Erasers

This week I spent some time at the NC Exceptional Children's Conference. I got a lot of great ideas for my class and picked up a few items I know my children will enjoy. I headed to my son's house for the weekend and proceeded to sprain my ankle while being seated for dinner at a local restaurant. This truly hampered my shopping plans. I was able to limp around a little and found some great mini erasers.

I love mini erasers for activities for my children. They can be used for counting, sorting, fine motor (picking up small objects), patterning.....the possibilities are endless. I love to find erasers that are related to holidays and themes. Target Dollar Spot is a great place to find these.

The erasers I found came from Michaels. There are 75 in the bag and have a Santa, a reindeer, a snowman, and a mitten. These are great because I can use them before and after Christmas (the mitten and snowman for my Winter themes). The bag was $2.99 but with a 40% coupon and 15% Teacher Discount, the price is reasonable.

WH Questions - With Pete the Cat

This year, we adopted Pete the Cat as our class mascot. I fell in love with the Pete the Cat books and the children have too! (There are two new books coming out in February and I already have them pre-ordered).  When we read "Pete the Cat Rockin' in my School Shoes," we went around the school and visited all of the places that Pete goes to in the book. We also took pictures of Pete in these places.

in the cafeteria

on the bus

on the slide

in the library

I made a Smartboard presentation entitled "Where is Pete?" Each day, we look at the pictures and the children respond to the question:

Where is Pete?    in the library....on the slide....on the bus....in the cafeteria.

I have since added a few more pictures - I took a picture of Pete on the fire truck during Fire Safety Week. I change the order of the pictures so the children don't get used to what comes next. They have really enjoyed this activity and they are getting a better understanding of the question "Where?"

Turkey Freebie

I think I finally figured out all the ins and outs of posting an item to Teachers Notebook. I got my store set up and loaded my first free item. Turkey Games is a 10 page pdf file that has two math games in it. The first is a 10 Frame game, where children will put items into the 10 Frame that corresponds to the number. I usually use seasonal erasers, pom poms, or chips.

The second games is a More-Less game. Children choose two cards, decide which card has more items and which card has less, and place them on the game board in the appropriate block.

Click here to access Turkey Games from Teachers Notebook. I hope you enjoy these activities. Please let me know if your students liked them!

Pumpkins

Yesterday, we finished our unit on pumpkins. I try to stay away from the idea of Halloween and concentrate on things that have to do with pumpkins. I am so happy to have found Pinterest - there are so many wonderful ideas there. Here is a link to my Pumpkin board. Some of the activities that we did that you will find on my board are:

• Pie Pumpkin: growing the pumpkin seeds from within the pumpkin
• Candy Corn Math printables
• Knuckle Pumpkins - cute art project using knuckles to make the pumpkin

Another pumpkin activity I did was a flannel board activity with felt pumpkins.

I got some felt pumpkins from Michael's. They were actually felt stickers, so I put them on an orange piece of felt and cut them out so they were ready for the flannel board. We were able to do patterning and sorting activities. One of the ways we sorted were pumpkins with leaves and with no leaves. I love the flannel board. It is magnetic on the back so I can place it on my magnetic whiteboard when needed.  I found some turkeys and pilgrims from AC Moore and added the felt backing to use with my Thanksgiving unit.