Easter fun and Dollar Store finds

I love creating my spring centers and I want to just share a few with you. The first one is to simply get some Easter eggs, mix up their colors, and write a two letter sight word on them. See the pic below.

Use a computer program to make an oval in one color and a semi-circle shape in the other color of the egg. Type in the letter, add a border and you're done. Place these cards on a ring, break all of your eggs apart, place in a cute Easter tin and let your students build their words. HERE are mine, that you're welcome to use!

Another fun center I added was this fun car Easter eggs I found at Dollar Tree. I wrote sight words on them and used our sensory table to hide them in crinkle cut paper Easter grass. I found my parking lot sight word game pages and placed it nearby for students to find the cars with those words and "park" them in the right spot. Get the Parking Lot page HERE!

One last center game.............If you own my spring bundle, then you have the base ten Easter eggs. I recently received some base ten stamps from a grant and decided these eggs would work great with the stamps and a recording sheet. I made a recording sheet and you can receive it HERE. 

 I also decided to do a freebie Friday and make a summer flip flop version of this game also. You can get that one HERE.

Spring Break Resolution

So this week is our SPRING BREAK!! It is much needed time for me to go through and clean and organized my classroom. I've also decided to make a spring break resolution (I think I'm making up that term) to start blogging more! We've been doing so much fun stuff in our classroom and I just don't take the time to blog about it anymore. Also, one of my favorite things to do is go back through my old posts and reminisce. It's kind of like a digital scrapbook. So, I will try to start posting every week and I'm also going to go back to posting freebie Fridays.

One thing I've already completed over this break is creating a new system for storing my "Rainbow Words". Each drawer holds rings of sight words, book box cards, and their mastery bracelets.  My old drawers were tiny and overflowing with the rings of words and I had to keep the bracelets in buckets.

These are my new drawers.

I've added quite a few more fun components to the Rainbow Word sight word system so if you have previously purchased it, please go back and see what all I've added!...........Go fish game, 2 bubblegum SMART board games, book box cards, a portable word wall, a class data sheet, rainbow writing activity, an editable race to the top game, a gumball small group game, and these drawer labels. In case you're wondering about the polka dot level, it's simply a way to keep those few kids going who fly through your levels and want to keep going.  I continued testing my student using our Literacy First 2nd grade list. I began with pink polka dot and create a list of the first 10 words that she missed and then continued on to purple polka dot, then blue, etc.

My next project is to change out my dramatic play center. It has been the doctor's office for the last month. The kids LOVED it, but it's time to move to something else. 

I'll be up there tomorrow changing out our center. Can anyone guess what it's going to be next???

Starting a new year off right!

I'm not sure if you saw this post or not, but

 posted a 30 Day Happy Teacher Challenge! I'm so excited to do it! I challenge you to join me! (Click on their logo to download yours!)

Cookie Shop Dramatic Play in time for Christmas

I changed out their dramatic play center over the Thanksgiving break. It is now a Cookie Shop! How fun has this been!

Drugs arrrrgh bad!

This last week was Red Ribbon Week, which is a national drug-free campaign. We always have a door decorating contest. My co-worker and I have doors very close together and decided to make our one huge project. (and that it was!) I love how this pirate ship turned out, but it was really a lot of work. BTW......we did win.

It's Here and It's PURPLE!!!

Guess what?! The Classroom Friendly pencil sharpener is now available in POPULAR PURPLE! Isn't it beautiful?

I'm sure you've remembered my ranting and raving about how wonderful these are! In fact I've blogged about them before. See HERE! I just wanted to show you the new awesome color they have just came out with!  

 This is my student teaching using this sharpener...........

Check them out! www.classroomfriendlysupplies.com 

October Bulletin Board

Our Kindergarten team takes turns decorating the bulletin board in our pod and guess whose turn it was for October? You guessed it! I should mention that in lieu of a Halloween parade and party at school, we have a HUGE fall festival family night a few days before Halloween.  Each grade level (or pod) is in charge of creating a theme and activities. Well, we did spiders last year and really enjoyed it, so spiders it is again! I wanted the bulletin board to have something about spiders on it, so I went back to an oldie, but a goodie. All kids LOVE to marble paint! We painted spider webs for the background and then I printed the cute spiders that I got FREE from my favorite clip artist on TPT, Educlips. (Get yours free HERE)  I added their cute little faces to personalize them and then printed some of our books that we've read this year. The kids really enjoyed seeing themselves as spiders!  Here's some pics of them painting and the finished board.