Oriental Trading's Updated Website Learn 365

Oriental Trading Company Learn 365

 Oriental Trading Company is rolling out their new teacher website this week Learn 365 and asked me to write a post about a couple of their products that will be useful in my teaching.  I am so grateful for the wonderful resources.  I found some amazing products for teaching young children.  I am impressed with the selection and quality of the products they offer.  I love that they offer Melissa and Doug products and Learning Resource products on their site. 

  One of the things I noticed with the little four year olds I was working with is that they also needed to work on some colors as well as alphabet the number awareness skills.

So when I found these alphabet bean bags I was super excited that they were in different colors.  I can use them for two activities color sorting/basic counting and of course alphabet games.  I also plan on using them for some spelling activities with the first and second graders as well.  I think these bean bags will be a wonderful addition to my teaching resource bag. 

Alphabet Bean Bags

I was so excited to get this Alphabet Phonics books.  What I like about these books are two fold:  1.  The books are not just the beginning sounds.  They have ending sounds as well.  The vowel books have short and long sound words.  2.  You get the entire alphabet for $10.  That is an amazing deal!  They are nice small square books for little hands.  I plan on using these books with the K5 and First Graders who are struggling with their sounds.  

ABC Phonics Books

I just love these color boxes.  I picked these out with my little grand daughter in mind.  She is learning new vocabulary and color words and this activity fits the bill perfectly!  The little vocabulary cards have wonderful simple photos on them.  The cards are well made and easy for little hands to handle.  My grand daughter loves the pictures, and the objects are things she recognizes from her environment. She loves putting the cards in the little slots on the boxes.  Right now we are only using two boxes at a time however you can change up the activity and tailor it towards each students learning needs.   

Color Sorting Boxes

This is another open-ended activity that you can change and adapt to the student's needs as well.  The game comes with a color dice and two number dice so you can play all kinds of games: colors, patterns, number awareness, basic counting, and early addition and subtraction.  So many possibilities and I know little boys are going to love the "race car" format.  I picked this game because I thought I could lots of different things with it.  

Learning Resources Mini Motor Math Activity Set

These number duckies are adorable....and what child does not like to play and learn in the water.  It is going to be so much fun picking up the ducks and looking at the numbers to identify.  However my grand daughter is not ready for number identification yet so we are using the colorful ducks to learn our colors.  You can really use this activity for two different purposes.  It was a lot of fun.  

1,2,3 Number Rubber Duckies

This MAGNETIC shape sorting activity is very open ended.  You can do so many different sorts.  I can not wait to try this out with my students.  I love that it is magnetic, my students love working on a magnetic board.  

Shape Sorting Magnets

Thank you to Oriental Trading Company for the above products.  I was given the products in exchange for this post.  All the opinions and thoughts are my own.  

Most Used Resources This Year

At the end of every school year I like to take time and reflect back over the year and think about what activities worked well and what I need to improve.  This year I found myself in new role as the primary resource teacher.  I worked with grades K4 - 2nd grade in the classroom and pulling students who needed one on one instruction.

I started out the year assessing the new four year old students to see where they were at and checking up on their progress throughout the year.  I created this assessment binder to grab and go when it was time to assess one of the little ones.  I have everything I need in it to check in on their progress all year long.

These name bags were a hit at the beginning of the year and again in the middle of the year when I added their last name.  I used these with the little four year olds and they loved setting up their names.  I had these bags on the table as they enter the room.  It was the first thing they did.  It was really helpful because they referred to the letters in their name all year long.  We even referred the letters in our friends names as well.

We played these Bingo games all year round.  I put the capital letter bingo and lowercase bingo back to back and we switched it up.  I did the same with the number bingo as well.  At the beginning of the year I played the number bingo 1-30 with the 5 year olds and towards the end of the year I was playing the 1-20 number bingo with the 4 year olds.  I also used the number and letter cards to play other board games as well. We switched up our markers to holiday markers throughout the year.  This was a favorite that they begged to play each week.

Oh my gosh the kids loved the letters on the stones.  They loved putting them in order and they loved using them to match pictures and letters for beginning sounds.  I used them with the K5 and first graders to do making words exercises.  I think it was a texture thing.  The kids loved the smooth cool feeling of the rocks.  I even made a second set with capital letters to match up. 

These sensory cards were a free item I got from Oriental Trading Company and they were a hit with my four year old students.  They loved touching them and we made up lots of activities with them however their favorite were the sandboxes.  They loved tracing the letters and then drawing the letters in the sand that I found at the dollar store.

Stick Bang is a game that cost little money to make and the kids love to play it.  I made so many different versions of this game.  However I think the favorite was this lollipop version I made for the four year olds.  

My Mystery Number Box was a huge hit.  I found these number cards in a Math Packet I had already purchased on TPT.  I printed them and mounted them on card stock and laminated them.  Then I found an empty Kleenex box and that's where I put the cards.  I used these cards for so many activities:  Number Identification, Greater Than/Less Than, Put the numbers in order from Greatest to Least, from Least to Greatest.   Grab a number and then find one more/one less/ten more/ten less, number of the day,  adding and subtracting activities. 

I looked and looked and I couldn't find where I got these cards from but I know they were something I found I TPT. 

These reference folders were something I used daily with a lot of my older students.  I have math activities on the outside and language activities on the inside.  I found this idea in one of the kindergarten classrooms at my school and I used resources I already had and found free resources that I could use to complete my folders.  

Reference Folders

One of the things I noticed as I am working in my new position at school is that I am often walking back into classrooms to get reference charts or wishing I had a poster hanging up somewhere to show the students where to find basic information.  The other day I noticed of the kindergarten teachers had some reference folders in her classroom.  There are tons of ideas on Pinterest under mini office. I found lots of awesome ideas but there was not one folder that fit all my needs. However, I found lots of wonderful teachers who were willing to share the things they created for FREE!

So I printed out a couple of ideas I thought would be useful in my daily teaching and put together my own folders.  

Inside the folder I crammed in as much language arts as possible. I believe all of these resources were free.  I did add some stickers for extra color.   

1.  Alphabet Chart  by Kindercraze

2.  Blend/Digraph Helper by Stephanie Ann

3.  Color Chart by Mrs. Ricca's Kindergarten

4.  Days of the Week and Months by  ??

5.  Seasons by Homeschool Creations

On the outside of the folder I put as much math as possible.

1.  Hundreds Chart by Kindercraze  (This was from a paid product I already had.) 

2.  Numberline by ??

3.  Shapes and Number words by Homeschool Creations

4.  5 Star Sentences Guideline by Kreative Kinder

I think this is a wonderful idea and you can make them for different age groups.  It is nice to have a reference folder handy when you need one.  

P.S.  I know I am missing two resources I can not find where I got them from.  If I come across them I will update the page.  Sorry.  

Goals for 2017

The Very Busy Kindergarten Blog has been my place to share my teaching ideas the past several years.  Each year brings new surprises for me as a teacher and as a person.  I love sharing the ideas I am using as an educator.  

This past year I have tried to be more consistent with my blogging. I am trying very hard to share two ideas from my teaching and then Friday Favorites each week. 

I will hopefully continue with that blogging schedule this year.  I will continue to focus on preschool through second grade ideas that I am using with the students I work with.  I am continuing to update my teacher resource site that I use and several other teachers at my school use as well.  

I am also working on revamping many of the products I have at my TPT store as well as create new ones.  I try to keep my prices low because I know teachers spend their own money purchasing things and our money needs to stretch. The little bit of money I make pays for the graphics I use on my products and freebies and any extra for educational supplies for my students. 

Thank you for reading The Very Busy Kindergarten Blog.  I hope you have a wonderful year.   

Sue 

Compliments

"Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, a honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around."

Leo Buscaglia

One of the hardest things I find throughout the school year is getting the students to treat each other with kindness.  They are great at finding each other's faults and mistakes however building each other up and being positive is very hard for them.  I often talk about what it means to compliment someone.  What is a real compliment verses a fake compliment?  

That is something that is so hard to teach.  The past couple of years I have had a wonderful bunch of children.  They worked well together, however one of their faults was they were very social.  I would encourage them to work together to earn compliments from myself and from other teachers.  Real compliments.....in fact the other teachers did not know the deal I had with the children.  

When the class earned a compliment from another teacher they could put a sticker on their reward chart. This was hard to do.  It meant we had to walk quietly in the hallway, line up quietly, they had to be the quietest table in the lunchroom and walk into a speciality classroom and sit down quietly and be ready to learn.  These are not easy tasks to do.  Many times the speciality teachers would say, "They were the best behaved class of the day."  

All these compliments were real and well earned.  It took the children a long time to earn the stickers as you can see.  We did not get a sticker every day.  However we did make it to 100 by the last day of school so we could have all the extra fun.  

My thought is....we are going to have some kind of party anyways...why not make it something they can get excited about it and earn it.  It will be more meaningful to the children if they had a say in the planning and earning of the reward. 

BTW--The children make it to 100 twice a year.  

If you decide to go this route let the kids pick the rewards they love being part of the decision making process.   

Welcome Cards

One of the things most of the Catholic Schools do in our area is have an Open House during Catholic Schools Week.  

My class was asked to make some welcome cards for the new family packets. We were given the frame and the children could draw something about our school.  

We had a great discussion about what signs new people will see at our school that will help them see we are a Catholic school.  All of my students did an amazing job however I wanted to share my favorite two with you.  

What I love about these pictures is the children they drew.  Both students used our school colors to color the border as well.  
I think these pictures are a nice touch to welcome a new family.  

How I Organize the Areas Where I Teach

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I would like to share with you the areas in my classroom that I organize as teaching spaces.  Even though I have a desk, my students rarely see me sitting at the desk.  

 This is my main teaching area.  The carpet area is the center of my classroom.  My students generally sit on the carpet area for main instruction.  I use the book stand or the smart board for everything.  

 Behind the book stand I keep books and things that I use to make charts on the book stand.  I like to keep the literature I am reading for the week in the basket.  I also have my teacher writing journal and copies of the student folders so I can model for them where I want things to go.

 This is my hard drive, dvd/vhs player and document camera (which I love.)  The pocket chart behind the computer will show my daily five procedures.  

 Here is another space I spend a lot of time, my kidney table.  I have many small groups here throughout the day.  

 Behind the table I keep lots of supplies I use daily with the children.  The divider stores all the papers I pass out throughout the day.  The jars contain our prizes that go with the reward coupons.  I have another little carousel from PB.  It contains: high lighters, pencils, stapler, literacy sticks, reading bookmarks and post its.    

 These file cabinet contain EVERYTHING!  All my center files, books for shared reading, guided reading, seasonal books for the reading center, science, social studies and religion.....really EVERYTHING!!!!!  I have a lot of resources from the twenty years I have been teaching and I keep them in these four cabinets.  

 I used black contact paper to cover the one brown cabinet on the top and the back so it would blend it as you walk in.  

 Here is the inside of the file drawers they really are packed with decorations and art projects.  

My Home Away from Home

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There was a time was I first started teaching that I didn't have a teacher's desk.  In fact I thought it wasn't necessary because I thought I wanted all the space in the room to be for the children.  However after 20 some years of teaching I have come to realize I spend more time at school than I do at home.  And yes, I do need some me space, because I do spend at least two hours or more a day in that room without children cleaning and getting ready for the next day.  

This is one of the most important things I have for myself.....a place to put my keys.  If you are a little bit older like me...you are always looking for things and if you give them a usable home then you don't need to worry about where things are.  

Here is my locker.  I have some family pictures in it and my comfort bags with all the daily necessities.  The two hooks in my locker are for my recess whistle and my work id.  I also keep a small air freshener and snow pants (I live in Wisconsin.)  

My next stop in the morning is my refrigerator.  I always bring a cold lunch to school and I keep cold water to refill my cup.  

Here is my desk.  Of course I have more family pictures and vacation pictures.  I always have my calendar and lesson plan book on top of the desk.  I also have the my marker carousel from PB that I just love.  

   

My desk drawer has a couple personal things and must have office supplies.  My desk is next to the window so can have to shelf space as well.

Just like at home, everything as a spot.  Even the kiddos in my class will learn where everything goes.  

One last thing I have for myself is my Power Thought cards.  I like to read them the first thing in the morning and the last thing before I leave.   They are just a gentle reminder to me of my personal daily goals.  

Developmentally Appropriate Practices

My field student asked me to write about my Developmentally Appropriate Practices.  It took me a while to put it together.  I didn't want something to stuffy.

Mrs. Schueller’s Classroom

In my classroom I try to create a caring community for all the learners in my room.  I try to model positive Christian behavior for my students throughout the school day.  I encourage and challenge my students to do their best on all their work. During class discussions I try to demonstrate how to be a good listener, how to ask good questions, and how to give good clues to help friends.  Throughout the school day my students can expect to read stories independently and listen to stories read to them.  My students can expect to have time to write daily.  Students can write phonically or using the print around the classroom.    Students will experience learning in small or large groups and individually if needed. Students in my class can expect hands on activities that meet the exit expectations of the Arch. of Milwaukee. Most importantly my students will know that they are loved and cared for when they are in my classroom.