I have spent the final day of my fall break prepping for Halloween week.  It was hard to narrow my plans down to my favorite Halloween books that I wanted to use next week.  But it was very easy for me to decide to use Creepy Carrots by Aaron Reynolds.  This book is so funny!  It's also great for making predictions, making  inferences, and for drawing conclusions.  We are going to be making these fun little carrots this week to add to our writing about Creepy Carrots. I teach kindergarten now, so we will be focusing more a drawing a picture to explain our thinking and adding a simple sentence to match our picture.  I differentiated the writing for you if you teach first or second grade.  You could also differentiate the writing within your own classroom based on the needs of your students.   We will be making these three carrots from the story to attach to our writing.  You can find the craftivity along with the differentiated writing component in the pack b...
Silent letters can be a tricky thing to teach and tricky for our young students to learn.  That's why I like to save them for Halloween week.  Ghost, or silent, letters are perfect for this spooky holiday!  I always build it up that I am about to teach them something that's really scary.  You can even turn out the lights and break out the flashlight to get them totally engaged.  You can just see the anticipation on their faces!  We talk about ghosts and what they think ghosts are like and what they do.  Last year, I even had a student get up and tell a ghost story!  {Whatever works!}  That's when I introduce ghost letters.   One fun activity we do is to go on a Ghost Letter Hunt .  You will need some small white paper bags for this activity to make the ghosts into puppets.  When we do go on a word hunt, I allow students to look anywhere around the room.  That includes in books.  For this hunt, Halloween books are perfect!  You may even wish to use your anch...
A kindergarten position opened up this summer at my school, and I jumped at it!  I loved second grade, but I was ready for a change.  The position entailed team teaching with one of my good friends, which was something I had always wanted to try.  She and the previous teacher tried out team teaching in kindergarten the previous year and had tremendous success.  After watching them and hearing all about it, I knew I had to go for it. We have two classrooms, one is hers and the other is mine.  We have a total of 37 students, but we divide them up into two teams: green and yellow teams.  We split for things like unpacking, lunch count, attendance, going to lunch, packing up, and math.  It also helps us at parent teacher conference, since we each meet with our own team's parents.  We do teach whole group math to our own teams.  It helps break up our morning and helps with the noise.  We do lots of group work in math, so it's just easier that way.  We each lead teach every other ...