HeidiSongs Teaching Resource

This week, I would like to share TEN fun new ways to help your kids practice matching sets from zero all the way up to thirty!  I have been creating these ideas for quite a while, and now share them in one of my new presentations on teaching number sense.  These activities are especially helpful for kids that are having trouble with zero to ten, all the way through those tricky teens and twenties. Bubbles in the Bathtub I call this activity, “Bubbles in the Bathtub!”  I found these cute little tubs at the Dollar Store.  I used pom poms for the bubbles, and then made groups of ten by hot gluing ten mini poms onto craft sticks.  Then I had the kids put them into the tubs, counting by tens, and then counting on from there to make the number that was shown on the side of the tub.  I value this activity because the children that need to physically count up all of the tiny pom poms still can touch each one, but the ones that don’t need to can simply ignore that and know that t

This post will tell you how to make CVC Word Family Gumballs!  My kids tried them out this week, and they were a huge HIT!  The children could hardly keep their hands off of them, given the allure of the gumball machine and the wonderfully shiny little jewels with the words on them! I have seen ideas from other bloggers and presenters using gumball machines in the classroom, and this was my inspiration for this idea.  Most notably, I pinned this wonderful picture from Shari Sloane’s website, KidsCount1234! Her students were putting pennies into her gumball machine and then writing the sight words that were written on jewels that came out.  It surely looked like a wonderful idea, but the gumball machines tend to be bulky (translate: hard to store) and expensive.   I knew that I did have a small, plastic gumball machine already.  So I decided to try something similar, but with CVC words so that my students could get a little more practice sounding out words and sorting

Okay, everybody! Here are my most popular posts of 2012, starting at the top!  I hope you enjoy the run down… 1.  How I Got 18 out of 23 Kids to Master 100% of Their Sight Words Coming in first place is this little gem of a post, that seems to have a life of it’s own on Pinterest , due to one little picture of a little boy holding the sight word “the” printed on a piece of construction paper!  It has been repinned, and repinned, and repinned, etc., etc., etc.!  I would have never guessed that this post would have gotten THAT many hits! The idea is to take a picture of each child holding a sight word, and then make a Power Point presentation out of the pictures and drill the kids on the words using it. 2.  Tips for the One iPad Classroom, and a Free iPad Rules Download! I never would have guessed that this post would have been quite that popular, except that I knew that the free rules for the iPad poster would be a hit!  I got the idea of posting tips for the one iPad

Here’s a great new idea that I developed for my new session on Common Core Literacy Centers, and I have decided to call it Sight Word Wands!  I can tell you that they are so bright, colorful, and appealing that I can hardly keep my own hands off of them, LOL!  Read this post if you would like to find out how you can make some of these beauties yourself. If you want to make sure the beads can’t “change places” in the tube, make sure you start with tubes that are 16 x 150 mm.  And though it may look like I added food coloring to the water, I did not!  This is just the effect of the glitter. First, I want to give credit where credit is due:  I was inspired by this idea that I saw on Pinterest from Mrs. Kelly’s Kindergarten!   I only just found her blog via that pin, and I have to say that she has lots of great ideas, so kudos to Kelly!  I will be following her blog from now on!   To make sure that the beads don’t “change places” in the tube, make sure that they are