HeidiSongs Teaching Resource

Here is a fun art project that can be done for Memorial Day or the Fourth of July with patriotic colors, or for any day with other colors!  All you need is some painters tape and some paper that you can easily remove the tape from.  In our case, we had a bunch of paper that had been donated from somewhere that worked.  It looks and feels like pieces of poster board because it is stiff and glossy on one side.  The best thing to do is to try it with what you have and see what will work best.  Our pieces of paper were about 12 inches by 12 inches.   Painter's masking tape is usually blue and removes easily. I lucked out with the painter's tape because I happened to find it at the local dollar store!  So I just bought about five rolls of it in the hopes that we would have plenty and would not run out.  My class has not yet had a chance to actually try this project out, because my volunteer didn't show up to help out on the day that we were going to do it.  But a

Pete the Cat "fever" has swept through my classroom and indeed, my school!  All of the Kindergarten classes at my school are now reading and enjoying all of the Pete the Cat books and activities that we are finding on blogs and other places online!  So I decided to hop on the "Pete Bandwagon" and make a few of them myself.   My favorite drawing is the one with just three legs, LOL!  It's SO Kindergarten! I haven't posted a good guided drawing lesson in quite a while, so I thought that a nice Pete the Cat guided drawing freebie would be just the ticket to help close out the school year for those of us that are still plowing our way through it!  We do the whole cat with a black marker first, and don't pass out crayons until we are done. The Pete the Cat Guided Drawing activity was lots of fun and very successful.  The kids didn't find it challenging at all, other than the shoes.  This was the first time that I had tried

Counting to 100 is a tough skill for many little ones, but it is one that they are expected to master in the Common Core Standards for Kindergarten!  In my district, we have been expected to teach the children to do this now for many years, so this is nothing new, thankfully!  I am now down to about eight students (out of 23) that are still unable to count to 100 successfully without assistance. As I have attempted to get them to master this skill, I decided to keep track of the different things that I have done to help them and share these things with you here today. Obviously, counting to 100 involves recognizing the hundred's chart as one giant pattern!  And I think that a lack of solid patterning skills (and probably some general readiness issues) are what is holding back some of the children in my class from reaching this milestone.  Children also need to practice this skill with an adult in a one-on-one situation, and if parents at home forget to do this, then th

Well, we finally did it - our new Music for Classroom Management CD is finally here, and it's posted on the website!  I am so excited, because the kids and I are LOVING this CD!  And, as fate would have it, I wound up with a very difficult class this year, so having songs to review the rules has really been helpful.  God works in mysterious ways, doesn't He?   I have encountered one classroom management problem after another, and have tried to solve them musically.  The list of songs kept on growing and growing throughout the year, as I plowed my way through different situations and tried to solve them by writing songs and teaching the children to sing them.  Now I am going to tell you about a few of them!  We also are working on some visual aids to go with this CD, and we are providing you with some free downloads from it for your kids to color, just for fun! Nobody Likes a Tattle Tale! Is there any good solution for solving the never ending problem of tattling?  W

The snake was so long that it was difficult to photograph! These are the completed snakes. This week, I created some giant zoo animals out of butcher paper for my kids to paint!  So I am going to tell you a little bit about how I did that, and then let the pictures tell the rest of the story. To create the animals, I just took the patterns from the Zoo Book that is on our website and basically multiplied the size times five!  So if the pattern called for a five inch square for the head of an animal, I cut out a 25 inch square, and then cut off the corners as usual!  As far as the patterns were concerned, such as for the head of the alligator, I had to just sort of sketch it out myself because I couldn't possibly enlarge the pattern on the xerox machine to that size!  So I just "eyeballed it" and took my best guess, figuring that it needed to look a little childish anyway, and it worked out just fine!  When I was finished putting the animal together, I too

Today I am going to tell you about a resource that I have really fallen in love with... our newest creation, called Counting Creatures Subtraction Worksheets!   And one really fun part of this book is the part of it that is a lot like my recent post on Loose Tooth Subtraction , except this one has the loose teeth on MONSTERS! We have been working on developing this new subtraction book over the last couple of months, and I have been trying it out in my classroom, of course.  The children really love the monster theme of these worksheets, and they love coloring in those monsters when they are done with their work!  But the BEST thing about them is that my kids passed their official subtraction test for the report card this week with flying colors, and I would have to say that these are the best results on a subtraction test that I have had in years!  I think it is because they are so excited about the activity, and got so much good practice doing it. Roll a die to fig