HeidiSongs Teaching Resource

What should you do when you tell a child to go to time out, but the child refuses to go?  There are few things that are harder to deal with as far as discipline problems are concerned, in my opinion.  This question was recently asked of me on my HeidiSongs Facebook page, and because it is such a difficult issue to deal with, I thought that I would post my response and of some of the other responses here.  It was also the topic of part of my classroom management presentation at the SDE Missouri Kindergarten Conference that I was at last Tuesday, and the Alabama Kindergarten Association Conference last week on Saturday!  So the topic is on my mind at the moment.  I would love to hear from more of you if you have other ideas to contribute!  As far as I am concerned, the more ideas and experiences that we all have to draw from, the better!  By the way, if there are any other questions you would like me to tackle, please feel free to leave a comment below or post it on my Facebook p

Do you like to hunt for teacher treasure at conferences??  I do! One of my favorite things to do at educational conferences is to go into the rooms where different people are presenting, and look at all of the goodies and gadgets that they have displayed there.  Then I search for the very best ones, and take pictures of them!  I like to call this process my "Treasure Hunt," because it is often like looking for buried treasure amongst all of the things that they have set up.  And, just like Pinterest, a picture is often worth a thousand words!  So it is often possible to just look at what they have on display for all of their sessions and instantly just "know" what they are going to say about it!  It is the quickest way to get new ideas that I know of.  Sometimes, there are just as many great ideas in the exhibit hall as well.  Here are a few pictures of the treasures that I found at I Teach K last week!  I hope you enjoy them! Gumball Machine from Help

This week, I thought I would share a few quick tips that have helped me keep organized in the classroom over the years!  And sometimes, pictures are the best, quickest way to communicate!  I hope that they are useful to you!  Here are a few quick pictures of some things I do in my room to stay organized. One thing that helps me keep organized is any clipping paper masters that I often need for lessons inside the teacher's manuals that we use, and keeping those masters in page protectors. I mark the correct page to begin on for each group with a colored post-it note.  Those same sticky notes often last me a whole year! I recently found some colored clips that serve the same purpose.  They work just as well, of course! I try to always save the large zippered bags that new bedspreads and other blankets come in so that I can store picnic blankets in them in my classroom!  I like to take the kids outside and read a book on the grass when it's a

This year, I had the usual amount of "reluctant writers" that really didn't want to risk trying to write anything new for fear of making a mistake.  So I tried to come up with some new ways to motivate them to write sentences with the sight words that they needed to work on, and also include some words that they would have to sound out and spell phonetically.  One of these motivational techniques that I came up with was to have the children make books using stickers as the pictures!  Most kids just LOVE stickers, so I assumed that this would be a good activity for my kids.  We did this last February or March, as I recall.   Last year, a teacher retired and left a big box of stickers in the teacher lounge up for grabs.  Guess who took it???? This was the activity: 1.  I made an example of what a Sight Word Sticker Book might look like. 2.  I gave the children blank books that I prepared ahead of time, all stapled together and ready to go. 3.  I