Hello Kitty Pumpkin

One of the munchkins brought in two white pumpkins to decorate our class with, so naturally I did this to them :D

Spooky Cat Hand Prints!

A cute addition to our hand print books, just paint the kids hand black and paint on a tail. After it dries use white paint to draw claws, ears, and a face!

Halloween Spiders!

Simple, easy, and quick! I painted dixie cups black and had the children put on sticky eyes. I cute eight strips of black construction paper and the kids folded them up to make the spider legs. I taped the legs onto the inside of the cup and viola! These little guys are spread around the shelves in the classroom.

An Apple a Day...

Decorating for the beginning of the school year, we made these cute little apple hand prints. Using red to paint their palms, and green to paint a finger for the stem :) They'll be a perfect first hand print to put in our hand print books!

Now we know our ABC'S!

We finally finished our letters this week! I was hoping to get them all done by September and we finally did! A few years ago we went to a training for Handwriting Without Tears and have been using it ever since. It really is such an amazing program, and have never seen anything work so fast and so effectively with the children.

They say not to work on pushing letters to hard before age 4, so I try to keep it all really light, fun, and easy going the first year. We started in about January after giving the munchkins a few months to settle in. For each letter we start by introducing it at circle time. I draw it first on the easel and we discuss how to write it using HWT terms (big line, little line, big curve, little curve). Then each child takes a turn writing it.

Then we go to tables and do the letter worksheet from the Handwriting Without Tears My First School Book (used to be Get Set For School). I just make copies of the pages the first year and then this year they will be doing their own workbook. After they finish their workbook they get a date stamp and a Hello Kitty stamp (obv) :)

Usually within the next day or so we make a letter collage. I cut out the lines or curves and the children use glue sticks to glue them onto construction paper. I keep them all connected and they just got to take them home this week.

To celebrate finishing our letters I bought the kids cheez-it letters, and magnetic letters & numbers for the classroom :)

Best munckin drawing of all time...

I CAN'T. This munchkin already reminds me SO much of myself at her age, it's crazy. She drew me this picture, and it will FOREVER be my favorite. It's me and her fighting a zombie, I'm on the right and she is on the left (obviously the zombie is in the middle). I apparently needed "blue on my black hair like Katy Perry", two knives to kill the zombie, a zebra dress, and "firework pants". Also, I have a pet zebra and she has a pet horse.

So much WIN in this picture.

Graduation

Since I had the younger group this past year, and I went all out crazy for our first graduation last year, my co teacher and I decided to settle with a family picnic for her "graduating" kids this year. I put together little bags for each of the children in her group including a bobble head from Oriental Trading (I wrote their names on the front and 2012 on the back), Congratulation Frames, also from OT (and had the children wearing the caps we used at last years graduation), a CD filled with pictures from throughout their 2 years in our room, and a "diploma" (I'm pretty sure I found those in the dollar section at Target and tied some red ribbon around it).

But seriously, I'm already mentally planning the Rockstar Graduation for my munchkins next year :p

Preschool Apocalypse

This really has nothing to do with teaching, but I couldn't help feel so proud with the little munchkins when they started drawing Zombies with the chalk outside on the playground. It is days like this that I KNOW I chose the right path in life, I seriously LOVE them!

Self Portraits

One thing I can't stand is empty walls! In attempting to fill up some space, I decided instead of the small portraits we usually have the children draw to put on our closet door, we should have them draw large black and white ones to fill up all the empty space in our block area. I drew myself first to show the children, and explain to them to draw all parts (head, eyes, hair, nose, mouth, body, arms, legs, etc.)

They came out really cute really show the different levels of all the children. They absolutely love looking at them too, and pointing our themselves and their friends. We also laminated them so that they would last longer.

Puppy Love

As I'm planning to move soon I've started going all my old stuff to try and downsize, I found this giant "I Love You Puppy" that my friends gave me after I moved to the west coast a few years ago. It's adorable, but being 25 it's not exactly what I'd display in my apartment. A few of my munchkins have just recently had new siblings and have been emotional disasters to say the least, and having 2 teachers in a class of 24 makes it impossible to give them the one-on-one attention they need.

It's only been a few days since I brought the puppy in for the kids, and it has already been such a huge help! They give him hugs when they need extra love, play with him if I'm busy talking to a parent, and he even took a nap with an extra sensitive munchkin with a newborn at home. Today as we were leaving the classroom for the night, the last four munchkins said he needed to snuggle in the rocking chair and got a blanket to tuck him in for night with.


Guess it's true when they say one person's trash is another person's treasure....and also a good thing that my apartment is filled with things 3-5 year olds would love!

Tangled Tower

The parents went through a phase for a while donating giant boxes to our classroom so I painted a lot of Holiday boxes (a "spooky box, chimney, snow box, etc..). Our Rapunzel tower is hands down the munchkins favorite, and oddly enough the only one that is still standing ;p

This was actually an old freezer/refrigerator box and has been one of the best donations we've received. It had to be cut down the side, so the first thing I did was hot glue the box back together again. I painted it using basic washable tempera paint, gray for a base coat, black to define the "stones", green and pink for the vines, and brown for the windows! I cut out and adult size tower window on one side (basically because I am a giant child who likes to play in it too), two child sized windows, and a "secret door" behind a painted tree in the back.

We only let 2-3 kids play in it at a time so it doesn't get to crazy, and we keep it right next to the basket filled with all our donated princess dresses, shoes, and tiaras :) If you know anyone who is getting a fridge (or any other large item) in the future, have them save you the box!!

Go Green :D

Rockstar Birthday Board

As you will soon learn, I am totally obsessed with zebra print and anything "rockstar style". I'm really surprised it took me this long to think of a reason to make part of our class zebra print. I found the idea off of Pinterest, which led me to this blog .

As I mentioned before due to not being able to order supplies I had to improvise. I stapled white butcher paper to the wall and started painting the zebra stripes all over. The kids got to pick between pink or green "rockstar" sunglasses that we had left over from Graduation last year (children's faces are blacked out for obvious privacy reasons), and glued onto star cutouts. Each month has a different color star and their birthdays are written on the side of the star. Obviously, they weren't glammed out enough so we painted them with colorations washable glitter paint (ordered through DSS)

The kids LOVE our birthday board, and it actually hangs above their art files so they are always looking at and commenting on their Rockstar pictures :)

P.S. My Birthday is JUNE 12, just so nobody forgets ;p

Handprint Books

I'm always doing tons of hand print projects with the munchkins for the holidays, but unless I safely store them in their already filled 'all about me' books, they probably all tend to get lost at home with the rest of the artwork. I found this idea for a Handprint Art Book through Pinterest, and I knew I just had to make these for my munchkins!

We have a lot of supplies already, but are currently on an ordering hiatus due to unforeseen expenses on fixing the air in the school. I just used a sheet of card stock for each child and cut it in half for the front and back of the book. Then I used 5 large sheets of white construction paper, cut into 4 (making 20 pages inside each book), hole punched the sides and tied it with ribbon, just in case I need to add more pages later. I had the kids write their first names at the top of the book (traced it with highlighted letters if they aren't able yet) and that's it! Easy as ever and great to have ready so I can just place the handprints in the books when they are ready!

A little background...

I'm 25 and I've been teaching at the center I work at coming on 5 years this October, and even though I've successfully sent off 2 groups of amazing children to Kindergarten already, I still question how I was able to do that without Pinterest. If for some crazy reason you do not have one yet, I suggest you get one, like, yesterday.

Normal schools get summers off, but ours is year round which definitely makes it tricky getting things ready for the new year/new kids when the old ones mostly stay still the last week in august. My classroom is 3-5 year olds and my co-teacher and I rotate who gets the little ones each year and keep them for the next 2 years. This year my group will be the older ones, which I love because you can do so much more with them once they've had the first year to settle in! I'll be using this blog as the year goes on to post activities and art projects I do with the munchkins throughout the year!