There's No Place Like School

I thought that I'd share a few pics of my costume from fairy tale ball. I love The Wizard of Oz! Dressing up like Dorothy was so much fun, especially the shoes!

These are the ruby slippers I wore as part of my costume..  I'd been going back and forth about buying them for two years!  I am so glad that I did.

I used them to play a little trick on my kiddos. In the morning I wore black shoes with my costume. I told them that I really wished I had a pair of ruby slippers. Then while they were watching part of the movie I slipped behind my desk and switched my shoes. When I went back to the front of the room they noticed my shoes had changed. They were so excited. Why have a pair of ruby slippers if they don't create a little magic.

 A really sweet girl from a local theater company dressed as Cinderella came to our classroom and read Cinderella to us. All of the students had their pictures made with her. I loved her shoes and had to snap a picture.

I love this pic! Cinderella's glass slippers and Dorothy's ruby slippers. It's all about the shoes ladies.

One of my students had a wand. We took this picture. So cute!

One of our kinder's grandmothers came to the ball dressed as Cinderella's fairy godmother. She took pictures with all 150 kindergartners! Then she posed with our teaching team.

We all had such a great day!

b,d,p,q

Wow it's been so long since I've posted. One of my bazillion goals for the summer is to try and write at least one post each week. I thought I'd start back with something quick and simple.

I've seen a lot of ideas for how to teach students to correctly identify lower case b & d and p&q.  I thought I would share an idea that I used with my class this year. It's pretty simple but it worked well.

One of the skills that we practice to prepare for testing is identifying which letter is different in a given set of letters. I noticed that when we looked at a set like  pqp or bdb that my students were not paying attention to the fact that the letters were facing different directions.  Instead of concentrating on the names of the letters or the sounds they made we started by focusing on the direction the letters were facing.

Each day during our morning warm up we looked at letter sets on the ActivBoard and circled the letter that was facing a different direction. Then we began connecting them to the letter names. We said that the letters were going different places. The b is headed to baseball in one direction and the d is going to the doctor in the other direction. The p is going to a party and the q is going to see the queen (one of my students came up with this one when I couldn't figure out where the q could be going).

Creating an awareness of the different directions that the letters face combined with daily practice really helped my kinders with b,d, p, & q.