Welcome!

If you are coming to my little blog via Teaching Blog Addict, welcome! I have some interesting posts in the works about organization (I LOVE colored sharpies, lists, and binders), curriculum (some fun printables) and tips for teachers who are getting displaced (it sucks, but I learned some things this year that will hopefully help others).

If you would like to keep updated, click on the "Follow Me" button and I can't wait to get to know you all!

Using Your Teacher Manuals

At my school we use Houghton Mifflin as our reading curriculum.  It introduces letters, sounds and sight words, as well as teaches reading comprehension skills.  I love the Alpahfriends they use to introduce the letters, and my kiddos LOVE the songs and motions that go with them {and it helps them remember their letter sounds}.

Of course I don't use ALL of the curriculum {shh, don't tell my district} and I supplement a lot, but it is nice to be able to grab my manual and flip right to the pages for the correct day.

The curriculum is divided into 3 week themes for a total of 10 themes.  I have taken all of my manuals and tabbed them like this. . . . .

The tabs are labeled like  -  Theme.Week.Day or 10.1.1 {Theme 10, Week 1, Day 1}.  This is also nice when I have a substitute because I can just tell them what tab to turn to and voila, they are ready to go {hopefully}.

P.S. This is our next theme, I just brought it home so I could tab it and see what's coming up so I can plan.

P.P.S The themes are great, but our current theme is "Spring is Here" and it's not quite spring up here, nor do we have "typical" spring.  We spend a lot of time comparing and contrasting what spring looks like in "the lower 48" and what it looks like in Alaska.

My Favorite Techy Tools

Miss Snowden is hosting a linky party with favorite techy tools for teaching.  I love all the typical things, document camera, projector etc. . . . and would LOVE a SMARTboard,  but one of my FAVORITE (and most used) tools is good ol' Excell.

I use Excell to keep track of my classroom data.  I took all of our Kindergarten standards for both math and reading and created checklists for each one.  I then created "workbooks" with sheets for each of my kiddos

When it comes time to assess all my little darlings, I just pull them over and check their letters, numbers, etc. . . and mark it on their personalized sheet.  When it's time to print the sheets off to send home with Report Cards, and to stick in my Data Notebook, I just print the whole workbook - easy peasy, lemon squeezy.