Team Meeting Binder

Oh my, I feel like I've been MIA from my blog. I was able to participate in Friendship Fridays with some new blog buddies, but I've been in the middle of so many projects that I just didn't want to post until I had something new and fab to show. 

My FAVORITE project that I've been working on is my team/faculty meeting binder. I was trying to create something that is basically life-proof. No matter what the situation, I wanted to have something in my meeting binder for it. I'm still trying to figure out a way to discreetly keep an emergency latte in it though.

I don't even want to put a cover sheet in it because I'm so in love with this color and print! This should be easy enough for me to find at any time.

Components:

Agenda

SPARKLY notebook

District calendar

Team meeting note sheets

Faculty meeting not sheets

I couldn't find the perfect team meeting note sheets, so I made them myself. I really enjoy the brain space for doodling and jotting down my crazy ideas. :-) You can find those HERE in my TPT store!

I always prefer my notes to be chronological in a common place, and on the SAME style of paper. Having uniform note sheets should save my sanity there.

Oh and the best part...

All of these post-it stacks are attached with velcro so that I can pull them out or replace them at any time. The velcro set up and fox post-its make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

I love this thing! I'll let you know if I figure out that latte...

Friendship Friday *All About Me*

Hey everyone! I'm so excited to be joining in on the Friendship Friday fun with some of my new teacher-blogger friends. Thanks for sharing your great idea, Mr. C! We've all been sharing so many wonderful classroom ideas, I'm looking forward to getting to know a little about everyone behind the blogs and Instagram accounts.

Here's a little about me...

Name(s): Tiffany, Miss M, Miss Matson, The Teaching Fox

Where I'm at: I live in Virginia Beach and teach in Norfolk.

My favorite things:

KiNdErGaRtEn

Anything purple

Coffee (mmmm)

Mr. Sketch scented markers
Saturday mornings

Netflix
Target, obviously

What I love most about this world of blogging:

I've only been live in the blogging world for a month as of yesterday. I actually feel like it's been a lot longer considering the amount of time I've put into the blog itself, my TPT store, and Instagram. I could never have imagined that even a month into this journey I would connect with such an amazingly creative group of people. I'm amazed every single day at what teachers are doing and how they are constantly pushing the envelope and giving 200% to their students, to their classrooms, and to developing themselves in their profession.

Since I joined this community, I've realized that I'm not the only crazy woman laminating at 1:00 in the morning, going to four Targets a week to stalk their school supplies, and getting over-the-moon excited about a 28% off sale on Teachers Pay Teachers. I'm so relieved to know there are more of you out there, haha.

Seriously though, it's incredible to be among such a positive, hardworking group of people.


Thanks for stopping by! For more of me, you can follow me on:

Instagram at: TheTeachingFox
Teachers Pay Teachers at:
https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/The-Teaching-Fox

My Teachers Pay Teachers Grand Opening

I am so SO so SO so excited to announce that I have officially become a teacherpreneur! My Teachers Pay Teachers store is up and running with just a couple basic FREE documents. Yay! This has been a goal of mine for so very long and I am very excited to be making it happen.

You can visit my store here!

Follow me. (My store that is, so you don't miss new freebies)

Rate me. (So I can stop seeing that sad little "0 ratings" under my store name)

Here's a run down of the beginning items you'll find in my store. You can click the pictures to take you to the download.

The first product is a basic pack of student information sheets, parent information sheets, and reminder bracelets for back to school. They are all black line so they can be copied however you'd like.

The second product is all about making connections after reading. This is something I've noticed my students struggling with during DRAs. They weren't quite able to verbalize their connections to me, but I knew they could make them. Just because they can't articulate it, doesn't mean that they can't do it. I realized that I was skipping a step. When students write, we consider drawing an essential pre-writing strategy in kindergarten, so maybe reading comprehension requires the same strategy. I thought I would try adding this step, providing students with the visual representation of a thought bubble to illustrate their connection.

I found that it helped students that were not ready to articulate their connection, giving them an outlet to express it, and showing me that they could do it.

It helped the students that were ready to articulate connections by allowing them to take their connection a step further and think of connections to other texts and the world as well.

Sound Sort Organization

Ok so this is a spur of the moment post, but I just had to share how well this project came together.

I used to store my sound sort cards in envelopes...in a box. How boring. SO clearly this area of my life needed to be revamped.

Thanks to my incredible reading interventionist (who has just retired this year, sad face) for this oh-so-perfect organizer. She had been using it for magnetic letters-also a great idea. It was love at first sight and I knew I could turn this into the sound sort organization tool of my dreams.

With just a little spray paint, card stock, and letters. Ta-da!

The best part is that it fits perfectly with this amazing guided reading pack I got from Mrs. Lee's TPT store.

I just printed multiple sheets per page to make them a little smaller. This helped me save on ink, card stock, and most importantly they fit into the organizer of my dreams. It was meant to be!

Classroom Tips and Tricks

First of all I just want to thank every single person that has taken the time to stop by and look at and/or read my blog. Those of you that have sent sweet messages my way, thank you! You really make it all worth it. I love hearing from people that tell me they can use even just one of these ideas. Thank you!

As I've stated in a previous post, I set my classroom up with student independence in mind. Some of the tips and tricks you'll see here were thought of with exactly that in mind. Others might just be cute things I feel are share-worthy.

I apologize in advance that I don't have ideal pictures for everything in this post, I clearly was not thinking with this blog in mind.


1. Turn-In Bins
If you look at the smart board in my classroom, you'll see two purple baskets below it. I attach those with command hooks so that they hang in place. Last year I used these as baskets for students to turn in their recording sheets after workstations.

This year I plan to use two different colors. One will still be the turn-in bin, the other will hold write the room activities and materials. I've moved some furniture around this year so this seems like the best way to keep traffic evenly moving throughout the room in all directions.

2. Invisible Light

I use this light when I'm testing students or teaching guided reading. Students know that when my light is on, they cannot interrupt unless it's a true emergency.

3. Extra Recording Sheet Organization
One of the most frequent interruptions I would get while teaching guided reading was students asking for more recording sheets to use at their workstation. Then I would have to stop teaching and either explain where they were, or get them for them.

Last year I decided to use an organizer to store all extra workstation sheets and label each section with the workstation picture. You can see them on the right side of the picture below. The one thing I will change this year is to relocate them so that they do not disrupt students in the library area.

4. Guided Reading Anchor Chart Stand

I made this cute little stand last summer while I was on my PVC project and spray paint binge. I use it at my guided reading table  to display small group objectives and anchor charts.

5. Missing Pieces Buckets

These buckets helped keep our tiny workstation pieces and headless glue sticks from getting lost or thrown in the trash.

6. Speech Bubbles

I was looking for a way to display student work in the hallway, but to also incorporate the student's description of their work in their own words. I added these speech bubbles and their photos above their work. I would write a quote from each student in dry erase marker.

7. Listening Station

I love having a listening station in my classroom, but I never really love the way any books on CD or cassette are read. So I decided to make my own!

I used a cassette tape to record myself reading a group of books. I would begin by having them locate things we were focusing on at that point. For example, before reading I would have them locate the parts of the book, give them time to take a picture walk, find punctuation, make predictions, look for sight words, etc. You can do so many things before the reading even begins. This also allowed me to give directions about rewinding the tape and locating the next book

The best part was that doing it this way made it very easy to DIFFERENTIATE. I could have two or three levels of books on different cassettes. I just labeled each cassette with a color and placed a list of students under each color. They knew that when they went to the listening station they found their name and located that color cassette.

8. Objective Display

These give me a dry erase area to write my daily objectives on, while also providing a visual cue for students.

9. Handsignals

These hand signals were a great way to allow students to communicate with me nonverbally. I knew exactly what they needed without the lesson even stopping.

You can find an assortment of these on TPT, but these are the signals I use.

10. Quiet Chicks

These are our pet chicks. They come out when it's very quiet and only stay if it's very quiet. I bring these out during writing occasionally and they just adore these little guys.

11. Dismissal Chart

I use clothes pins to attach each student's name to how they get home.

12. Word-a-pillar

As we learn dolch words I add them to our word-a-pillar around the door. This gives us something to practice while we are in line and also serves as another source for students to look at during writing.

100 Charts the K Way

When I get a new group of kindergarteners in September, most of them are still working to understand the difference between a letter and a number. So imagine their faces when I hand them a 100 chart for the first time. 100 charts can be very overwhelming for five-year-olds unless they're exposed to them consistently. I love using 100 charts to teach an assortment of objectives like patterns and money in addition to numeracy.

I like to introduce my students to 100 charts early in the year. It obviously helps with with number recognition and counting, but what I love most is that it also gives them a visual of the relationship numbers have.

1. I start with 100 chart puzzles. To create these I print a 100 chart on colored card stock, laminate, and cut. I cut different patterns based on the color of the card stock. That makes it easy to keep the correct pieces together. Some are in predictable horizontal and vertical patterns, some are just cray.

They don't even realize how much they are learning with these. As they get more used to them they notice more things about the numbers as they put the puzzles together. These are easy to make and are a great activity to use for early finishers.

2. This is my favorite interactive 100 chart to use on the smart board.  I use this for a lot of lessons, but especially when we learn how to count by fives and tens. It attaches a visual to the numbers they are counting and helps them notice the patterns.

http://www.abcya.com/interactive_100_number_chart.htm

3. I got this 100 mat for the floor last year.

We love this thing! The possibilities with this are endless, but here are some of our favorites:

Roll the dice, find the number (I would change out the numbers on the dice with paper)

Roll the dice, add, and find the number

Use their bodies or a game piece to move through the mat. Roll the dice and move that many spaces. Say and write the number you land on.

Roll a number, go to the number, say what is one more and one less than your number.

4. I make this blank 100 chart on the floor, give students number cards, and let them go to town. At first I don't give them any rules to follow for placement of numbers, I just observe their work. Then we'll start with 1-10, then 1-20, etc. We work up to being able to place the cards from 1-100 in the grid and by the end of the year we are even timing it to see how fast we can get! Very fun!

5. For the first time this year, I also used 100 charts to teach money. Yes, money!

Here we go...

Simply attaching each coin to their value on the chart.

THEN we used it to count mixed sets of coins. They know that a nickel is 5 cents so it goes on the 5. Since pennies are each 1 cent, they will each go on top of one number and they count as they go.

Loved, loved, loved this, and so did they!

Getting to Know Miss Matson

In an effort to begin building a sense of community in my classroom as well as a rapport with my students early in the school year, I decided to create a big book to introduce myself to my new batch of kinders. I pulled out some old photos that I'm sure they will enjoy. I'll hold the plastic sleeves together with silver rings and keep it in the classroom library when we're finished reading it.

I included a few different topics:

Miss Matson as a baby

Miss Matson as a child

First day of kindergarten

Miss Matson the beach lover

Elementary school

Dance days

Family

Cheerleading days

Traveling

Miss Matson the college graduate

Fun facts

Here is a sneak peak at a few pages in the book: