1000 "Fall"ower Giveaway!!!

1,000 blog followers- WOW!  To top it off, two of my favorite blogging buddies hit 1,000 blog followers the exact same week that I did!  We wanted to celebrate BIG time so we have been working together over the last few weeks to put together a fabulous fall giveaway to show our appreciation to you!

Don't you love the button?  

Thanks to Maree Truelove and mycutegraphics.com for making it for us!

We are each hosting a themed trio giveaway on our blogs this week.  

Since I have obviously "fallen" for the season, here are some items that you could win using the Rafflecopter below:

You could win both of these from Marsha at A Differentiated Kindergarten!

and this from Mary A. at Sharing Kindergarten!

I am working on a HUGE "Fall for All" unit that I'll be giving away as well!  It isn't quite finished so I can't show you a preview of the finished product just yet.....but here are a few sneak peaks:

  I should have it finished and posted real soon!  :)
Don't forget to enter below!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Columbus Unit! (Freebies!)

Phew!  I have been SO busy the last 2 weeks I have had to neglect my blog a little bit.  So sorry friends!  I promise to catch up soon with a camera dump post.  In the meantime...

I finished my Columbus Day unit!! This pack is aligned with CCSS for kindergarten.  It has some great activities that I can't wait to use with my own kids next week in preparation for the holiday.
All of the graphics are original.

Take a look:

You can check out the description of the pack on Tpt for a list of all the included activities.
I've included a few freebies for you!  Click on one of the pictures below to grab all 3.  I hope you enjoy them.  :)

I'll send the pack for free to the first 3 people who comment below! Don't forget to leave you email address.

Happy fall, ya'll!

Kindergarten Common Core! (resources)

Like many others, my district has adopted the Common Core State Standards this year for Kindergarten!  I feel like CCSS is one of the latest and greatest buzz words because it is absolutely everywhere!  I want to share with you a few resources that I have come across to help me meet these standards.

First of all, have you checked out Charity Preston's latest resource? AWESOME!! She has put together a site for reading and for math that lists tons of free and paid products specific to each Common Core standard K-12!

Here is another fantastic resource for Common Core.  Read Tennessee breaks down each K-3 standard (reading and math) and offers multiple ideas for lessons, assessments, etc.  This is one you need to bookmark for sure!

I also came across this Kindergarten Common Core Workbook. 

It has over 600 pages of worksheets, activities, and posters for both ELA and Math for Kindergarten Common Core.  How wonderful to have resources for each skill all bound together in one workbook! I'm thinking this workbook will really come in handy for assessment purposes. You can download a 34 page free preview of the workbook here.

What resources have you come across?  Leave a comment below to share!

Celebrating the letter Mm!!

Letter Mm is the first letter we study in our curriculum and it is definitely one of my favorites!  There are so many great (yummy) things we did this week to help us learn the letter!  We had a jam-packed 4 day week (district learning day on Friday...so no kiddos).  Here's a run down of a few things we accomplished:

On Monday I introduced the letter using my monkey puppet (Mr. Malcolm Monkey) and taught my kiddos the Mr. Malcolm Monkey poem/song from our reading series.  I wish I could share it...but it is a part of the series and obviously copyrighted.  :(  We talked about all of the reasons why M is MY favorite letter and began a huge web of M words that we added to throughout the week.  By the way, my kids were totally blown away by the fact that my first name is Mary....with an M.  Haha.  So of course it has to be my favorite letter!  :)

I should tell you that I very rarely reward my kids with candy (outside of our many edible activities!).  I'm not one of those teachers that keeps a jar of skittles on hand.  So when I do reward them with something like that they think it is a BIG deal!  This week's motivator was a bag of mini marshmallows.  Randomly throughout the week I would ask a student for another M word to add to our web.  If they could provide a new word, they got to "munch" a "mini" "marshmallow" as a special treat.  Total success!

Tuesday we enjoyed my favorite candy which just so happens to be M & Ms!  We sorted by color and graphed our M & Ms.

Wednesday was all about Moose.  Muffins too.  We read Laura Numeroff's If You Give a Moose a Muffin as our literature focus and then worked on turning the letter M into a moose.  We also made cutesy headbands to go with it and munched on mini muffins.  They were more like mini cupcakes but no one complained!

The template for the hat is from Simply Kinder and can be found here.  

The M craftivity is from Rowdy in Room 300 and can be found here.

Thursday was our grand finale! All of kindergartners dressed for our annual Mickey and Minnie Day!  They were a-dor-a-ble!  I always love seeing how creative they can get with their outfits!

We watched an episode of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse (Minnie's Mystery) and recorded all of the M words we heard throughout the movie, practiced following directions while assembling our mouse crafts, and enjoyed a special mouse treat with ice cream and Oreos!

What a marvelous week!

Chicka Trees, Shapes, Zero the Hero and More!

I can not believe I actually survived 6 days without the Internet!! Ok...not completely...I did have my phone.  :) Our home service has been out for almost a week so that has made for very limited online time.  That being said...this post is pretty much just going to be a bunch of randomness from the last week or so.  Prepare for a camera dump!

First of all, we've been on sight word overload.  We have created our new words out of pretty much anything I had on hand. Here are a few pics I snapped.

We ended our A-Z overview Chicka Chicka Boom Boom style. The majority of my class actually liked coconut!  That's a first for me! :)

Zero the Hero visited again and brought us glow in the dark zero bracelets and a new book.

If you are interested, you can check out the new book he brought us by clicking the picture below.

Mary from Sharing Kindergarten gave me the great idea of using Twizzlers to practice shapes. (Thanks, Mary!)

We also made cute hand-print puzzles for our Grandparents.

Tomorrow I'll be sharing this week's letter M activities.  Think muffins, moose, marshmallows, M &Ms, and Mickey and Minnie! :)

Zero the Hero!

Check out my homemade Zero the Hero!! :)  He's made of felt.  Hand-stitched with love.....

He arrived on our 10th day of school along with a note and some DONUTS!! :)  Our financial secretary interrupted our morning meeting to bring us our special delivery.  It had been left in the front office for us, of course.  It was perfect timing because we had just finished talking about wrapping the zero (rubber band) around the straws to make our first group of ten!

Here are a few pictures from our festivities.

Most of the activities I use for Zero the Hero come from a combination of these fabulous packets:

(Thanks, ladies!)

We also practiced counting to Dr. Jean's Number Stomp and worked on learning how to skip count by 10's to 100.  Zero will return to us this week for our 20th day of school.....I wonder what he will bring us this time! :)

Seriously....aren't they adorable?