HeidiSongs Teaching Resource

This week, I only taught on Tuesday, since Monday was Presidents’ Day, and I had to fly out for to Oklahoma on Wednesday!  I am scheduled to present at SDE’s Oklahoma Pre-K and Kindergarten Conference in Oklahoma City, so I wrote this blog entry early last weekend. Therefore, I decided to write about the answers to the top few questions that I seem to always get asked.  Plus, I also threw in a section with some free downloads that I have been saving for a busy week just like this one!  Hopefully, I’ll get to meet some really great people and pick up a few new ideas that I can pass along to you next week.  Enjoy! 1.  “Fishin’ for Addition” (And diamonds and hearts, too!)  I made up these worksheets last month when I made the previous one with the stars on it that I gave away in January.    I am giving you now the ones with the diamonds, hearts and fish on them, since they are very appropriate for this time of year!  Find them here. Hopefully it is not too late for you t

I am sharing with you today some ways to help kids learn how to sound out nonsense words and even some REAL CVC words that actually make SENSE! (Imagine that!) I also have some guided drawing projects we have been working on over the past month, along with some other things for the February holidays and stuff I have been using for test review. On a personal note, this week, my class braved a field trip to the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, CA in the rain, no less! If we are REALLY lucky, then we will get to do our great Jump Rope for Heart fundraiser today in the rain as well!!!! Oh, boy! Hey, if they have snow days back east, why can’t we have rain days in California? It just doesn’t seem FAIR! I have never had a day off for snow in my whole life! Boooo! 1. Learning to Sound Out CVC Words Getting kids to sound out words is a tricky thing! There are a couple of “prerequisite skills” that each child must have in order to accomplish this. * One thing they need

Well, in all of the February celebrations, we somehow have to find time to get all of our testing done, since our upcoming reporting period will be ending soon.  So I find myself trying to figure out ways to keep groups of children occupied so that I can steal a few moments “alone” with each one for testing.  My goal is always to get it done early enough so that I can help the few kids that are “straggling” along on a few concepts. That way, I can help them a little bit more and then retest the children again at the very last minute if I think they may have mastered some of the concepts.Besides all of the regular holidays, we also have a field trip to the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, CA next week on Wednesday, plus our school’s annual Jump Rope For Heart fund raiser for the American Heart Association on Friday.  So I am trying to take advantage of every teachable and testable moment that we have, because of course before I know it, February will be GONE! As far as I am

I have a couple different Valentine’s Day themed activities for you! Free sight word worksheets, a free Love Bug art project.. It just may be that Valentine’s Day is the most wonderful, most loving, most pure of all of the classroom celebrations that take place in Kindergarten!  The children are genuinely excited about giving their cards and gifts to each other, no matter how small. Maybe this is why teachers seem to be so drawn to February projects that feature hearts as a motif, and I am certainly no exception! 1.  Sweet Sight Word Surprise and Valentine’s Day Color By Sight Word Worksheet In my blog entry on September 24, 2010  I posted an idea for something I called the “Secret Sight Word Surprise.”  In this activity, you prepare the papers ahead of time by writing some different sight words on them with a white crayon.  Then the children water color the paper, and as they do, the word becomes visible, since it is essentially a water color resist!  Although my chi