Luv My Kinders: What Works! Teacher Appreciation Linky & Giveaway

It is Teachers Appreciation week! As a teacher you work hard and we want to thank you for all the hard work that you do! What better way to do that than by giving you lots of great teachers tips and the opportunity to win some FANTASTIC prizes. So let's get started!

My first teacher tip is all about organization. I store all of my centers and theme materials in bins above my cabinets. I don't have much storage space in my class so I had get creative. I have one bin per month to hold my activities.

Inside each bin are envelopes that hold all task cards, spinners, etc that are needed for the activity along with any recording sheets needed. Then I label the outside of the envelope. Nothing fancy, but it works.

When I am ready to use the activities I take out what I need and transfer them into my weekly center bins. I have 8 for ELA (blue numbers) and 8 for Math (green numbers). I also have a bin for each day of the week to hold whole group materials. Also inside each daily drawer are folders for the different subjects that I teach. I put all books or extra materials for the week in a book bin on my counter next to my computer.

I have bins for each month/theme behind my guided reading table so that I have all the books I use for whole group lessons. This makes it easy to always find what I need. The better organized you are the easier it is to plan and get ready for the week ahead.

My second tip is to use a focus wall. My kiddos love to come in first thing each Monday and see what we are going to be learning about. I have all of my letters, sight words, shapes, etc laminated and numbered on the back by week in my files. So it is super easy to pull out what I need and hang it up on the wall each week. It is easy to modify this for your grade. You can put the book you are studying, phonics, math, science or even social studies concepts. In fact my wall morphs and changes over the course of the year.

Once we are done studying letters, it becomes digraphs, then blends and finally vowel teams. My color spot moves on to word families. As you can see there are endless possibilities. It helps build excitement when the students know what they are learning about each week.

My final tip is all about weekly objectives. Our district requires us to post the objectives or standards up in our room that we are working on each week. It can be quite a pain to write these over each week. So I came up with a plan. I post my objectives on the side of my white board in sheet protectors.

I typed out all of standards in kinder friendly I can statements. Then I put them in a binder organized by strand/category.

So each week I just look through my binder find the objectives I need and put up the sheet protector on my board with the magnets and I am all done.

It literally takes me 5 minutes or less. This allows my kiddos to see our goals for the week and what they should be striving to learn by the end of the week.

Now what you have been waiting for. Below you can enter to win some FANTASTIC prizes. Believe me, I wish I could win. Just enter using the rafflecopter below. Remember the more entries you have the better chance you have of winning.