So I haven’t been writing in my blog this summer.  What have I been doing?  (You know, besides drinking cold chardonnays in the evenings, reading books, sleeping in, and organizing my house a tiny bit each day?) I have been PINTERESTING.  Man, I am in love with that site.  I love to check out what is new under the general heading of Education, ...

A little discussion about how clutter impacts the children in the preschool classroom!

Last week I ran a giveaway, and the only thing readers had to do to enter was put a comment with an idea of something they'd like to read about in my blog.  I got some great ideas from readers' comments! More brain based ideas TechnologyDr. Seuss Mother's Day ideasIdeas for themesHow we share holidayIdeas to help the children feel ...

Wouldn't it be great if we could make multiples of ourselves just so that we can get everything done? I try to make my own posters and centers. I do this when my students have extra-curricular activities going on. As long as I finish correcting their books and do my own day to day organisation of classroom work, I get so excited to create ...

Wouldn't it be great if we could make multiples of ourselves just so that we can get everything done? I try to make my own posters and centers. I do this when my students have extra-curricular activities going on. As long as I finish correcting their books and do my own day to day organisation of classroom work, I get so excited to create ...

Last year I felt frustrated about my low increase in scores on vocabulary, so I started making vocabulary cards, using Google Images.  (I make two for each word, so that they get used to seeing different images of the same thing for each word.)  So far this year we have introduced one vocabulary word each day.  Some of our words so far:  dolphin, ...

On Friday we had a visitor who was there to observe one of my students, who is being assessed for possible special ed services.  She sat during centers time and watched and took notes. The art center was full of kids making ants out of black paper and then adding glitter glue to them.  This was thrilling, but they managed to stay calm and ...

Monday rolls around, and I often don’t have my lesson planning done, so I have to wing it. I don’t keep changing the centers activities to match our theme; it’s so much work and I don’t have the time.  Okay, sometimes I do.  But not nearly enough. Sometimes I don’t keep a tight lid on the schedule, and we run out of time for recess. My desk and ...

Tomorrow I will try to get up early and get to work early, because I have lots to prepare.  We are done with Under the Sea (almost — I forgot to give everyone a real shark tooth to take home, so we will probably read a shark book at story time and then blow their minds by handing out the teeth), and so I will have to take all the books off the ...

I have been writing about setting up classrooms over the past few weeks and so far I talked a little bit about setting up furniture and selecting baskets for your shelves. Once you have your baskets, you will certainly need to decide what will go into the baskets. What goes into each basket depends on [...]