June 21, 2009
Summer has finally arrived and I am really enjoying my short break before summer school begins.
The end of the school year is such a bitter-sweet time. It is often difficult to say good-bye to my little ones that are moving on. Also, at the end of the year I typically try to reflect on the school year and my teaching practices. I find myself asking the question of what can I do to improve my teaching for the next school year?
I have started a HUGE list of things to do for the summer, and one of the things at the top of the list is updating my blog! As soon as I can start to get those creative thoughts flowing, I am truly going to make an effort to update this teaching blog and add new ideas, printables and more thematic unit links.
So, for those of you that are reading this–what sort of projects will you be working on this summer? I would love to hear your comments too, and don’t forget to enjoy your summer!
April 6, 2009
Lately I have been working on creating some more materials for words with specific word patterns. Specifically, words that students can sound out, such as cvcc words or ccvc words.
Here are some cards that I created for students to use with magnet letters or letter tiles to spell words:
CCVC and CVCC Words to Spell Big Version
Here is another version of the CCVC and CVCC words that already has the letters and words for students to match letters to: CCVC and CVCC Words Big Version
This past summer I also purchased these puzzles for students to put together four-letter words from Lakeshore:
These retail for $14.95 and are very durable.
Here is a review worksheet that I created: CVCC/CCVC Word Worksheet
This website has many great resources: Cando’s Helper Page
Enjoy!
March 22, 2009
Some of you may be aware that before I taught preschool and kindergarten special education students, I previously taught first grade for two years. I just recently scanned and included my Open House pictures from when I taught first grade. I hope that you enjoy them!
Open House 2005:
This was my first year of teaching. We had an ocean theme inside of our classroom. I loved the way that everything turned out! This theme was so much fun to teach to my students. Here are the pictures:
Ocean reports and story summaries
Ocean themed math word problems that students illustrated.
These are made from paper plates. The bottom paper plate is painted blue. Then you cut out a circle from the top board. Students glued tissue paper strips to make sea weed and stuck ocean stickers. These looked really cool!
This was the view from the door. Students painted their own ocean animals and we also included torn paper art fish on our mural. The hanging jelly fish are made from paper plates and streamers.
We made paper plate killer whales, handprint octopi & crabs and watercolored seahorses and starfish.
This was the door decoration, and I placed students' pictures inside of the portholes.
Open House 2006: This year was a jungle/rain forest theme. I loved this theme as well. We had a giant Kapok tree in the center of the classroom that had tissue paper toucans hanging from it, as well as paper plate snakes. Here are the pictures:
This was the door decoration. Students made handprint jaguars.
This is the view from the Kapok tree.
This is a close-up of the tissue paper butterflies that students made.
This was the back board within the classroom. There were monkeys, hand/footprint birds and butterflies on display. The writing is students rain forest reports.
This is another close-up of their rain forest reports. I typed the reports so they would be easier to read, but included the originals underneath.
These are their jungle math story problems.
This was our seed experiment. We placed a seed with a wet sponge inside of a Ziploc bag to see if it would grow.
Feel free to email me if you have any questions. I also included these pictures and more on the Bulletin Board page here: Mrs. Kilburn’s Bulletin Board Page
March 22, 2009
I just added a new math page for addition and subtraction. I hope that you enjoy this! It is sort of a work in progress, so I will continue to add more information in the near future.
Mrs. Kilburn’s Addition and Subtraction Page
March 15, 2009
It is that time of the year again–I’m busy working away on my student’s memory books for this school year. So, I have been thinking of sharing some ideas and pictures of the memory books that I have made with my students and ideas that others have shared as well. Hopefully this will be able to help all of you!
- Shari Sloane’s wonderful website has an entire page full of wonderful ideas for creating memory books with your students: Kids Count 1234’s Memory Book Page
- Patsi Kugler’s ABC 123 Kindergarten website also has a memory book page on her site: Memory Book Ideas
- Sew What 4U has a wonderful Teacher Resource section and in 2007 she posted some great ideas and printables for creating a kindergarten memory book: Kindergarten Memory Book Printables and Ideas (you will need to scroll about half-way down the page to find the printables and ideas).
Here are the pictures of the memory books from this year–it is still a work in progress. I’m not going to send these home until the end of the school year, but I thought that I would share what I have so far:
March 15, 2009
Oh my goodness! I have had the busiest week ever! Our school held their Open House on Wednesday night. It was so much fun to see all of my little ones show their parents and families around our classroom. They proudly showed their families all of their artwork that was displayed. Here are some pictures of our classroom this year.
March 2, 2009
I just added a new homework page under the teaching section. Here is the link and I hope that you find this information useful!
Mrs. Kilburn’s Homework Page
March 1, 2009
Filed under Printables, Reading, free printables, kindergarten, teaching ideas
Tags: ABC, Alphabet Recognition, blog updates, english language arts, free printables, free teaching resources, kindergarten, Printables, teacher resources, teaching ideas
January 25, 2009
Since beginning my website/blog this summer, I have had a few people ask how I create many of the printable worksheets, emergent readers, etc that I have shared. The majority of these items I create on Microsoft Word with text boxes. After I create these documents, I then save them to a PDF format so they are easier to upload to my blog.
Last winter, January 2008, I presented a workshop with my district on how to create your own resources with technology (primarily Microsoft Word). Here is a copy of the powerpoint presentation: Technology Presentation
Here are some resources on the web to help you with creating your documents:
Microsoft Drawing Tutorial (this PDF discusses many things, such as inserting lines, working with Word Art, etc).
Microsoft Office Training Courses (this is a free resource from Microsoft and features many online classes with a variety of tutorials for various things).
Text Box Tutorial (this PDF discusses the many different ways that you can use text boxes in your documents)
I hope these help!
