First Day Jitters

Starting my second "first day of school" I was nervous. I get that feeling like when I was in school where I felt sleepless the night before. I kept questioning myself and went through the checklist in my head to assure myself I had everything ready.  I laid out my work clothes, packed my lunch and woke up without too much help when the alarm went off at 5:45 a.m.  I walked through the familiar concrete walkway up to my school while the moon still shined down on the pavement. It seems like it was a hassle or a pain to do, but my heart was no longer pumping with anxiety and nerves, it was pumping with excitement. 

I consoled parents when they dropped their babies off. The first tears I saw were actually from a mom instead of a student.  I could tell she just stared at her child and thought where had the past five years gone? I assured her she was in good hands and that we were going to have a really great day, and that we did!

Morning Assembly, photo taken from NEISD homepage: http://www.neisd.net/ComRel/News/NEISD_NewYear_082712.htm

We kicked off our day with a school wide morning assembly and we had a guest who led us in a musical presentation.  All the students were given plastic instruments called something along the lines of "ban Wackers" and the gym was filled with rhythm, dancing and smiles. Our little Kinders were a little unsure of what to do when it came to their part. However,  we made it through and in the end I am so glad we showed them the community they are now a part of. 

Throughout the day we practiced how to sit on carpet, line up, walk in line, ask questions and color and cut! I have completely forgotten the amount of routines my kinders learned and perfected last year.  I know that at this point that things are a little crazy, but I know that each day things will get better and better with practice. The best thing was that all the kids said they were excited to come back to school tomorrow. 

Well it is now 7:30 and I am already showered and in my pajamas ready for bed. It was a really great day! Although I am exhausted, I am anxious to keep coming back to school.  We got some sweet kiddos and I am ready to teach my heart out. 

I hope all of my teacher friends has a great first day back!! Looking forward to this year, its going to be a good one! :)

Living Meatless

Well, many of you probably know by now but Holland and I have been trying a vegetarian diet. It has been over a month when we started to just have vegetarian meals at dinner and Holland has been completely Vegetarian for most of that time.  I have been completely vegetarian for two weeks as of today. Please read blog post of what started it all: Forks Over Knives

So when I wrote that post, we decided we were going to still eat meat occasionally but we wanted to eat more meatless meals. Then we started the meatless dinners, then we moved on to just more of the meals throughout the day and here we are. 

In the beginning, I had a more difficult time than Holland just figuring out WHAT to eat. Therefore, I struggled more than he. I remember the first day we decided to try this diet I was thinking "I just want to try and not eat any meat TODAY. Thankfully, as time has passed on things have been getting MUCH easier. The first week I just made salads and such for dinner. I woke up the first night yelling at Holland saying " I AM SO HUNGRYYYYY I CANNOT SLEEP!!" We started incorporating more grains in our diet and more filling hearty veggies to keep our carnivore craving bellies satisfied. It was almost like a detox. Detoxing from meat.... sounds strange but our bodies were adjusting.  I started getting creative, researching blogs, online recipes, reading the Engine 2 Diet Book and now I can pretty much make up my own recipes of what we eat for dinner.  I want to point out how much easier it has been doing this together.  If one of us was not fully committed, it would have ended after day one.  

We went to our first total Vegeterian Restaurant yesterday(Green on Flores Street) for lunch and WOW. I finally understood what my friend Megan told me. She said she always gets overwhelmed when she goes to a vegetarian restaurant because she can order anything on the menu! It took us 15 minutes to order and I planned on taking pictures of Hollands Philly Cheesesteak Sandwich(With Mushrooms not steak!:) and my Falafel Burrito but we just chowed down. 

I have found many perks to eating vegetarian.
1. It is just plain healthy. Holland has lost a total of 9 lbs and I have lost 4. The only exercise we do is walks with the dogs so that is a nice perk.
2. You get to be creative.  No more driving through fast food drive throughs. I plan our meals for the whole week and grocery shop for everything at once. However, we have made up our own recipes based on what we have and it is fun to try to cook something new.
3. Grocery bills are lower. I would say our bills have dropped down 40 dollars weekly meaning it is saving us around $160.00/month.
4. Having more energy. Overall Holland has been getting through his workdays easier. Not as lethargic and tired. We will see how I am once I get back to the grind next week!

We have been having discussions on what we are going to do next. How long will we keep eating vegetarian? Will we eat meat again and if we do how often? We both have a difficult time committing to anything halfway. I feel like I need to do 100% or not do it at all and Holland feels the same way.

So here is a recipe I wanted to share. It was REALLY good.  I swapped the water for veggie broth and added mushrooms.

Kale, White Bean and Potato Stew

Happy Monday!

Last Weekends of Summer

After this weekend, there are only two more weekends until school starts! Crazy how time has flown by.  Holland and I have been trying to see as many people as possible and stay up late watching Vampire Diaries because he knows once I get back to work I will be much more sleepy and fall asleep at 9 o' clock no matter where I am at!

After waking up early and eating breakfast with some friends, we set off to Austin to celebrate a very special birthday! Hollands sister, Allison hit the big three-oh this weekend!

The Bailey Family. Allison, Kevin, Bryce and Raya

Once we got to Austin, we enjoyed some which which sandwiches and then we had a ladies trip out to do some small shopping. Allison will be teaching Pre-K this year so it is sooo much fun to get together and do crafts and projects for our classrooms. Once our craft shopping was done we set off to the pool which was full of laugher, pool toys, floaties and......something else I will get to that in a minute.
The pool had this awesome slide and we all took turns going down it with the kids.

Holland and Allison

Bryce and his Oma

Kevin was sad because he had no one to go down the slide with him!

The Baileys and Lawrences!

Raya and her Opa. 

I went down with Raya a few times but the first time was SCARY for me, not so much for Raya. She was sitting on the slide next to me but I went down WAY quicker than her little body did and I was holding on to her the whole time but we had a big dunk and we went to the bottom of the pool together and once we came up she looked a little shocked then started laughing. Crazy fearless child reminds me so much of her uncle!

After swimming we enjoyed some homemade pizza and some awesome ice cream cake. It was a fun filled day full of family, which are my favorite kind of days. Happy Birthday Allison! I hope you had an beautiful day.  :)

Getting Ready to Raise Kinders...Again!!

After over two months of rejuvenation and relaxation, I am ready to get back to my passion of teaching! This will be my second year teaching and I will be teaching Kindergarten again. I wanted to write a post to share some of the awesome things I have found over the past year and this summer to make my classroom organized, accessible and kid friendly. 

View of the classroom from one of the two entrances. 

Here is my teacher table. I had a desk last year that I hardly ever used. I always found myself sitting back here so I decided to remove the huge desk and make more room for the people who matter, the students!

Last year I used this tree and the owls as a positive incentives reward. I had it go from 1-8 and I would move students' owls up the tree when I caught them making positive choices and when they got to the top they would get something out of the treasure chest at the end of the week. I am trying to incorporate more leader in me things.Check out explanation of Leader in Me Here.

So instead I will place the owls on the Healthy Habit I see the students practicing! I feel like this is more of an intrinsic reward and although I will miss the treasure chest, I think this will be a great way to motivate students to do the right thing simply because it is the right thing to do, not because they will get a monetary reward.

So, one of the things that I wanted to change was the restroom situation. I always tried to only let one boy and one girl go to the restroom at a time.  When more than one goes, playing just starts and there are three other kindergarten classrooms so really, eight kids at a time is really plenty. I am going to have students take a rubber ducky and place it on their desk spot. They do not have to ask me to use restroom, they will just grab the duck and place on desk as a visual for other students that another students is out and they will have to wait until they get back. I found this idea on Pinterest but the teacher used sanitizer which I thought was a great idea but our classroom has a sanitizer machine they can use when they get back in the classroom.

Simply to pick up little paper pieces.  This will also be accessible to students who drop any other materials that need to be swept up off the ground.

This will be a classroom job.  The nurse helper will be in charge of taking those who need assistance to the nurse and taking this pail out to recess for any injuries that happen while we are outside.  Going to put a pen, nurse passes and plenty of bandaids in here!

This was my life saver last year. I got this bin from the container store and I place all the papers and lessons needed for each day. This was nice because I would walk into work in the morning, grab the days worth of stuff and get to it.

As a first year teacher last year, I was required to go to Math unit training and this idea came up at one of the trainings and I absolutely LOVED IT. Once I get students' names, Ill write them on their stick and they move it to the lunch they will be having that day.  This has many purposes. A number line and we would talk about how many more tray lunches there were than alternate lunches and so on.  I also use this as attendance because if the stick is still at the top, the student is absent! This saved me a ton of time. Also, we got some small stickers of the students' pictures and I put them on their for another visual if they have trouble reading their name at the beginning of the year.

This is my small group space.  I have materials ready for my RAP group along with binders to organize student assessments and data to track their progress throughout the year.

Got these from IKEA!! I only had one last year and got another one because it became so handy with storing just about anything in my teacher table area.

Afternoon centers and Math Workstations are on left shelf and library and student book bins on right. 

View of our classroom library. I have each genre organized by bin and then stickers so students know where to put them back at.  At my school we do the Daily 5 for our literacy portion of the day and I added hanging owls to show the 5 different areas around the classroom. Read to Self, Read to Someone, Work on Writing, Word Work and Listen to Reading.  I will be giving students lessons on how to choose good fit books for them and their reading bins more in the Fall vs the Spring like I did last year.

This is our Work On Writing station. I rotate all kinds of writing materials through here. I usually put notepads, dry erase boards, popcorn paper, themed paper and small blank books. One of my favorite things last year was watching students go from scribbling to actually writing stories. They progress SO much over the year. I am excited to watch this transformation again.

IKEA AGAIN!!! The rod was three dollars and the red bins were one dollar each. The students can grab a pail and work at the wiring table or work anywhere else in the room but their pail has everything they need for writing, including dry erase markers with felt erasers!

This is our Listen to Reading corner. I got some new curtains and my mom hung them all nice and fancy and I put in the leaf canopy to make it feel like a hidden nook in the room. I LOVE IT. 14.99 from IKEA-totally worth it. In this corner I have bags with cd players in them and I put around six different books with their cd's. Students can go anywhere in the room to listen to their book and follow along in the book.

Our bathrooms have NO mirrors and I want for students to be able to see themselves every so often. These are from Target in the home and living section. They are plastic so if they fall no worries of breaking and hurting little fingers.

These ideas came from a math workstations book study I did. The number on the left shows them which bin they go to first and then the second bin they go to after we rotate. The numbers  rotate down and around each time we do math workstations and I only pair students with one partner. Just having two students working together causes a lot less arguing and problems and I switched up their partners every so often.  I will take pictures of the students on the first day and use their pictures as a visual of where they will be.

Whole group area!!! Thanks to my huge desk being gone, this area has really opened up and I have a nice perimeter of space all around the carpet which means no distractions or hands playing with any  items.I put a piece of duct tape in the front for students to stand on for the whole group lessons or when presenting their work to the rest of the class. ITS AGGIE TAPE!!-Target.

This is by far ONE OF MY FAVORITE parts of my room this year. I am so lucky to have a dear family friend who made and installed these beautiful shelves for me.  They are so convenient and I cannot believe I went through last year without them. I had only one picture of my family last year so this year I printed more of the dogs and Holland and I . Kids are SO interested in their teachers licves. Especially when they figure out that they don't live at the school, they actually do the same things they do!

I am going to use "Hannah and Bleu's pick of the day" sticks for anything fun and rewarding. This is a way to basically keep things fair and keep all students involved.  All sticks start on green and so If I choose a student for calendar, I can choose a stick and then turn it around to show the red side so that every student will get a turn. I am going to do this for a variety of things like calendar helper, morning message, taking home morning message, fill in for a job for an absent students etc.

I got this drip pan from O' Reileys for around twelve dollars last year. I put a bucket of magnetic letters for the students to sort and it is a great way for them to get used to different fonts of each letter.  They LOVED this last year. I switch out the activities as the year goes on to CVC words, rhyming words, word families etc.  

Got this idea from Mrs.Riccas Kindergarten blog: Here
I usually always had students read a book on carpet and it will be nice to change up activities for the students who finish quickly.

I got this from Lakeshore. Kids like to know what part of the day they are in and what comes next.  They love a routine and if you mess it up, things can get a little cuckoo! This is also a great reminder for me with times because it makes sure I get every lesson in and get the kids where they need to be on time.

This is our Word Work station. Here is where students do all kinds of fun stuff to form words. At the beginning of the year they do activities like alphabet puzzles, sorting objects based on first sound, writing popcorn words in rice and making names out of play dough.  The colorful bins and shelf on left is from Target.  The shelf to the right will hold extra materials.

Bottom row has the fast finisher items.  This is going to be the supply section for the students to get materials they need.  I wanted for everything to be at their level. This means less work for me to get things down where they cannot reach and it makes them responsible and independent.

14.00 easel from IKEA. Got this last year and used it everyday for anchor charts and predictable charts. I got a thick binder clip to clip inn things to it. I am looking forward to our first week of school and doing Chester the Raccoon activities!

I am sure if you are a teacher or know a teacher you saw these babies somewhere online. Wooden Board + Foam+Fabric + stable gun+ milk crate= these fun storage chairs. I am thinking of having students store their RAP materials in here. These will be at the teacher table in back of room.

Loved these simple rules that I feel like any students can follow.  you can download them at Mrs. Riccas Kindergarten

Popcorn words!

Reveille and Aggie books. 

Another great find at Mrs. Riccas blog. She really is an amazing teacher with amazing ideas. This an alphabet monster. Students can use it to find sight words, letters, shapes , numbers basically anything. Cut out and glut to fly swatter and you have an awesome monster on a wand!!

Download Alphabet Letter Monster.

View form the other entrance into the classroom. 

$20.00 Foam frame in children's section at IKEA. 

I am really looking forward to this year. My goals when setting up were to make this a welcoming environment where students are able to get their materials and in turn be in charge of their own learning. PLEASE check out the following blogs. They are amazing and have inspired me to make/create more things to add to the classroom.

http://mrsriccaskindergarten.blogspot.com/
http://www.kindergartenkindergarten.com/