Morgan's Blog

My favorite books for gingerbread week! Click on the pictures for links. :) I love The Gingerbread Girl. This one is by far my favorite. It's about a fierce and sassy gingerbread girl. I love this one because I dress up as her for our gingerbread day. I just ordered this book ...LOL First, I'm obsessed with twins, so I needed it, but also how cute. I just watched it on YouTube to see if I liked it or not. The fox is the one who makes the cookies lol. This little book is super cute ! The gingerbread cookie travels through the school, which the kids love because they are familiar with all the spots. If you love the 'how to catch' series, you have to get this one for your collection!

My most asked about Christmas gift! Here is the step by step on how to do it. First hang paper somewhere. I use the bulletin board and I only need this amount because they are small lol. I do yellow because when using remove tools sometimes they are wearing green or white because it's christmas themed and then it's a pain. Have the kids stand facing however your back drop photo is. The reindeer is to the left of ours so I have them face that way. I give them options like reach your arm out, look that way, gasp with your hands on your cheeks, etc. Here is the link to the background I purchased on Etsy. Then upload the pictures to your computer and either remove background in PowerPoint or if you have canva pro you can do it there too with the magic eraser tool! I will be using canva this year, but I have used PP for a long time and it's fine. If you need a video tutorial click here or click the picture above and it will take you to my Tik Tok. You can stick it in an ornamen...

For November we have popcorn kernels, orange-dyed pasta shells, and number erasers. I used to go crazy cutting and laminating little numbers and copying recording sheets, but I found they were less productive with stuff like that. It may work great for some classrooms, but I find that this time at the sensory table is perfect for communication and creativity. I know it sounds like all those blogging pages that say to be gentle lol, but it's actually true. The kids are 5 and 6 so I have found it's okay to just let them 'play' in the sensory bins and guess what? They do their own academic stuff when I let them. I hear them talking about sorting numbers and addition back there. When I used to have a set activity like pull a snowball and record the number, all I was doing was redirecting because they were throwing snowballs. Plus, who wants to do the same thing every day? No judgment to people who make their kids do recording sheets, it just didn't seem to work out as a...

So Monday all the kids were here and Alex and I were together as well. Tuesday the kids didn't come and we got the room ready. Wednesday they were all here for their 'first day' knowing who their teacher was. Alex and I were both here Wednesday. Then Thursday started the job share. I am Thursday, Friday and Alex is Monday, Tuesday. Then we rotate Wednesdays! I used Thursday as what I would typically do on the first day- PIGEON! (click the picture for link to the book) First activity- graphing! We sat around the edge of the carpet for the first time (my fav thing to do). Everyone got a turn to put their name on the graph. The two choices were 'wanted to go to school' and 'didn't want to go to school'. I TOTALLY thought more of them would have put on 'didn't want to', but it was a full house for 'wanted to' lol.  Then we did the recording sheet. The ELMO will forever be my kindergarten bestie. If you don't have one, you should get a...

If you're new here, I absolutely love CRAFTIVITIES! Craftivities are a craft that aligns to whatever you are doing academically. We do a math craft once a week! My kids love it and I love being able to reference back to them. We used to do the hot chocolate teen numbers and these teen number puppies (which I do still love and we could do), but hot chocolate is out for March and the teen number puppies were just counting, not showing a tens frame like my hot chocolate ones did. So I randomly thought of this while my kids went to specials and whipped it up. The cereal represents the ten and the marshmallows are the one. So now when we talk about making teen numbers and filling the tens frame I can say 'remember the tens frame gets the cereal and the other part is the marshmallows'. :) The craft comes with different ways to print it out to make it easiest for your classroom or home. When I made it with my kids I realized I needed a 'topper' and also would not print out...

Years ago my first grade teacher friend and I made lucky charm pancakes with the kids. We wanted to make them a rainbow stack of pancakes. Ya, don't try that unless you are at your house with maybe five kids max lol. Making all the colors of the rainbow pancakes for 40+ kids is not an easy task lol. We ended up giving up and they got two different colors. Fast forward five or so years and I just make funfetti pancakes with the kids. This is the kind I use. You can find it at Walmart. You could really use any kind of mix, but if you are doing it at school I would suggest any that is 'just add water'. I probably would use just add water with my own kids at home too, considering I use it for myself as well lol. I have portioned it out individually before, but this year I portioned it out for four tables. I did a bowl of pancake mix for each table and then a small cup of water for each kid. I was trying to portion out the water correctly, but it turned into a hot mess because t...

LUCKILY Saint Patrick's Day was on a Friday because this teacher could not have handled another holiday falling in the middle of the week lol. The kids were pumped because on the calendar I put a little icon for the holidays and they were counting down. We called it everything from 'the leprechaun day' to 'the clover day'. I am not huge on Saint Patrick's Day. I'm not Irish at all and I just never really was fascinated it by it, even as a kid. However, when you teach kindergarten babes you have to be into every holiday. So we had a somewhat normal Friday, but added in rainbows in a cup and we made pancakes. The rainbows in a cup were so simple. I saw the idea on Tik Tok, but they had used green jello. Which I did look into, but I couldn't find it at target and I didn't feel like making any so something in my mind said vanilla pudding and food coloring. Walmart sells the pudding cups in packs of 6 which was nicer than doing the packs of 4 with how man...

Another dramatic play in The Beach Classroom. Click here to skip straight to the product! So I started this one way back in mid march of 2020. Which today seems like ten years ago. I literally went up to school that week later on to continue working on this and then they never got to do anything with it. Last school year we didn't get to it because we were in and out so they didn't get as many dramatic play stations. So this year is the year. They were super hype to see this set out. Normally I have something having to do with food or a restaurant so this was definitely a switch up. Here is the back view. The top left stays the same no matter what. It has the credit cards, phones, dry-erase markers, and extra money. (I do have the Melissa and Doug market cash register piece so a lot of the money stays in that.) Then the bottom two are for whatever set we have. I have learned that LESS is so much MORE. More organization, more time, more patience, more peace. LOL The more items ...

If you want to skip the reading and go right to the door decor pack click here! So I did something wild yesterday. I let my kids decorate the door... A few years ago I said I wanted to put up a new door every month. The kids love when the door is decorated to something new. I lasted maybe 2 months LOL. I try to decorate it at the beginning, but it is such a pain. It always falls down, I can't get it straight, etc etc etc. Well last week one of my co-worker's decorated her door. It was a spring door with flowers and my kids of course were in awe. "Let's decorate our door!" So yesterday morning during my morning coffee I randomly thought to make a packet of things they could decorate the door with. It is homeschool at school in our classroom so I thought, I'll give them the stuff and some examples and they can decorate it together. I told them in the morning about it so they were pumped when it was time. I printed out all the stuff ahead of time and cut it into ...

If you've been around for awhile you know that I LOVE craftivities. I think they are so much more fun than just the regular day to day lessons and even more than random stations. I typically tend to hate station games and cut out cards because they get lost and what not. #iykyk Over winter break I was trying to prep to come back and I knew I wanted to start doing a math craft every Friday. I am a creature of habit and routine, so I want to start doing Monday-Thursday stations and Friday craftivities. I saw a few subtraction craftivities on pinterest, but they weren't really sparking my interest. I wanted something different than something being eaten and it needed to be winter themed. So penguins on and off an iceberg just popped into my head.   I decided to first let my kids color the penguins. I also made them number the back because I knew they would be all over the ground and no one would know which are theirs. So we did that, but it took longer than expected so I collected...