Amanda and Holland: Thankful for Teaching

I am unsure of when I truly decided to become a teacher. Up until I was a senior in High School approaching graduation, I wanted to be a nurse. Then, my thoughts took a different turn as I decided I wanted to teach. FOR ANYONE who says that quote" Those who can, do and those who can't, teach" Feel free to come and sub for my class ANY DAY! There are many things I CAN do and teaching, thankfully is one of them :).

This is my second year teaching kindergarten and OH. My. Goodness. So fun, exhilarating, exhausting, fulfilling and giving all at the same time. There is nothing like the moment you have your first out of body experience when your classroom is chaotic, you have 20 five year olds demanding for your attention all at once and you kind of float up in the air and have an out of body experience. At the end of the day, I shake every one of my students hands and I am anxious to see them again tomorrow. Every day(or week) I look back and remember how far they have already come from the beginning of the school year.

Bottom line. I am thankful for my job, for my colleagues and for my students. With every job comes challenges but in the end, it will always make you a better person and in my case- it makes me a better teacher!

These past weeks have been SO much fun. The kids have been so engaged in our lessons on capacity, they are SO excited every time they see a popcorn word they recognize and they are pumped about all the Fall Holidays we have been talking about and celebrating. On October 1st they all came into school thinking it was Halloween. I remember when I was younger and my teacher showed me the calendar and I was so bummed to realize it was the VERY LAST DAY. My class still was excited ALL month. We counted down how many days until Halloween and we made jack o lanterns we measured pumpkins and we heard about their spooky plans. We are now onto Thanksgiving. Thankfully, they are still very excited and we have been doing some really cute crafts.

Today, we made some sentence strip pumpkins! All you need are the following:

*Sentence strips cut into half

* metal brads

*Hole punch

*green construction paper

*green pipe cleaner

*markers/crayons

We first talked about what Thanksgiving was and how it is a time of the year where you reflect on what you are thankful for. I explained to them that we can be thankful for people we have in our lives, things that we have or simple things like good health, food, pets, freedom etc.

I wrote down ahead of time the students name and left a blank for them to write their thing they were thankful for in. I wrote what they wanted on post its so they could copy it down and for some kids I highlighted it so they could trace over. The answers I got were hilarious. I think one of my favorites was " I am thankful for popsicles". Seriously, everyone always forgets about poor popsicles!

I gave each student a blank sentence strip as well to color in so the pumpkins would have some color. I advised them to use "fall color like green, orange, yellow, red and I got pink, blue and what I like to call "classic Kindergarten Pumpkins" I still LOVED the way they came out. These will be table decorations at our school Thanksgiving Feast!

One you have your sentence strips( I made a pumpkin for each table so 8 1/2 strips) hole punch each end and put brad through and pull paper out slowly to form pumpkin. Twirl pipe cleaner around them and attach with construction paper leaf.

Thankful for McDonalds!

I had three students say they were thankful for me! Way to make me tear up!

Capacity!

In Math, we have been learning about capacity! We did the best lesson ever to introduce capacity. We gathered all the students in our common area and had them estimate how many mashmallows each kinder teacher could fit in their mouth. Two of us used the small marshmallows and the other two of my team members used the large marshmallows. The kids were SO great with their estimates. They were so engaged and counted along as we put the marshmallows in our mouths.