Spotlight Saturday for Kissing Hand Unit!

Welcome to another week of Spotlight Saturday, hosted by KINDERGARTEN DRAGONS! If you haven't heard of it, this is like a Show and Tell for teachers to share resources, ideas, or tips. Isn't it wonderful? To learn more about it, click on this image:

My Spotlight Saturday this week is for my unit on the Kissing Hand!

This was my first week of school, and of course was all about the Kissing Hand by Audrey Penn.
However, this year instead of reading the book myself, I tried playing the Storyonline.net version, read by Barbara Bain. I noticed that by using this resource, students were so much more focused on the story than in the past when I read the book aloud!

After listening to this book we worked on several activities. We made hand prints for the Kissing Hand poem:

We made this adorable Kissing Hand magnets with wooden hands from A. C. Moore (you can also find them at Michaels. Students painted them using skin color paint. With a Sharpie I wrote the student name and year on the back. I hot glued a small heart button on the front (a heart shaped sticker or jewel would work too), and a craft magnet on the back. I put it in a small plastic bag along with the card you see in this picture.

And of course, we also did some writing to go with our Chester craft:

I can't tell you how much fun these kids had making Chester! In addition it was a great exercise for learning to follow directions!
The picture above shows one of the writing templates I made, which happens to be the one we used in our class. However, the packet includes several choices of templates for different levels of learners. It also includes all the activities shown in this post.
You can fin the Kissing Hand unit in my store, just click on the picture to go there.

Hope you enjoyed this post! Thank you for reading!

Five for Friday with a Teacher Toolbox

Thank you Doodle Bugs for another week of Five for Friday!
If you are new to this and would like to be part of this weekly link, just click on this picture to learn more about it.

Here are my five randoms for this week:

I was on Pinterest and came across this Teacher Toolbox, that apparently everybody is loving and making. It looked like a good idea to get the clutter out of my drawers. With so many things in there, sometimes I can't even get the drawer to open without engaging in a fight with it!
So this is what I'm talking about (picture from Lowe's,where I bought mine):

I also bought 2 cans of pink spray paint, which were on sale for $1 each, so I could turn the "Blue Plastic Storage Cabinet" into my Pink Teacher Toolbox.
Here it is, pretty in pink, drying out. However, if you are going to do this, please make sure your neighbor doesn't have the sprinklers programed to start when you are in the middle of painting! Yes, that actually happened to me! Not fun! So here it's drying in the garage, away from my neighbor's sprinklers!

While waiting for the paint to dry out, I printed some basic labels, and glue them on scrapbook paper:

Do you see the labels for Band-aids, and Binder Clips??? I don't know what happen to them, but after taking this picture, I lost them! I looked everywhere, and even have my son to look for them! We could not find them, so I had to make 2 new ones! I'm sure I will find them eventually, but I hate when that happens!!

 Then I used Mod Podge to glue them to the inside of each drawer.

 And that's it...here it is, the finished product, my Pretty in Pink Teacher Toolbox!

I can't wait to take all these things out of  my desk drawer at school and fill my pink teacher toolbox with them!
You can look "Teachers Toolbox" in Pinterest, there are tons of them. If I inspired you to make one, don't forget to post a picture on Instagram and tag me so I can see it!

We start working today, and I just can't believe the summer it's over! While I am excited to see my coworkers and my new kids,  I just love summer, and it seems like this one went too fast. Maybe because all I did was work, and work, and then work some more! We didn't go anywhere, we didn't do anything special, we just stayed home the whole time. Other than going to Tampa for my husband's surgery, I feel like the summer sneaked by and left without warning! So this would be me right now:

 (By the way, this drawing is from Maitena, a very talented cartoonist from Argentina). Se has several comic books translated to English and I found this one in Amazon. She is hilarious!

 This is my classroom when I first walked in on Tuesday:

Had to do a lot of moving around furniture, but it really didn't look too bad.

I've been having fun making some banners for my classroom using some of my scrapbook paper. I love how easy was to make them and how cute they turned out (I can't say the same thing about the picture I took though! Sorry, the light in the room was awful!)
It didn't take more than 10 minutes and this was my first time making this. I actually spent more time deciding what patterns I wanted than what it took to make it!

 I got so excited about these, that I even made little ones with the paper left over (this are only 4 inches long):

If you are interested, I am planning to have a blog post about this, sometime this weekend explaining what you need. Stay tuned!

While getting ready for next week when we have our Open House, I've been doing some laminating. I got done my rules posters and welcome sign, among other things. Yay! A few more things to cross out of my list!
Did you know that if you print your posters on photo paper, changing the settings on your printer to photo paper instead of regular white paper, your printing quality will be 100 times better! I usually buy photo paper at the dollar store and use it to print posters, game boards,  and things like that. Try it, you will be amazed by the difference it makes!

So, these were my five randoms for the week. I hope you have a wonderful weekend and an extra special beginning of the school year. Thank you for reading! PS: Don't forget to come back to my blog during this weekend to learn what you need to make your own banners with scrapbook paper in 1,2,3. I'll try to take better pictures, I promise!

Spotlight Saturday with a FREEBIE!

Can't believe it's already Saturday! Time for the Spotlight! Thank you so much Erin with Kindergarten Dragons for hosting this weekly link party.

If you would like to participate, just click on this picture above to learn more about it!

This week I have a FREEBIE for Kindergarten teachers. Each month I post a new freebie as a thank you for my followers, so for August, I thought to share this Beginning of the Year Assessment.

 As many of you know, the first things we want to assess in Kindergarten is letters, letter-sound, and number identification. This would be the recording sheet for letters and sounds:

One thing I like to do each time I conduct the assessment is marking the correct answers in a particular color, and write down the date under notes with that same color. Next time I will use a different color, which helps me to see the progress as I follow up on these skills.
Another thing I like to do, is to send a report home, so parents can help their children with those letters or numbers that are not marked off. This is the letter I send home:

Many times after sending this report home, I've noticed a dramatic improvement. Parents really appreciate when you keep them posted about their children's progress, and think about it, what parent doesn't want their child to succeed, right?

So, if you would like to try this, like I said it's absolutely free. So when you have a chance, just stop by my store to grab it.

I hope you can use this! Thank you for reading!