Funny Farm Number Recognition Game

      Yee HAW!!!!  How's everybody doing on this snowy day!  Well, it's snowing here in Montana and it's COLD!!!!!  So, as you can tell today it's a "Funny Farm" type of day.  In my room, I'm always looking for new ways to make it fun for my students to learn.  Having them sit at a table or on the carpet is not only boring to me, but to them.  So, I'm putting a twist on teaching student's to recognize numbers 1-30.  With this game, there are "funny farm" cards and "boom" cards.  How this works is you have all the students either stand up in a line or in their carpet squares and you go around presenting a number to them.  If they get it wrong they sit down.  If they get it right they continue to stand.  There are the two cards that say "boom" and "funny farm."  If the student get's the "Boom" they automatically sit down...BUT...if they get "funny farm" the people sitting down stand up and the people standing up sit down.  There are no real winners in the game. Head on over to my TPT store and rope up this game!!! Click on the "Funny Farm" picture to pick up your copy of the game!!

Happy Learning!!

Shannon

CVC Activity

In my room I do not like to keep my kindergarten students sitting for a very long periods of time. This group I have are very "antsy" and have to be up and moving and switching around a lot. We are working on first sound fluency and being about to sound out three letter and four letter words and form them together. I found a set of letters on Pinterest and printed out four sets of them, so that I could have smaller groups. I gave the students a word and they had to sound out the word and then find the letters to the word.

Once they had found the letters, they had to stand up and determine how to arrange them. This seemed to be the most challenging part for them. They seemed to be unsure which way the letters were suppose to go. We practiced it a few times and some of the groups caught on and some still struggled. The students had fun with this activity.

Not only was it working on sound out words and forming them together, but teaching them to work in a group and as a team.

 

 

 

I had the students hold the letters at their stomachs, so the other students could compare.

I would recommend printing your letters on card stock and then laminating for durability.

 

Happy Learning!!!!!

Shannon

 

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New State....New Room

So....it seem's like it's been a very long time since I've been on here and well it has been.  A lot has changed.  My husband and I moved our family to Montana and I am now teaching in the Anaconda School District.  Here is a sneak peak in my classroom.  I will post pictures with the final outcome!  For those of you who have started school, I hope your year is going great and those who haven't started school...I envy you!!!

The other part behind the accordion wall is the Title Teacher's room.

I'm hoping the student's like my crate chair's I made!

Happy Learning!!

Shannon

Mr. Potato Head's Follow Direction Activity

I'm always looking for activities that provide student's fun ways to learn how to follow one and two step directions.  This Mr. Potato Head's Activity is a great and fun way to help the students.  I printed them in color using cardstock paper for durability, and then laminated them.  Once they were laminated, I cut them out, and put magnets on the back of them.  Something different besides a file folder or velcro.  I picked up cheap cookie sheets in order to complete the activity.  I will tell you there are a lot of pieces.  It's nice, because there are two potato heads and you could play with two people and give each person a card or you can play with one person and they work on both potato heads.

The different directions

Here are the different parts.  As you can tell, there are pieces to make a girl and boy potato head.

Happy learning!!!

Shannon

Positional Words

I'm always looking for different activities for my younger students.  We have a wide range of disabilities in our classroom.  I have found when I give directions to my student's they don't always understand what it means to put the object under the table, or beside it, etc. I found this positional words book on teacherspayteachers and my little boy with down syndrome loves it!!!  It's really nice, because the first few pages are not as long so you can see all the objects that they are requesting you to place on each page.  You do take them off as you go, because you use them on different pages. The speech teacher always comes and borrow's the book too.

Front of the book.  You can kind of tell how the pages on the left are shorter then the back page.

An example of what the book looks like inside.

This is the last page.  It is a full page that includes the velcro pieces.

Happy learning!!!!

Shannon

Four in a Row Addition and Subtraction

My son love's to play games at home and believe it or not he likes to play educational games.  I think it's more, because he think's it's the coolest when he can beat his mom!!!  This game is a spin off to me of connect four, except with a different name and concept.  Of course...you can guess that I got it off of teacherspayteachers!

How this game is played, is you have once dice and two different markers.  We just used pennies and nickels to cover our spaces.  You have to roll the dice, and then whatever number is on that dice you find a problem in that row and solve it.  Once you solve it you cover that space.  The object of the game is to get four in a row along either vertical, horizontal, or diagonal with making sure you block your opponent too!

Here are some pictures of my son and I playing.

There are different levels with the addition and subtraction boards.  

I wish the picture of him winning wouldn't have turned out blurry!  It was so cute how excited he was to beat me!  Believe me, I don't try to lose either!  He get's being competitive from his mom!!

Happy Learning!!!

Shannon

Update on Chicka Chicka Boom Boom

Hello!!!!!!!!!!

Awhile back I posted about a new theme that I was working on in my classroom.  If you are new to my blog, here is the link: Nursery Rhyme Unit 

Anyways, we have finally filled the tree with some letters, and now it's time for them to fall down the tree.  I wanted to show you how it looked now.  Remember, every nursery rhyme is based off a letter of the alphabet.  The kids really seem to work on the activities and then complete the art project at the end of the week.

Happy Learning!!!

Shannon

My Joy!!!!!

We all have our moments in our classroom that are just a big joy or put a smile on our face. Everyone one of my student's in my classroom are near and dear to my heart.  I was having one of those day's that nothing and I mean nothing was going my way.  This little boy is the sweetest little boy and I had every power to try and not smile when he was teasing his paraprofessional with a bean bag chair not to laugh.  So, I decided to take pictures.  Everyday, when it's rough and you just don't know what to do, I'm going to come back and look at him. Take a look....

He didn't want to give up the bubble wrap, so he decided to slide the bean bag chair away from us and continued to pop it.

His grin made me laugh the whole time.  Eventually, we had to pull him back into the classroom as he giggled the whole time.

Ok...so back to my post about movement....in a previous post I talked about how movement in your classroom is a good thing and it get's your students up and moving.  Well, once again this little boy decided he was going to play drums with me.  I finally was able to get him video taped on the ipad. Normally, he can be a stinker and stop what he's doing if you are watching him.  GUESS WHAT!!!  I got him!!  LOL

So, everyday he knows what time we get up and do movement activities and he uses two markers for his drums, and everyday the kids hand him his markers and he is ready to go.

Candy Land: Parts of Speech

Hey everyone!!!!

I hope this finds you with a smile on your face and like our school we are in fourth quarter already.  I talked about Jen Stamm and her AWESOME material's she has over at teacherspayteachers. If you haven't checked her out...you really should.  She has even made things for me.  Well...I popped over to her page again one day and found out she made...drum roll please...CANDY LAND GAMES!!!!!  That was my all time favorite game to play when I was little.  So, of course I bought all of them.  I even asked her if she could do an alphabet one for my students who are in preschool and kindergarten.  As soon as I finish printing them out and getting the materials together I will continue to post more.  Here is one of them I have completed with my students.

With this...I divided the student's up into groups and made sure that the different learning ability levels were mixed in.  

They had to work as a team to come up with the answer, instead of just one person providing the answer all the time.

Cards are just like the original candy land cards, except they have words on them.

Just bought an Candy Land game from Walmart for $5.  Now days they don't have ones with the cards.  They just have a spinner, board, and the pieces in it.

Well...I highly recommend her.  I cannot speak enough about her work.  

Happy Learning!!!

Shannon

Scavenger Hunts

Hello!!!!

I am a big time crafter when it comes to making things, cards and scrapbooking, but due to being so busy with work, I have to rely on my favorite website.  teacherspayteachers When I'm on that website, I don't always find what I am looking for, but you can put out a request of what you want and see if another person has something similar or you can work out a deal and they make it for you.  I have been working with an awesome lady that has been making my scavenger hunts.  Her name is Jen Stamm.  It started out with...ummm...I guess I really don't know anymore, because she has made so many awesome scavenger hunts for me that I own then all and continue to buy as she makes more. She is now making candy land games and we played one yesterday for the first time and the kids just loved that!  I will post that in another post.  If I were you and what learning games and fun games to head over to her page.  Here is the link Jen Stamm  

This is how I do it in my classroom, on Thursday's I set up the scavenger hunts and determine which ones the students will do.  Some of the scavenger hunts are harder then others, do I pick which ones will work with the different students.  I did make an excel sheet, so I do know what student has already done that scavenger hunt.  Below are some pictures to see some of the action.  Did I mention how much my student's love these?  They are always begging to do it more then just once a week.

I set it up right away in the morning and it just so happened that one of the student's was absent.  HEHE so I got the other special education teacher hunting for the cards.  :-)

Happy Learning!

Shannon

Movement

I've always known that you need to get student's up and moving around to get the energy flowing back and recess is not always coming fast enough for it to happen.  I recently went to a workshop that is called SMART and they really focus on movement, the brain and activities that incorporate learning along with learning.  They had us up and moving and normally I'm one of those teachers that are like ya right you aren't getting me to do this, but it was so much fun that when I came back I ordered the different CD's that I loved.  The one advice the presenter's said was make sure to practice before you have your students do it.  Well, knowing my special education student's I wanted to learn right along with them and let them know it's okay to make mistakes.  We sure had fun learning together.  Then they got the bright idea to do the Cha Cha slide too and honestly I didn't care as long as they were getting up and moving around before we switched to another area of learning.  Here are some video's to show you what we are doing.  I do still have some student's that are quite shy about doing it.  I also showed the other special education teacher in my room that was helping.  Hope you enjoy!

Happy Learning!!

Shannon 

Being Unusually Good

When your teaching whether it's a regular education classroom or a special education classroom you need that little extra boost for the students to work for. I found this on teacherspayteachers and you can find it under the name of Being Unusually Good. It comes with bugs and frogs. The students have to earn bugs for points or if they not behaving a frog. We have it set up that the students have to earn 5 frogs before they get a prize. The other special education teacher and I put a prize box together. If they get a frog all the their bugs have to go back. If they end up with 5 frogs, then the student and I have to call the parents. Right now, the most frogs I have seen one of my students get 2 frogs, but if they get a bug even though they may have 2 frogs, all those frogs disappear. Hope you enjoy!!!

 

 

 

Happy Learning!!!

Shannon

 

Spelling Scrabble

I'm always looking for ways to teach the student's their spelling words besides writing them over and over again or worksheets after worksheets. A kindergarten teacher and I were talking one day at lunch and the idea of using scrabble letters to make their spellings words. I ran with the idea from there. I found a free board online that you can print off and put the pages together. I would recommend laminating the papers, so that you can use it for a long time. I found it at Quirky Artist Loft: www.quirkyartistloft.blogspot.com/2012/11/diy-printable-scrabble-board.html

I looked at her blog to see if you could search for it and I was unable to find a spot that said search.

Once I printed that out and matched all the sides together, because you will have to cut off parts to match it up to the other side. You'll see when you print it out that the first sheet will say A1 and A1 and then the bottom sheet will say A1 and A3. You will just have to cut off one side of the A1 and line it up with the A1. It sound's tricky, but it actually isn't.

Then the fun begin with seraching for scrabble tiles besides having to buy a whole bunch of scrabble games. I went on ebay, Amazon and then I bought the Bananagram game and used those tiles. I then separated them out into each bag with all the same letters.

I wasn't for sure how to go about introducing this game, because I have younger students in here and some 2nd and 3rd grade students. I combinded the studenet's based on what spelling level they were. Here is how I started it:

1. Each group get's a game board and a list of their spelling words.

2. I took each spelling word and put the tiles that spelled that word into a pile and continued with each spelling word. Yes there was duplicate letters in the pile.

3. Did the same for the other group. I would highly recommend doing the separating of the words before the day you want to play the scrabble game.

4. If you plan on playing the game more then once, put all the tiles for one game board in a bag and then all the tiles for the other game board in another bag.

5. The next part was a little hard, because I knew once the older kids got the hang of how to play the game and understand that the tiles had to spell a spelling word and that you couldn't put a letter below another tile that wouldn't spell a word. With the younger kids, I let them for the first time on the board just see if they can spell a word, but I will know teach them how to actually play the game.

I hope this makes sense! If not, email me! Here are some pictures!

 

Happy Learning!!

Shannon

 

 

 

 

 

Sorry.....

I know it has been extremely long since I have posted!  Life has been truly busy and I've been working on a scrapbook album for my cousins wife who has stage 4 breast cancer and now with numerous of spots on her brain.  I have finally finished that and got it sent off to them.

I'm currently working on spelling games and word games using scrabble letter tiles.  I'm always looking for new activities for the students to work on besides worksheets and repetitive work.  

I am still working on my nursery rhyme units and let me tell you they are coming along great and the students love them. It makes me feel more organized and feel a sense of accomplishment having something more structured for them. To me it doesn't feel like repetitive work and they love it!!!  I will take pictures again and post as now we have some letters up on the tree.

Well, time to make supper!  Stay warm!

Happy Learning!!!

Shannon