HeidiSongs Teaching Resource

As you can see in the photo below, this has been an exciting summer for us!  We have opened an actual HeidiSongs office.  So for the very first time, we have four walls (other than our home!) to run the business out of, and even a couple of friends to help out!  Above you can see a picture of me, Heidi, in front of the door.  I feel so very blessed to be a part of God's plan in this, and so very fortunate that my husband Greg wants to run this business for me.  Because if he didn't, I'd be truly lost- and I mean that sincerely. Also new, I am now on Twitter!  So if you like to tweet along with me, you can follow me on Twitter! @heidisongs (I am also on Facebook and Instagram , if you're interested!) And now down to the business of blogging!  One thing that I always love to do is look around at the exhibits at conferences, especially the larger ones where there is a good selection of new materials out for browsing.  Who would have thought that there would be

Making lesson plans for a group rotation in Kindergarten doesn't have to be time consuming or difficult!  Once you find a routine that works, the process becomes much easier and planning for the entire week can be done quickly and easily, especially when you follow a pacing guide as I do. (Click here to download mine.) Here is the routine that I generally follow when planning for my small group rotation in language arts, along with some links to other posts on how I do my rotation and learning centers. I wrote this post in response to the question below that was emailed to me this week, and I thought that I would include both the question and answer in my blog, just in case there are others with the same thoughts. Question: "How do you make the lesson plans to work in groups? For example, do you give your lesson at the beginning and then send them to their groups? What I do, is follow the Houghton Mifflin guides. For Mondays, I would introduce the new alpha-fr

I hope you all had a wonderful holiday weekend, and that ALL of you are now finally enjoying your summer break!  It has been incredibly hot and steamy here in sunny Southern California; in fact, it seems a lot like a sauna outside! The questions and answers below are posted in response to some questions that arose after last week’s blog post on my center rotation.   The person that asked the questions left them as comments on the blog, and after I answered them, I thought that with a little bit of clarification, they might be good general blog entries rather than just comments on the blog that few might think to read.  I hope that the questions and answers are helpful to you! Question:  It sounds like all of your class rotates through to the teacher table each day. Does each rotation last 15 minutes? Puzzles are a nice, easy center! Answer:   Yes, they do go to the teacher table every day.  And actually, each rotation lasts about 20 minutes, with about 4-5 minutes p

This week it’s been back to normal, and back to work at home on different projects!  I’ve been focusing on creating a new presentation that I will be giving for the first time at SDE’s Arkansas Kindergarten Conference on December 2, 2011 .  Since the handout is due this week, the presentation itself must also be mostly finished, so I have been having some fun working on that.  In order to accomplish this task, I have been going through all of my picture and blog files, and trying to pull into one single computer folder all of my guided drawing activities that I have.  Boy, there’s a LOT of them!  Actually, I am very pleased with the way it is coming out; I think that this session will really be a FUN one!  I am going to have the participants drawing along with me, and then I’ll be showing them pictures of the children's work.  I did a little bit of guided drawing in my “Singable Books to Make and Read” session at the SDE Minnesota K Conference last week, and it was great fun!