I'm Baaaaack.... A Peek At My Week

I know it's been ages since I've blogged.  I'll be honest... I just haven't been feeling it.  It was a short summer, filled with professional development, presenting, and a little family time.  I think my avoidance of this blog stemmed from the fact that summer was so short and I wanted to soak it all in, and quite frankly, avoid school stuff for a bit.

We have been back to school for a week and a half, but before that, we spent a week with our new kindergarteners at Jump Start.  This week consists of a half day program where students can become acquainted with our school and the three teachers.  We already knew our class lists at this point in time, so we were able to get to know our kiddos a little better.

I am really going to make an effort to keep up with blogging this school year!  I love what I do, and I love sharing what we do.  There will be some changes to this blog that I'm pretty excited about, but more on that later.

Right now,  I'm here to share my lesson plans for the week!  I'm going to make my best effort to blog each Sunday about our upcoming week, and my good friend Deedee gives teachers the accountability with her Peek At My Week linkup.  

For those of you who don't know, I teach kindergarten in a 1:1 school district, meaning each of my students have their very own iPad mini.  The world is at their fingertips!  My instruction has transformed, and student learning has deepened.

Last week began our color study.  Each day, our students wear the color of the day, and we learn all about that color.  Using our iPads, we have gone on a color scavenger hunt around our school and made collages using the PicCollage app.

Red Day... This was our first PicCollage, and I really think they did GREAT!

We took it outside for our yellow PicCollage.  The kids are really getting the hang of using their camera!

We will continue with our colors through this week, and we will continue to search our school for the color of the day!  

We have always celebrated our colors to teach those who come to K not knowing them, but let's be real for a sec... 99% of my students know their colors.  I love incorporating how to spell and recognize the color words into this unit!  I adore my sweet friend Cara's True Colors pack to do just that!  We have using these resources heavily and will use most of these for centers this week!

This week's unit is All About Me!  Not me as their teacher, but the 22 sweeties that belong in my classroom!  We will be focusing heavily on NAMES!  I love teaching names, and another sweet friend (the one and only Deanna Jump) has created a fun, perfect-for-kindergarten pack that I am thrilled to pieces to use this week!

This year, our school district has allowed us to adopt Deanna and Deedee's reading, writing, and math workshop packs for our curriculum.  We started last week, and I am loving the results.  We are tweaking specific aspects of all three to work for our students, and, of course, adding lots of technology to the lessons, but we love the scope and sequence, the engaging lessons, and the fact that real teachers created it all.  

We also use these resources to beef up our alphabet instruction!

Homework also started last week.  You can find our homework bag instructions in my store!

We will also be learning a brand new app this week:  Chatter Kids!  

This was one of our favorites last year.  We use it often for story retell, making connections, and stating opinions!

This app makes relaying thoughts and ideas fun by taking an image (you can find one online or take a picture on your own) and making that image "talk."  It's P-E-R-F-E-C-T for little learners!  We will be using this app during Guided Reading this week!

Here are the rest of my lesson plans for this week.  Enjoy!