Freebie Friday!

It's Freebie Friday over at Blog Hoppin'!  I've been waiting for this day all week long.  Love finding new stuff!

I'm absolutely OBSESSED with sorting activities (they're totally perfect for my construction station)!  Here are a couple I've made to go along with our math series, Math in Focus. 

This one is a number bonds sort for first grade.

And here's one for second grade over standard, expanded, and word form.

Happy Friday!  I have a feeling my printer is going to be working overtime tonight...

Three for Thursday!

Teacher Week continues over at Blog Hoppin' with Three for Thursday!

My favorite font:

How am I supposed to pick ONE favorite font?!?  No way, Jose!  I love all of 'em over at Kevin and Amanda!  "You Wish You Were A Shirley" is making me pretty happy at the moment, so I'm going with it!

My favorite blog:

OK, again...I'm extremely indecisive.  I'm going with one teacher-y blog and one non-teacher blog. 

My favorite teacher blog is the very first teacher blog I ever started reading in college, It's Not All Flowers and Sausages by Mrs.Mimi.  She is fabulously hilarious and I love her sense of humor!  She's snarky...and I like that.  She finds humor in even the most ridiculous and dark situations (and there can be several of those in our line of work!).  She wrote a book based on her blog, got her PhD, and I don't believe she teaches anymore.  I think she is doing some consulting.  But she still blogs and is still laugh out loud funny!

My favorite non-teacher blog is Whoorl.  She's been in my Google reader for years!  Her kiddos are precious and she does awesome hair and makeup tutorials!  So fun!  I get all kinds of product recommendations from her (as if I need any more products...)

My favorite online resource...

I've been loving Kelly's Kindergarten since my student teaching!  I get so many great games from her site.  Most of her games are reading, but I change them up and make them go with our math content.  The kids LOVE them and don't even realize they're learning!

Can't wait to hop over to your blogs and read about your favorite things!



Where It All Goes Down...

Well, I'm 15 days into school and my classroom is a hot mess! has that nice "learned in" look.  I got in like 6 sets of new textbooks last week and I have 28 kids so there's NO EXTRA SPACE.  Seriously, if I get any more stuff, I don't know where it will go!  So I'm going to take this opportunity to share some pictures of the Project CHILD elements in my classroom.  (Project CHILD highlights...we work in "clusters" of 3 teachers, each specializing in a content area, we keep our kids for 3 years, and our kiddos work in stations daily.)  Here are a couple quick pictures of the whole shebang:

Every day, our kids go to stations.  (In the pictures above you can see the station signs hanging from the ceiling.)  They choose their station using the station assignment board:

They can go to computers, textbook (paper/pencil activities), teacher (small group instruction), challenge (a game), exploration (working with manipulatives), construction (cut and paste activities), or to the library.  Our library is free flow, so we don't have a set time each week.  They can go whenever they want!  Students choose their own stations.  They LOVE this!  The same activities are at each station for two weeks, so they usually have time to get to everything.  They record where they've been on their Passports:

I keep my station materials in tubs.  Each grade level is assigned a color and that color stays with them from kindergarten through fifth grade.  That way they always know which set of station tubs to use.  This is how I keep my tubs organized: 

Something new that we added last year is a College Station.  We work really hard to make sure all of our kids know that they WILL go to college.  Every year, all of our students go on a college tour.  Our kindergarteners go to the local community college and every year they get farther from home until they get to make the big trip to the University of Kentucky in fifth grade!  It's really exciting and so awesome to see my babies on a college campus.  But we decided to do a college station to help our kids explore more about college, the application process, campus life, etc.  Here's a picture of my college station (it's totally cramped and yes, I have a lot of STUFF!):

I'll share the activity that our kindergarteners do (because that's the one I made!).  This is based on the "road" to college.  We were supposed to tie in our content (math!), so I made it a patterning activity.

You can download it here.

I'm off to check out {and drool over} all of the other Blog Hoppers' classrooms! 

Teacher Talk Tuesday

Teacher Week over at Blog Hoppin' continues today with Teacher Talk Tuesday: advice for new teachers!  I'm in my third year of teaching, so I'm pretty new myself.  Just warning you not to expect anything terribly profound here... 

Be flexible.  Eleventy million things can (and will) go wrong.  The PE teacher will be out sick.  Someone will throw up.  The interventionist will need to change group times just this once.  You will have three different parents show up with 30 cupcakes each on the same afternoon without checking to see if it was ok (true story).  Just take a deep breath and a swig of your caffeinated beverage of choice and go with it...  It will all work out in the end!

Become BFF with the janitors.  Make your kids pick up trash, wipe the tables, etc...anything to make the janitor's life a little easier.  They notice these things!  They tell me all the time that I have one of the cleanest rooms in the school.  And anytime I need something, they don't hesitate to help me out.  (This may just be because we have the sweetest janitorial staff EVER.  But still...be good to them and they will be good to you!)

Have fun!  I'll never forget...towards the end of my first year, one of my students was dead serious when he looked at me and asked, "Do you even have a job?"  It cracked me up and I took it as a compliment.  He didn't see all the work I put into every single minute of our days together.  He just saw his teacher having fun and making memories.  So find a way to make learning fun.  And take a few minutes to sing a song, do a craft, tell them a joke, let them teach you how to Dougie...  They're kids; fun is their language!   

My biggest advice to anyone, in any situation, at any point in time is this: laugh it off, learn from it, and let it go!  I tell people all the time that I laugh at myself first and foremost...and most often!  You have to find a way to laugh at yourself.  Don't ever take yourself too seriously.  (Now, our jobs are definitely serious business, but there's a difference in taking pride in your awesome work and taking yourself too seriously.)  We all make mistakes every single day and the beauty in that is the opportunity to learn from them and grow.  I don't mind to make a mistake or two (or thirty!) in front of the kids--they need to know that grown ups make mistakes and they need to see how responsible adults handle their slip-ups.  And after my mistakes have been made and I've laughed at myself and let others laugh along, I let it go!  Don't beat yourself up over every.single.little.thing.  Let it go, because it happens to everyone.

...and that's all she wrote.  I can't wait to read all of your awesome advice! 

Meet the Teacher Monday

I'm so excited to participate in Teacher Week over at Blog Hoppin'!  Today is Meet the Teacher Monday!  So.....here I am!!!

Tell us a little something about you...

I'm Caitlin and I teach primary math.  I'm not married.  No kids.  Just me, myself, and I.  I like it that way; it's quiet and no one bugs me when I come home!  I do love spending lots of time with my friends and family though!  When I'm not teaching, I love to shop.  Seriously.  It might be an addiction.  I'm pretty sure I keep JCrew in business.  When I'm not teaching or shopping, I'm probably watching tv.  Love me some Chelsea Lately, Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, Criminal Minds, oh I could go on and on.  My DVR gets pretty full and I love Sundays because that's my DVR clearing out time.

How long have you been teaching?

I have been teaching for three years.  I have a second grade homeroom, but teach math to kindergarten, first, and second grades.  My school is a Project CHILD school, meaning we keep our kids for three years and we are all content area specialists.  It's really a great way to teach; I get to build amazing relationships with my students and their families and I can concentrate on teaching one subject area well.  I can't imagine teaching any other way.  Outside of my elementary classroom, I have a couple of other teaching gigs: I'm teaching an introduction to education course for my local community college this semester and I recently opened an early childhood enrichment center (think: Mommy and Me, mini-camps, baby sign language).  I stay pretty busy with teaching-related stuff.  Good thing I love it!!

You might not know...

This summer I went with my family to Discovery Cove in Orlando.  And I swam with and kissed a dolphin!  I wish I could just completely and totally gush about it, but I was scared to death.  This grown, 23 year old woman was clinging to her daddy like a 3 year old!  But once I got over my fear (and got used to the freezing water), I had fun.  And I would probably do it again.  Probably.  I told my kiddos about it on the first day of school and that afternoon, one of my little friends brought me a picture she drew of me kissing a dolphin and the dolphin was saying, "I got kissed by a teacher!"  Here I was the one freaking out about kissing a dolphin; I never even considered that the dolphin could have been freaked out about kissing a teacher!

What are you looking most forward to this school year?

Getting a Smartboard!!!!!!!  Any day now, I've been told!  I'm so stinkin' excited.  I'll be at school constantly working on lessons and figuring out all kinds of cool stuff to do with it!  Can't hardly wait!

What do you need to improve?

Spending my time wisely!  I love to talk and spend most of my time before and after school in other teacher's rooms chatting it up.  I should be spending that time in my own room doing lesson plans so I'm not there until 8:00 on Friday nights.  It's just so hard to teach with your best friends!!

What teaching supplies can you *not* live without?

I think I would die without my iPod!  I sing ALL.DAY.LONG. and use my iPod to make playlists so I'm not shuffling through CDs all day.  Makes my life so much easier. 

I completely and totally rely on my cutesy clipboard.  Since our kids rotate classes, we keep our behavior chart on a clipboard.  Mine is pink, polka dot, monogrammed, and adorned with grosgrain ribbon...of course!

I also need my Mr. Sketch markers, my black ballet flat house slippers (you know, for those days when my superfab shoes start killing my feet), and my Tervis tumbler to keep my Dr. Pepper cold all day long.