To theme or not to theme...

For the past two years I haven't had a theme in my classroom. Instead, I've stuck with primary colors, easy to read signs and labels, and hopefully a pleasing and welcoming classroom. When pinteresting I always see the cutest themed classrooms and they just look so awesome, but they also seem like a lot of work. Another thing is that as cute and colorful as they are, I wonder if it is a bit much and distracting for the little ones. I love cute stuff, don't get me wrong, but sometimes it can easily go from cute to harmful. With that, I've decided to do a VERY minimalist theme this year. I'm going to embrace the world of bees.

((Here are my newest additions to the theme. Bee borders, bee nameplates, and flowers (for the job chart).))

To start, our slogan this year is going to be "We are BEEsy learning in Kindergarten!" Pretty cute, right? I'm going to spray paint an old frame yellow and use it as a prop to take their pictures that first week. I think I'll glue a couple of bee figures onto the frame too. Then I'll display them in the hall along with our slogan. I'm thinking I might also have colored bees hanging above their tables as a way to distinguish between the groups; blue, red, green, orange. Still deciding and thinking about it.

In other news, the classroom is looking awesome for next year.I am really excited to see how it all works with the new arrangement! I'm also looking forward to less stuff which equals less mess. Oh yeah!

What are your thoughts, do you theme or do you not?

Summer, summer, summertime

Oh glorious summer! Hot days, hot nights, fireflies, fireworks, pools, and Popsicles. I hope that all my friends from this past 2012-2013 are having a wonderful time and all my friends from the year before. Here at the house we are packing away our goodies for our big move next week. We are so very fortunate to be able to move into a beautiful home with enough space for our family. We are also working on colors, counting, and reading many books with Olive. I think that we should all have relaxing time, but in my mind reading is relaxing!


The next school year is approaching and I have spent some time getting ready. The biggest change is my classroom (pictures to come.) I have got rid of the puppet theater and a large cubbie desk. These two things took up a lot of space! I also moved my computer to the front of the classroom, so that myself and the kiddos have better access to it. This helps tremendously with the SMARTboard, because the board runs through the computer. I would often times have to make a trip all the way to the back of the room to right a wrong! This means that my reading table also moved to the front. I am so excited to have more spaces for the kiddos to work in small groups! We are going to do many group projects this year!

I'm looking forward to meeting all of my new little's...but not too soon :)

April showers bring May flowers

April is halfway over and we have been having so much fun in the classroom. So much fun that I haven't updated this blog in a very long time. After spring break we did a short unit on weather and now we are on our insect unit. The insect unit is one of my favorites and the kiddos seem to really enjoy theirselves.

On Monday we made a KWL about insects. First we wrote about "What we know" about insects. Here are some of friends thoughts; "Insects can tickle you," "Spiders eat people," "Daddy long legs don't bite." Then, we read a book called "What is an insect," an easy informational book. When we finished our book we went back and filled in the "What I Learned" portion of the KWL. We discovered that insects have 6 legs, spiders are not insects, and Daddy long legs are not insects. Next we came up with some "I wonder" questions.

We are Paleontologists!

Today we had a blast looking at fossils. The kiddos got out magnifying glasses and took a good and close look at them. Then they drew a picture of what they saw and wrote some describing words about them. How fun! Another group worked on creating a scene with dinosaur stamps. These Paleo ntologists have a lot to say and show you!