Student Skills and Calming Strategies

I think we can all agree that the hardest part of teaching kindergarten isn't the academic piece, am I right? While there is SO much to learn in that regard, it is not the part of teaching that poses us the greatest challenge. I'm not trying to speak for everyone, but I THINK I CAN SPEAK FOR EVERYONE when I say that one of the most difficult parts of this role is teaching kids to be STUDENTS. That's a packed word isn't it? When we're facing a class of 20 kids who don't know how to student, we realize just how big this job is! 

I took some time this summer and really thought about what I want my kids to know and internalize when it comes to those social skills and I put together this set called Being a Student. I'm certain it will grow over time as we uncover more skills that are needed, but this is a good start! Now, I'm not disillusioned into thinking there's a ton of time in the day to teach these very necessary student skills. Let's be real. There's never enough time. SO, in putting together this resource, I tried to create every part to only take 5-10 minutes. Some parts can just be sprinkled throughout the week as you have a quick moment. 

Here's what's included:

1. A social story with discussion questions. 

2. A simple parent letter for that home-connection piece. 

3. A mentor text list for additional support. 

4. A response sheet with a drawing only option and a drawing/writing option. 

5. A list of scenario prompts for discussion. 

6. A poster to reference throughout the year. 

I also created a digital version of the social story and scenarios for anyone that teaches off slides like me! 

What skills do we address?

*School has Rules

*Following Directions

*I Can Do Hard Things

*Paying Attention

*I'm Part of a Team

*It's Not All About Me

*I Can Stay Calm

*Big Deal/Small Deal

*Mistakes Are Okay!

*I Am a Problem Solver

If you have any suggestions for additional skills, please leave them in a comment! I'd love for this resource to grow. Click here to take a closer look or grab it for your own classroom!

One of the biggest issues my modern-day kindergartners face right now is that they lack the skills of self-regulation. So many of my kids go from 0-60 so quickly and then struggle to bring themselves back to a calm headspace in order to continue on with their day. Be sure to grab this FREE set of self-regulation and mindful breathing cards for your kiddos! I teach each one explicitly to the whole class, we practice together, and then I put the cards on a binder ring in our calm down spot! I have also made copies of specific ones for specific students to keep on/in their desk to use as needed. 

Grab them for FREE here or click on the image!

I also have a larger set of Mindful Breathing strategies! If you teach with slides like me, then these Mindful Breathing breaks are PERFECT for putting in your slides at the points of your day that kids are getting a little escalated. I use them right before special class and right after recess! They come as poster size and card size as well if you're not into the slides. 

Don't have a calm down spot? I got you covered! This has been a MUST have for my kindergarten classroom. Find a cozy corner and get started!  

Wishing you a calm and happy school year - with students who are less like feral cats and more like functioning humans! :) 

Nursery Rhymes and Colors - The perfect entry point to Kindergarten.

Kindergarten teachers - I applaud you. Every year at the beginning, I forget how little they come with! I forget the absolutely absurd amount they learn over the course of the year. Of course, knowing how far they go means that they start the year with very little understanding of letters, sounds, words, print concepts. 

If you're like me, you might be searching for engaging and exciting ways to introduce these beginning basic skills. You want your students to fall in love with learning while gaining the skills they'll need to be successful for the remainder of the year. Over the last several years, I have done just that with two beloved favorites: 

Nursery Rhymes and Colors. 

Why nursery rhymes? They are sing-songy and fun! Students typically come with some exposure to them already and that background knowledge will be a huge support. SO MANY SKILLS can be imbedded in your Nursery Rhyme practice, particularly print concepts like 1 to 1 correspondence and letter/word awareness. 

Why colors? Most kids already know them! They can tell you that apples are red and frogs are green. Their beginning knowledge of colors opens the doors to sprinkling in so much skill practice, like pairing the colors to words, sorting, tracing/writing, coloring, and so much more! 

If you're interested in using these two concepts as vehicles for your beginning of the year instruction, look no further. I've already done all the work for you and have several free resources to offer! 

NURSERY RHYMES - Sing to learn! 

Each of my nursery rhyme sets comes with the following activities:

*Print concept posters

*One-Page Reader with or without tracking dots

*Emergent Reader in Book Form

*Vocabulary Posters

*Sound/Word Study for Phonics and Phonemic Awareness

*Pocket Chart Sequencing Station with 2 Recording Sheets

*STEM Challenge

*Craft

*Printables to practice alphabet, cutting, labeling, and numbers to 20

*1 Math Station

*1 Literacy Station

You can grab the Humpty Dumpty set HERE for FREE to try out with your kiddos! 

Or you can grab the bundle of 5 nursery rhymes HERE! 

COLORS - Use the familiar! 

Each of my color sets comes with the following:

*2 Color Posters

*Emergent Reader w/Simple High Frequency Words

*Color Sorting Pocket Activity 

*Poetry Center

*Torn Paper Craft

*Color Crown

*Fine Motor Activity

*5 no-prep printables for extra practice!

You can grab the RED set HERE for FREE to try out with your kiddos! 

Or grab the BUNDLE with 11 colors! 

GRAB THESE FOR FREE! 

These open ended craft pages are a blast! You can have kids use a variety of supplies - whatever you're working on that week - to fill them in! Bingo daubers, stickers, cut paper, paints, markers, you name it! The circle charts can either be a guided brainstorm activity OR a "write the room" where students search the room for items of that color. Click here or the image below to download. ENJOY! 

Writing Before They Can Write - HOW?!

I love teaching writing in Kindergarten. I know it's not everyone's jam, because let's face it, it's hard! Writing is the only content area where students have to produce something from nothing. It's literally all on them! In years, past, I have struggled with what to do at the beginning of the year when students don't yet have the letter/sound knowledge to produce words. I know I'm not alone here! I didn't know how to fill our writing time before students could actually write. 

In seeking to solve that problem, I asked myself what the pre-requisite skills were. Well, before they can write letters, they have to be able to manipulate a writing tool and produce the developmental strokes necessary for letter formation. 

Before they can write stories, they have to be able to TELL stories - to understand the components that make up a story. Eventually we want them to be able to tell these stories with words and pictures. They'll need the foundation for drawing before becoming illustrators. 

Enter Before Words. I wanted a systematic approach for teaching all these skills. I didn't want to leave them to chance or try to teach them "on the fly" because these prerequisite skills deserve the same care and intentionality as anything else we teach. I know you've heard this before, but I can't stress it enough in Kindergarten Land. 

Go slow to go fast. 

I put together a unit for each of these skills: pre-writing strokes, oral storytelling, and illustrations. Each unit includes detailed lesson plans that follow a gradual release model: I do, we do, you do. Each lesson has a Google teaching slide already prepared for each of those gradual release components. These are no-prep, no guess work, everything laid out and ready to go! Click HERE to get a closer look! 

BUT, WAIT! I want to clarify something. I fully believe that while you're teaching these prerequisite writing skills, you should simultaneously be teaching children about letters and sounds. When you're working on oral storytelling and illustrating, you're also giving them the tools to physically write. So, I highly recommend pairing this work with some letter formation practice. I've got a really comprehensive handwriting bundle you can find here. And I want to offer you a freebie A-Z letter set as well! Click the image below to download! :) 

Wishing you all the best as you give your kids the tools and confidence to be actual, real life writers! Thank you for all you do to encourage their creativity and the opportunities you provide for them to express themselves through story! 

Mystery Egg - Easter Clue Solving FUN!

I saw a giant egg at Target and couldn't resist. I knew I had to have it but wasn't sure what I needed it for!  I saw some equally amazing giant eggs at Kroger if you're looking for one. After some thought, I landed on this idea for a little whole-class fun! 

SUPER easy, all you need to do is hide a whole group activity inside a large Easter egg (or an Easter basket if you can't find an egg).  Some ideas of what you can hide would be sidewalk chalk, paints, bubbles, gum, lollipops... whatever you think might be fun for your class!

Then, you will provide four clues for what is inside the egg!  Reveal each clue one at a time. After each clue, discuss predictions as a class. Talk about how your predictions changed as clues were added based on the new information.  For this freebie, I have provided clues for three different objects: sidewalk chalk, paints, and bubbles! If you'd like to hide something else in the egg, all you will need to do is come up with four clues that build upon each other. 

After the final clue, send students to their desks to draw and label their predictions of what is in the egg.

Then, the reveal! Open up the egg to reveal the Easter surprise! Talk about how it fit each of the clues given. Send the kids back to their seats to finish their recording sheets. Then, of course, the BEST PART! Whatever you've hidden in the egg, you can now enjoy together!

This activity works just as beautifully with a cute little Easter basket! 

And that's it! Be sure to grab this freebie to try with your kiddos! You can click here or click the image below to download. 

Have you grabbed this Easter Literacy Freebie yet?  It has a cute little emergent reader, a beginning blends sort, and a CVC "bunny belly spelling" station. 

And don't forget to check out these spring thematic units! 

Plants and Weather!

It's almost Spring - though we are expecting our first big snowfall of the season this weekend... Yikes! Regardless, I love Spring and the fun topics that come with the season. Here's a peek into some of the activities we use to teach about plants and weather. Be sure to grab the freebie at the end of each section! 

 After reading some books and watching some videos on plants, we create this brace map for what plants need, what they have, and what they are. 

We learn about the parts of a plant and do some labeling. 

We also learn about the life cycle of a plant before we prepare to grow our own! 

Through the course of our plant unit, the kids will get to sprout their own lima beans and grow marigolds (either one as a class in a clay pot or individually in small cups!) Before we plant our marigolds, we will get our hands into a soil exploration. 

We also do some learning about plant needs to prepare them for caring for their plants. I love these little flipbooks with a sentence starter!

Then we'll learn about the steps for growing a flower with this chart. We also do some how-to writing on this topic. 

In addition to growing their own flowers, the kids will each sprout their own lima beans in a plastic bag. We make these cute little garden templates to frame the plastic bags and so kids can easily identify their seeds. 

And they make observations in a little journal as their seed begins to grow.

And of course a unit wouldn't be complete without some fun station activities that review math and literacy skills. 

Grab these two game boards for FREE to practice addition and subtraction fact fluency within 5! 

All of these activities are available in my Plant Unit on TPT! Click the image below to get a better look!

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We learn a LOT in our weather unit.  We learn about the different kinds of weather, the seasons, what meteorologists do, and the clouds! 

We make this cute little poem/craft with cotton balls as we learn about the different kinds of clouds.

 Then students get to observe the clouds and record their observations in their cloud journals.

We read the book "It Looked Like Spilt Milk" and then draw our own clouds with white crayon on blue construction paper. These make a great class book or hallway display!

And of course we HAVE to read Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs!! We learn a little poem about food falling from the sky and write about what foods we would and would not want to rain down!

We also learn about temperature and how we can use the weather predictions to prepare ourselves (what we should wear, pack with us, plan for activities, etc.). We love to get out thermometers and measure different temperatures (inside/outside/in water). 

We observe the weather every day for a week and write our observations in our journals.  In March in Indiana, the weather can vary a lot from day to day! 

And we do lots of fun activities during our stations time! 

You can grab these two color by code sheets for free! There is one for addition within 10 and one for subtraction within 10! Click here to grab them or click the images! 

 And of course, all of these activities are available in my Weather Unit on TPT!

Happy almost Spring!!!