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Showing posts from December, 2010
   

Happy New Year!

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Well, we’re wrapping up another calendar year, and getting ready to go back to see our little "Kindies" again! For me, that’s next week on Monday. So this week, I’ll be telling you about some things that I have planned for next week. This past week, my husband and I started making fresh video tapes of Sing and Spell Volumes One and Two ! He is working on making them available as digital media, for use with interactive whiteboards and custom Powerpoint presentations for teachers who would rather use this in their classrooms than DVDs! This will give you the ability to customize your lessons by rearranging the songs in any order, just by moving the song slides around to your liking. I think that this will be a great tool! Here is a picture of me in our “studio” which is our really just our garage!!! 1. Winter Themes I always begin my unit on winter when the children come back from school in January. So we begin by learning the Winter song from Little Songs for La
   

Welcoming the Holidays! - Week #17

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Well, I wasn’t planning on publishing a blog this week, but there seem to be plenty of folks out there who are still teaching for a few more days next week, so maybe these resources will help out in a last minute pinch!  For those of you who, like me, are all finished teaching for now and are just beginning two weeks of vacation, then maybe you can file these things away until next year! 1.  Poinsettia Book Buddy Project I posted a picture of this beautiful art project on my HeidiSongs Facebook page , and several people asked me to share the pattern for it.  So I brought home the file and got to work on it, and I am sharing it with you today as a free download!  I do want to point out that making the points on this poinsettia is rather tricky, and NOT something I would attempt to do with Kindergartners without plenty of help!  We always do this project with our third grade book buddies, or not at all.  The hard part is wrapping the petal around a finger to form a point.  Then
   

Counting Down to Christmas Vacation! - Week #16

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Here are FIVE great ideas to help you welcome the holiday season in your pre-K, Kindergarten, or first grade classroom, and a sleigh FULL of free downloads to go with them!  There are downloadable instructions for Christmas Guided Drawing, a Christmas Tree matching sets activity to practice the numbers 0-30, a Sight Word Santa game, a Counting by Tens Christmas Tree Hat, and three different Christmas themed worksheets, including a graph, a counting worksheet for 10-30, and a Christmas tree color words worksheet.  Boy, oh BOY!  I hope you enjoy all of this, and have a wonderful holiday! 1. Christmas Guided Drawing Directions Back by popular demand, here are the instructions as a free download and some pictures for a Christmas themed guided drawing picture. Remember, the kids draw along with the teacher in a following directions and visual perception type of exercise that results in a fun drawing! My kids always wind up including these little drawings as illustr
   

Teaching Kindergarten: What’s Working? - Week #15

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Here are FIVE more great ideas for teaching kindergarten during week 15 of the school year, which for us falls right smack at the beginning of December!  Read on to hear about my ideas for a fun game called Jingle Bell Bang, a free downloadable Hanukkah candle craft pattern, some free calendar printable calendar icons, an idea for using our Number Pattern Blocks to teach numeracy from 11-30, and some links to my favorite holiday books.  Enjoy! 1.  Jingle Bell Bang! Many years ago, I came up with the idea for this little game, I call Jingle Bell Bang .  I originally made it using holiday stickers on index cards.  I wrote the directions up on a separate piece of paper, and I have used the game every year since!  I have shared the directions for this game many times on the Teachers.net Kindergarten Chatboard, but was never able to share the actual game cards because I made the game with stickers that I found at Stater Brothers!  Well, I finally found the time to draw the artwo