learning zone

School has officially started for a lot of you and quickly approaching for others! I have had a lot of people ask about my Back to School Centers and how I introduce them at the beginning of the school year. I absolutely love centers time with my students and I know it is their favorite time of the day! They get so excited and engaged with the activities that I swear I could leave the room and they would never even notice!    The skills included in my Back to School Centers are: handwriting, forming letters, beginning sounds, uppercase and lowercase letters match, sorting letters, building sight words, identifying letters, rhyming, simple sentence building, counting, counting out pictures, shapes, ten frames, ordering numbers, showing numbers in a variety of ways, building numbers, sorting, and SO MUCH MORE!!  There are 27 activities altogether! Here are some pictures of a handful of the center activities included in my Back to School Centers (not all activities are pic...

That day is here for a lot of us and just around the corner for the rest! The first day of kindergarten!!!! Our to-do lists are multiple pages long and our heads are full of all the ideas and things we want to get done in our classroom! On top of that we need to start planning our first day of school! Ahhhhh!! I remember when I first made my transition from teaching 3rd grade to kindergarten and having absolutely no idea what the first day of kindergarten should even look like!! I was incredibly overwhelmed and spent hours upon hours trying to find ideas. Even after teaching kindergarten for 5 years, I still forget what I do on the first day of school! There is so much growth that happens throughout the year that when the new school year begins, I like to refer to my first day of school plans. Thank goodness for those!! Over the years, I have come up with some important things that I always like to include in my first day of kindergarten: 1. Make the day fun! 2. Create a warm, safe, an...

Hi everyone!! I hope you are all having an amazing summer! I can't believe how fast it has flown by and that we are already in August!! I don't know about you, but I start to get the jitters a little bit around this time of year and do my best to hold off on the Back to School shopping! But who am I kidding??? You can find me roaming the $1 Target spot section, Dollar Tree, or Walmart almost daily! I have been working extra hard on updating all of my thematic units! As many of you know, I absolutely LOVE using thematic units in my classroom. I can't say enough wonderful things about them! They are my absolute favorite thing to teach during the school year and over time I have created thematic units to go along with each week of the entire school year!! I know that sounds crazy, but my students and I just can't get enough of them!!! I remember two years ago when I had a student who had a not so good home situation and was really having a hard time at school. This student...