target in the dollar section in October.  I think that the Table Scatter is meant to be a decoration, but as soon as I saw it and that there were 125 pieces in each one, I knew that they were REALLY meant to be counters for me, LOL!  So I bought two of them and then decided to use them with my Pumpkin Patch Counting Worksheets. 
Using the worksheets is simple, but the kids really need an adult or an older student (like a fifth grader) with them to make it work.  They choose a number on a pumpkin to try to build, and count that many pumpkins into their ice cube tray.  Then they raise their hand for the helper or teacher to check and see if they counted correctly.  If so, then they receive a crayon and may color that ONE pumpkin.  Don’t give them any crayons at all until they finish counting out the pumpkins correctly and tell you how many they have.  After they color that one pumpkin, then they must give that crayon back while they build another number.  Then they raise a hand and the activity goes on, etc.

 I stapled all of the pages together for each child to make a packet so that he or she could work at his or her own pace.  And, if I believe that a child needs to repeat a page because they really haven’t mastered counting out that many of a certain number, (like from 11-20,) then I will have them do that paper again.  We will work on this activity on and off for a couple of weeks, but not every single day because they will get tired of it.  The children that have mastered the whole thing will get to play with my iPads and iPod while their peers work on their Pumpkin Patch worksheets.


2.  November Graph Free Download
This is a graphing worksheet with a November/Thanksgiving theme.  Enough said?
There are lots of other graphs posted as free downloads on this blog as well.  Just use the "Search this blog" feature on the right side bar and type the word "graph" into it and press return.  Then scroll up to the top of the page and you should see a list of entries where I mention graphing, and most of those will likely also have a free download of a graph.  :)

3.  Barnyard Bang Game:  (Download for purchase) $5.00
This game ties in well with Thanksgiving, since it includes a turkey that is trying to escape becoming the farmer’s dinner!  It helps kids practice sight words, color words, alphabet, the numbers 0-30, ordinal numbers, and sorting. Includes blank cards so that you can modify the game to include your own sight words, etc.

Barnyard Bang Math Question Cards 

 The game includes enough cards for you to print it out as a math game as shown in one picture, or as a language arts game as shown in the other picture.
The game is played like this:  The teacher gives each child a card in turn.  If the child gets a question card, he must answer the question or identify the number or word.  But if the child receives an activity card, then he or she gets to do that activity!  Some of the activities are shown in the picture below.  The children love this game, and it is a fun way to drill and practice these basic skills.

Barnyard Bang Activity Cards

Barnyard Bang Reading Cards (in B/W)

4.  Turkey Tails Sight Word Game (or Alphabet Game)  Free Download  
I have used this resource in two different ways.  The first way is to use it as an independent center and have the children clip clothespins with letters written on them onto the turkeys.  In this case, I glue the turkeys down onto paper plates.  For sight words, the children can focus on the individual letters in each word and spell the words by clipping the letters onto them.  For the alphabet, the children can match the upper and lower case letters by clipping them onto the turkeys glued onto paper plates.

 The second way I have used this resource is by making a game out of it.  In this game, the children all chant,
"Turkey tails, turkey tails!
One, two, three!
Turkey tails, turkey tails!
Where could it be?"

Then they take turns searching for the words "Happy Thanksgiving" by selecting a word or a letter and looking underneath it.  It's fun- but watch out, because they peek!  I prefer to put the turkeys on a pocket chart rather than on a table; it seems to be easier to keep them from peeking that way and it keeps the game fun.  Also, last year I decided to make a little black Pilgrim boy hat out of construction paper to place under the turkeys rather than the "Happy Thanksgiving" words that are included in the download- but if you want that, you'll have to figure out how to do that yourself because that's not in the file!

Turkey Color Words Worksheet

5.  Turkey Color Words Worksheet Free Download
This activity is really for both the teen numbers 10-13 and for the color words, too, because it is a color by number worksheet.  I zeroed in on the numbers my kids were having trouble recognizing last year and created a worksheet just for them.  :)




6.  Dinner’s Ready Singable Book Project (Download for purchase)  $4.00
In this "Singable Book," the children sing about and learn the vocabulary of a typical American Thanksgiving dinner.  Of course, it rhymes, too!  Plus, it’s got this really neat hidden pocket in the last page with a secret dinner plate inside of it that one child told me is “out- STANDING!”  I like this project because it is SIMPLE and easy enough for everyone to do well and get it right.  :)

Pilgrim Color Word Worksheet

7.  Pilgrim Boy and Girl Color Word Worksheets- Free Download
After drawing a pilgrim boy and girl, I decided to make my first two creations a couple of color word worksheets for the holiday! I like these because the children also need to trace the color words, so it helps them notice the letters in each word, rather than just having them take a quick glance and a guess as they rush in to color.

 Turkeys Mounted on a Bulletin Board!

  8.  Decorate a Turkey Homework Assignment Free Download
I always send this turkey home with at least a week’s notice for the children to decorate it and then bring it in to share.  The sheer variety of what I get back is simply astounding!  And I always tell them that simply coloring it is fine, just in case I have a family that cannot do more.  I still want all of the children to have a chance to share their turkeys, no matter how much effort appears to have been put into them!


9.  Thanksgiving Guided Drawing Free Download
Want to know how to show your children how to draw those pilgrims?  This download will show you step by step exactly how to do it!  It even tells you how to describe the steps to your kids.  Most kids are very successful with guided drawing!  Just put those who are especially anxious right at your feet if you can, so that you can help them along if needed.  Or, assign them a peer helper to get them past a rough point, which is usually just a diagonal line or two. 
Want more guided drawing lessons?  Use the “Search this Blog” feature on the right hand side of this blog and put in the words “Guided Drawing.”  A whole variety of them should come right up!

10.  Thanksgiving Sound Effects Story Free Download
This is a Thanksgiving themed sound effects story that I wrote to get my kids to listen to and understand the story of the first Thanksgiving. I found out last year that several people used it for their holiday programs for their parents!
In a “sound effects story,” the children are supposed to listen carefully to the reader and listen for certain words to be said.  When these words are read, the children should make the indicated sound and/or movement.  This helps to capture and keep the attention of the active and auditory learners.

Eleven Weeks Down: Raise Your Hand if You’re Glad It’s OVER!!!!

Rotten pumpkins on Halloween are very SCARY!

On Tuesday morning this week after Halloween was over, I posted this message on my HeidiSongs Facebook page:  “Okay, teachers!!! Your mission:  IMPOSSIBLE.
Keep approximately 24 exhausted, over-stimulated, and sugared-up four & five year olds quietly and calmly learning the state standards, as if today were a day like any other.”  I very quickly had 32 “Likes” and 22 comments as people all started to tell me how tired they were and how difficult their days were!  Okay, raise your hand if you had fun, but you are glad it is OVER!  And now from the frying pan and into the fire we go:  many of us have assessments to finish so that we can write our report cards and then hold parent conferences!  I know that mine are scheduled to begin next week.


Last week on Friday, I attended a staff development presentation on our district’s new writing program, called “Step Up to Writing.”  I still can’t figure out why in the world the presenter that they have chosen for us is someone that has only taught high school!!!!  (She is back for a second round of inservices since she gave us the first installment in August.)  So there we sat, a group of Kinder, First, and Second Grade teachers, and she again told us that “11th and 12th graders are just like Kindergartners.”  Arrrrrgh!!!  If I have to hear a secondary teacher tell me that again, I think I am going to absolutely LOSE IT one of these days!  A couple of weeks ago, I sat in a diagnostic lab and corrected a stack of homework papers while I waited in a very long line for some routine blood work to be done.  A lady sitting next to me was watching me and commented on the work I was doing.  She asked, “What grade do you teach?”  “Kindergarten,” I responded.  She said, “I teach English to adults.  They’re just like Kindergartners!  They do just the same things!!!!”  Then she laughed and began to describe how alike they are.  I listened politely for a few minutes, and then I started to get irritated.
So I said:
“Is their attention span longer than five minutes?  She said, “Uh, yes....”
“Do they pick their nose?”  She said, “No....”
“Do they hit each other, cry when they get dropped off, have to be taught how to hold a pencil, not to hide under the table, have tantrums, or wet their pants?”   She said, “Well, no...”
Then they are NOT just like Kindergartners!!!”   Her chin dropped to the floor as she sat there in stunned silence.  Suddenly, I heard the lab technician call my name.  “Heidi Butkus!!!”  I quickly gathered up my things and as I walked away, I heard, “Well, I DO have to work on social skills with them!!!”  (All I could think of was THIS:  "Oh, yeah, right.  Give me a BREAK!  Teaching adults is NOTHING like teaching Kindergartners, and I don’t think that there is anyone in this world that can make me believe that it is!"  I teach both age groups regularly, after all!)

And, for those of you that are using the Read Aloud Charts, the remaining Read Aloud Charts are posted for sale on my website at this link.  Just scroll down a bit and you’ll find them!  For those of you that are just joining us, I had posted the first few Read Aloud Charts for August, September, and October as free downloads on my blog earlier this year, but now we finally we able to squeeze them onto our already overloaded website!  Luckily, we are getting a new website soon with room for lots more products and information, and posting things won’t be such an issue. 
:0

1.  Introducing a NEW sequel to the Wiggles book:  Wiggles Learns to Pay Attention!
The kids LOVE it, and I love it because it helps me address all of those little bad habits that kids sometimes have that prevent them from paying attention to lessons, such as:  picking at yourself and/or your clothing, spinning around in circles on the carpet, rolling around on the carpet, wandering around during a lesson, attention getting behaviors, asking or telling unrelated questions or stories, talking to other students in the middle of a lesson, interrupting, and asking to take care of restroom needs in the middle of a lesson.  In short, all of the annoying things that the children did continually during the first two or three weeks of school when they were supposed to be paying attention but were not found their way into this book!  It was actually a really fun way to brainstorm a story!

I find this book to be a wonderful, non-threatening way to address behavior issues with children because it takes the focus off of individual children that may be misbehaving and focuses it on the dog in the story instead.  When I tell the story, I always use a soft hand puppet and have that puppet act out the story, and as he misbehaves, I talk to him about why his behavior is a bad idea and what the consequences of that behavior might be.

It's Wiggles, Live!

I used this technique earlier this year when a child in my class misbehaved, and I got out the puppet and I talked to the puppet about the misbehavior rather than the child.  My thought was that if I did it this way, the entire class could benefit from this teachable moment, and I could avoid lavishing any negative attention on the offending child, which could actually backfire and reinforce the very behavior I was trying to eliminate.  In fact, as I tried to talk to Wiggles about the bad behavior, the child in question kept trying to interrupt my conversation with the puppet and insist that he did not do this or that.  I just reminded the child that I was not talking to him, but the dog puppet instead!  Thankfully, the child in question gave up after two or three tries to redirect attention to himself, and simply listened to my conversation with the Wiggles puppet instead of argue with me and try to get the class to focus their attention back on him.  In the end, he gave up on the behavior I wanted to eliminate, so it must have worked!
 On a side note, last week one day after school during my tutoring group, the classroom door opened, and in trotted a small dog that someone had evidently let in.  Wouldn’t you know that the dog was a dead ringer for Wiggles, LOL!  (Well okay- he was a white mutt with black spots, which was close enough for us!)  The kids in the group all started yelling, “WIGGLES, WIGGLES!!!!!” as if a real live celebrity had just walked into our room!  It was hilarious!  It turned out that the dog had been sniffing at our door after school and one of the children from another class that had gone to the restroom had seen him there, and decided to let him in, assuming that he belonged to us!  Not long after that, the dog’s owner came looking for him.  Luckily, he was a friendly little thing!  You can see a picture of our furry little visitor at the right.  :)


2.  A NEW Wiggles Game: Where’s Wiggles? Sight Word Game

Where's Wiggles?  Here he is!

My kids absolutely LOVE this new little game, because they get to pretend to be dogs and do dog tricks!  I love it because I get to watch them do silly things like shake, sit, stay, roll over, speak, beg, and wag their “tails,”LOL!  So in the game, the children read a word and then pick up the card to see if Wiggles is hidden behind it.  If not, the whole group does the dog trick.  It’s as simple as that.  It can be played whole group or small group. My only complaint about it is that I only wish we had more time to play it!  In a small group, it works better if you seat them on the floor rather than around a table, since they constantly need to get up from the table to do their dog tricks, and that’s a bit of a pain.  So it is better to just push the table and chairs out of the way, I think.  As always, we included a page of blank word cards so that you could change the words to whatever you are working on, or even change them to numbers, etc. 

When I tried the game out for the first time a couple of weeks ago, I had an incredibly fun morning, giggling the whole time as I watched them do their doggy tricks!  But I think that this game is a good cure for the blues.  Who could be depressed watching bunch of little kids roll over and beg, or wag their tails?  :)

3.  A Song for Number 31?
For a long time now, I have tried to sing the song for each number when we come to that number on the calendar.  So for example, if it is the 27th of September, we would sing the Twenty-seven song from Jumpin’ Numbers Vol. 2, and if it is the eighth day of October, we would sing either the Eight song from Jumpin’ Numbers Vol. 1, or the Number Eight Spelling Song from Sing and Spell Vol. 5.  BUT... when we come to number 31, there isn’t a song to sing, because I never wrote one for that number.  Well, this week on my HeidiSongs Facebook page, one of the readers there suggested that I write a 31 song for that purpose.  This is not the first time that this has come up, although the suggestion has only been made to me a couple of times in the past.  The problem with adding a song to an existing album is that anyone that already has the CD or DVD (or both!) is likely to be upset about having to buy the entire thing AGAIN, right?  And I couldn’t blame them.  What would I do?  I can’t replace everyone’s copy free of charge.  Since it seemed like opening a can of worms, I chose to ignore the issue completely and just skip it.
I can’t say that I will every actually add this song to the CD or DVD, but as I was trying to fall asleep on Wednesday night, I found myself trying to figure out how a 31 song might sound.  These number songs are typically very simple.  In fact, the challenge is to keep them simple, and not go overboard on the lyrics!  Kids don’t need much to help them remember these things; they only need a few key words.  As I turned it over in my head, a melody popped in- (thank you, Jesus!)  and it happened to be the tune of George of the Jungle!  If you are not familiar, then try Googling it and see what you come up with!  This little song I made up works to the tune of George of the Jungle, and maybe it will solve the immediate problem of needing a 31 song.  Meanwhile, maybe I can problem solve with my husband on what to do about updates to CD’s that need new songs added due to the Common Core Standards that most of us are having to meet now.  Yikes!

Thirty-one
© Heidi Butkus
 (It starts with the drum beat cadence.)

Three, one, that's 31, (say it like "that's thirty-wuh-un," for three syllables)
Three, one, that's 31,
Three, one, that's 31,
Three, one, that's 31!

(Here's where the drums stop and the lyrics start)
Three, one, that's 31,
That's a 31!
Uuuuuaaaaahhhhh!  (That's a Tarzan yell.)
THAT'S A 31!

5.  Number Writing:  Ugh!
Well, we have gone over it and over it and over it and some of the children just are not writing the numbers much better than before.  And I assign number writing practice for homework, and many of the parents in the class simply accept anything that their children write as correct and turn it in!  This drives me absolutely CRAZY!  I just don’t understand why some of them don’t ever think to help their child practice writing their name or their numbers or letters CORRECTLY instead of doing their homework practice completely wrong.  Where does that get us, anyway? 
So, I decided to make a “cheat sheet” for parents that would explain exactly what is acceptable in number writing and what is not, such as not making “snowmen” rather than “eight.”   I have included this sheet as a free download for you today, just in case you are having the same problem!  Of course, it does have one important flaw:  it does no good whatsoever unless someone at home actually READS it, so no guarantees!