Getting Your Room Ready for Summer Break

Hey y'all!  I have 7 days of school left!  Eeek!  So excited!  I am in full force cleaning mode...and so are my kids.  Yes, they help me clean, organize, & sort everything in the room from, games, books, manipulatives....you name it, we clean it!  So, that's what we've been doing a lot of this week already.  Plus, this is the perfect time of year to get some extra sunshine (wink, wink).  Some fun things I've planned for this week are bubbles, sidewalk chalk, stuffed friend picnic, popcorn and a movie, AND, we have field day Thursday with all kinds of fun planned by our coach.  Check out Cara's cutie patootie ideas HERE.  She has some wonderful things planned for her kiddos!  Here's a few pictures of how my kids help me organize.

A full Lost and Found Tub = Not good.

 To find where all the "extras" go I have my kids play every game and raise their hand when they are done.  I check each piece to make sure they played it correctly...then I jot down on a sticky note which pieces are missing.  Sometimes, we find pieces in other boxes too...not just the lost and found.  So, as we find missing pieces,  I mark out the piece we found.  

 Sorry for the sideways picture...could NOT get it to turn in blogger...

If a game has all the pieces, it gets a smiley sticky.  I like labeling them so even during summer if I find pieces I know where to look.

 Once games get a smiley, they go on a shelf and aren't touched again...until next school year.

 I wish the shelves in my room looked this good all year long....yeah right.  

My kiddos organize each shelf after we check them, to make them look nice and neat.

This is the finished product. 

 While they were playing their games and finding missing pieces, I was unwrapping our new Reading Series materials and organizing those so I won't have to do that this summer.

 Plus, I've already started running copies and die-cutting things for the beginning of next year!!

Makes me happy!

What do you do to get your room ready for summer?

Have you started looking at your August plans yet?

It's a ZOO in here!

****Go to my Facebook page for a chance to win this unit!***

It's a ZOO in our room....no, really...it is crazy right now.  10 days friends...10 more days.  How many do you have left?  I can see SUMMER at the end of this tunnel and I'm so ready!  I will definitely miss my kinders, but I'm excited to spend some time with my "at home" babies!  

I finally got around to finishing up my zoo centers!  We used them several weeks ago, but they weren't quite tpt ready.  But, they are now and you can go check them out HERE!

I've put this on sale for a day...or so...so go check it out if you're interested.  :)

TPT Sale Extended!

That's right!  We have one more day to shop and get some great deals on TPT!  I racked up yesterday, but I might have to look again.  :)  I'm already thinking about what I might need for the beginning of next school year.  Are you?  I just can't pass up this good of a deal!  I've linked some of my favorite products from my store for beginning of year.  Check back later on to see what I bought!

Happy Teacher Appreciation Sale!!

Happy Teacher Appreciation week to all the teachers out there!!  

I can't wait to go shopping in support of this week!  I'm thankful for all the wonderful teachers I had throughout my life and for the ones that mentor me today!!  

Click the button to go to my store.  :)

Congratulations to Deb for winning my new farm unit!!

I sent it your way!  :)

If you're interested click the pic.

New Farm Unit and Dino Week!

I'm finally done with my new farm unit!  I seriously love it!  I blogged all about this little unit HERE.  Go check it out!   Click on the picture to take you to the product on TPT.  :)

And, last we learned all about dinosaurs and finished our dino centers.  I was so busy that I forgot to snap pictures, but I blogged about dinosaurs last year. 

I'm dying to give away this Farm unit to a lucky reader...so leave a comment below to enter.

When do you do your farm centers??  Fall or Spring??  I'm curious!

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We made a T-Rex foot then put all of our shoes in it...see what we found out below. 

Center games for the week...plus several more than aren't pictured can be found in my Dino-Riffic Fun Unit HERE.

The Brontosaurus

Our T-Rex mouth with 40 teeth inside...then we counted how many teeth we had

Our dinosaur glyphs...from Deanna

Here is a sample of our Stegosaurus with a pattern on his back...I let each child make up their own pattern and I asked them to be creative...not to do simply an AB pattern...I had some really really good ones...wish I could post all of them on here

Don't forget to leave a comment to be entered to win my new Farm Unit!

I'll choose a winner tonight before bedtime!

As always, thanks for reading my blog!!!

Farm Centers and Activities

This week we're finishing up our zoo centers and activities plus reptiles, but I wanted to show you our new farm centers and some of our activities we did a couple of weeks ago.

By the way, have you ever heard of the Mobile Dairy?  It comes to our school every year and it's such a great opportunity for our kids.  Click HERE to go check it out!  The kids love seeing how cows really are milked plus they share tons of important info. about cows and dairy farms!

Also, our school has this huge farm day, thanks to Mrs. Henderson, where our students rotate to tons of fun stations to learn all about plants, animals, and farms.  We plant a flower, make a "beanie baby" to wear around our neck, work on the farm fishing, painting the barn, building the fence, shearing the sheep, riding the horse, milking the cows, & gathering eggs. We got to see farm animals, learn about horses, hear Mrs. Wishy Washy tell her story and much more.  :)

I love reading the little fact books about animals to my kiddos.  They are always so interested in the cool facts they hear that they may not have heard otherwise.  So, we made these little charts to help us with our learning.

We made these little cutie patooties.  What I love about them SO much is that they are super FAST and so adorable hanging up!  This way, we spend more time working on writing our facts and really concentrating on spacing, sight words, sounding out words, and punctuation.

You can find these and more HERE in my Faces of the Farm pack with Jamie Mayas.

I just love watching them grow as writers!

Guess what?  I made NEW farm centers.  My older ones were a little outdated and not really hard enough for my little group this year.  :)  That's a good problem!

So, below is what I came up with!  You can find these FARM CENTERS HERE.

That pretty much sums up our farm week.  :)