watering the {kinder}garten

WOW! The school year is underway which means, my blogging time is typically limited to the weekends; which, coincidently, seem to be the times I really don't want to catch up with my blog because I would rather be doing other things like laundry, dishes, and sleeping (you know, the things I miss out on during the school week!).  After that extremely long run-on sentence, I'll let the pictures do the talking:

During Daily 5 Time! YES-- These ARE kinders! READING BOOKS! and not talking! AND not even noticing I am there! I have fallen in LOVE with the Daily 5 and am so thankful that Pinterest introduced us this summer :)

More Daily 5 - Read to Self. The kiddos get to choose wherever they would like to sit.  I've got one laying in the kitchen on a reading rug, and two at the writing table, and NOT EVEN TALKING to each other!

My friends are math whizzes already! We have conquered graphing and tally marks, and it's only been 2 full weeks! :) After my OBSERVATION (EEK!) on story-retelling and Brown Bear Brown Bear, we did a tally chart and graphed our favorite character from the story.  Who knew the purple cat was such a big hit!? and NO ONE liked Brown Bear?! Hello?! He is the reason for the story! :)

I already knew I was a little crazy.  But then I created this glyph.  Do not use without adult supervision!  I mean, I had 4 parents in the room, and this was my rotation-- it took the kiddos like 40 minutes to do this.  3 groups x 40 minutes = a lot of sanity lost! I love them, but wish we would've had time to glue cotton balls on them. :(

The Key for the glyph!

Close-up of the rainbow glyph! They turned out precious, but it was a pretty hard task! Wish we would've had a chance to graph some of our responses! BUT that might be like a 4th grade mean-median-mode sort of standard! :)

Wow, what a crazy week! We were officially back to school on Tuesday for an in-service, Wednesday for our last morning of registration and a work-day (although 1-5 had a meet-the-teacher morning!), another in-service on Thursday, and began Kindergarten screenings on Friday! We will continue with two more screening days, and then a work-day on Wednesday for our parent orientation on Wednesday night!  It is so crazy to me that this time is here, and that I am not nearly as stressed as the beginning of the year last year!  even crazier to think that at this point, I hadn't even interviewed yet!  It is so refreshing going into something with time to prepare and with an understanding of everything that needs to be done!

I am still trying to get my Daily 5 in order; have you had experience with that in the Kindergarten classroom? If so, email me PLEASE!!!! at Rhiannon Dean zero seven @ g mail dot com.  clearly, without the spaces, and you might wanna make those the actual numbers too :)

I'm still new to the whole "teacher-blogsphere," so forgive me for not knowing how to have a pretty little google docs or scribd preview to load here, but if you follow the link below, you can grab some cute book box tags that I made for my classroom library.  I've printed these in color, laminated them, and am going to hole punch and attach them with book rings to my themed baskets!  There are 18 in total, and I'm not sure they can be edited because I uploaded as a PDF; but if you email me a of your themes, I don't mind making them custom for you!

I walked the halls of RSE for the first time in a month and a half.  The floors were freshly waxed; the walls, freshly painted.  I felt giddy as I made my rounds just to see if anyone else was in the building.  Seemed like yesterday I was tearing all of this down and moving my furniture into the halls for the summer.  Man, it passed fast!

Speaking of passing fast, this time last year, I wasn't even HIRED YET!  I had only been back from Haiti for 2 weeks!  Little did I know, in my discouragement, I would interview, twice, get hired, set up a classroom, and begin teaching kinders in less than 5 days!?  Wow.  I can't even believe I survived, to be honest.  Last fall was terribly stressful, and I don't think I realized just how intense it was because I couldn't even come up for air!

I'm fortunate to have more than just 2 days to set up my room this year, and I am beyond blessed to be back at RSE with a fabulous team of teachers and admin supporting me.  Excited to get my class up and going, and to see where this year takes me!

Here's what I walked into today:

Before

After

After