Earth Day Extravaganza!

Earth Day is one of my all time favorite holidays. I get really into it every year and go overboard on the crafts and recycled projects. 

This year, I have decided to theme my entire week around Dr. Seuss's The Lorax and Earth Day! 

Our first project was a Lorax themed writing. We read the Lorax and then did this adorable writing paper that I found on The Learning Tree's website. 

We will hang these in the hallway with our directed draws of the Lorax! 

We have a lot of discussions about why it is important to save our planet and how we can make it a better place to live.

We then made these cute crafts to go with our writing. We first used crayons to create the lines and then we used water colors to paint the background. Our next step was to color and cut out the truffula trees. These were fun and we added a little pizzazz with tissue paper. I'm not sure who to credit this idea with, but thank you to whomever it was! 

We will be creating bookmarks to give out to the school from our recycled scrap paper as well. My kids are really enjoying learning how to recycle and what it means to help the earth! 

We also attempted to melt crayons, but it ended up in melted silicone baking containers, let's not talk about that. 

In math, we did these great Earth Day Problem Solving books with a variety of math word problems. We are at the point in the year where the kids are starting to get tired of word problems, so I try to theme them around the holidays! They are a freebie in my store! 


Click here for the books above! 
Happy Earth day to you all! 

Planning and Sorting Curriculum

Blogging is a lot of work! I've been trying to create my own products for my classroom, but I am one of those teachers that falls completely in love with teacherspayteachers products and then lose sight of what I was planning on doing. 

At this point, I've done some revamping of our school's curriculum and my own way of planning for the year. I started planning for next year (eek!)! This will make my life so much easier. It is like my own personal bible of curricula. 

I've also been working on being more organized about the way I organize all of the products that I've found or other teachers have shared with me. I not only made my curriculum timeline, but I tore apart our regular curriculum (which is extremely confusing) and made a list of the main ideas that we will be teaching and the activities that I have to go along with each. 

I am so excited to begin using this for my planning that I've already started to use it for this year. I am amazed that I've had the time to put this all together during the school year and then I actually get to use it! I feel like sometimes I make things and then forget about them or I just lose track and don't ever get to it. 

Luckily, I have a great team of 7 other kinder superwomen to help me out! They are simply amazing. We get the chance to meet once a month for an entire day and hash out the kinks and work on developing new assessments. We are a town that comes up with pretty much all of its own stuff. By stuff I mean, schedules, curriculum, books, guided reading materials, math activities... You get the picture, we do it all! It seems overwhelming at times, but I really do enjoy having some control over what I get to do with my students. I've found that there are many schools that don't get that opportunity and they are told what to do for every second of everyday. I could NEVER teach like that, it just isn't who I am. I like to dive in, make a mess and then clean it up later. 

That is all for tonight, I have a very excited puppy who needs to go for a walk!