Teacher Bits and Bobs: January 2014

Sunday, January 26, 2014

Southern California Blogger's BASH!!

Have you heard about the Southern California Kindergarten and First Grade Conference?! It's a two-day conference in Pasadena, California geared toward early childhood educators. If you live in Southern California {or want to come out to visit!} and you teach Pre-School, Pre-K, Transitional K, Kindergarten, or First Grade, this conference is for you! Learn all about teaching Common Core Standards, organizing your classroom, reading and writing tips, classroom management and more!

Want to know the most exciting part?!? Some of your favorite Southern California bloggers {and a very special guest!} will be presenting at this conference on February 28th and March 1st!! Look at all these fabulous bloggers you can meet!

Annie's blog

Annie's store

Christy and Tammy's blog

Christy and Tammy's store

Katie's store

Kelley's blog Kelley's store

Kerri & Lindsay's blog

Want to know what we're the most excited about?! Our very first BLOGGER BASH!!! A party?! Yes, thank you!

Come meet your favorite bloggers and enjoy an evening of food, prizes and fun! Each attendee will receive a fabulous dinner, a goodie bag {full of freebies!!!}, and a raffle ticket to enter for some amazing prizes! We will have a short little blogger presentation and then the rest of the time will be for chatting and asking questions! You can purchase your Blogger Bash ticket for only $25 {here} or call (661)297-6900 to reserve your seat!

Are you excited yet??! How about a chance to WIN a FREE registration to the two-day conference?! Well, it's your lucky day! SCKC has generously allowed us to giveaway one free registration to the conference! Enter using the rafflecopter below! The giveaway will end on February 1st and the winner will be announced shortly after!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Print this flyer and hand it out to your fellow early childhood education teachers

or email them a copy!

A very special thanks to our sponsors!

Saturday, January 25, 2014

Five for Fraturday!

Happy Saturday, Peeps!! I meant to post my Five for Friday post ON Friday, but then Sherlock called my name, and this is how my Friday night went down...

Oh Benedict...how do I love thee???

So here it is on Saturday and I am linking up with Kacey from Doodle Bugs Teaching for her Five for Friday linky party!

Number one... Martin Luther King, Jr. portraits!! These portraits are always one of my favorite art projects to do each year, because, well, First Grade art is pretty much AMAZING!!

perfectly perfect Martin...

Surprised Martin...

Just woke up Martin...

I love them all!!

Number 2...My Terrific Tree Maps!

My sweet friend Jill Pherrin from my school who teaches Kindergarten has just uploaded the most FABULOUS pack ever to TPT!!

She teaches her students about a different animal each week that corresponds to the letter of the week and they fill out a tree map for each one, which the kids then use to write about each animal.

It SUPER helps her Kinders with their non-fiction writing!

She also saves each tree map and makes a book for Open House at the end of the year, and it is so darn cute!! You can check these out by clicking on either picture!!

Number 3...Mini hipster!
One of my littles came to school with a new haircut and I am totally obsessed with it! He looks exactly like a miniature HIPSTER, which is so much cuter than actually adult hipsters!! This haircut suits him perfectly and he is just too cute, I had to share...

Number 4...Kendra Scott and Teacher of the Year!
They recently opened a Kendra Scott store at Fashion Island in Newport Beach, which is about 10 minutes from where I live. This is DANGEROUS, friends! Very dangerous!! Have you heard of her jewelry? It is GORGEOUS!!! Even the shop is soooo pretty!! I think I might be obsessed!

Well, I was selected as one the top 5 teachers of the year for our school district this year, which is such a HUGE honor!
I actually WAS the Teacher of the Year for our whole district in 2006, so to be in the top five again 8 years later just blows my mind!
Anyway, I was presented with a gift from our PTA at Flag Deck on Friday and guess what it was??? OHEMGEEEEE!!!

Can you believe this??? It's GORGEOUS!

I have a mom at the school who is one of my good friends and she just happens to know about my Kendra Scott obsession, and she also just happens to be on the PTA. Isn't this AMAZING??? I was COMPLETELY blown away yesterday. How blessed I am!!

Number 5....Winter Games! They're coming, people!! I CANNOT WAIT to see this guy tear it up with his snowboard... Anyone else have a wee baby crush on Shaun White???

I am also all kids of excited for my kids to do all of the activities in my Winter Games Unit, which I completely revamped this year and even added another activity too!

Here are my kids doing some of the math and literacy activities from this pack!

Spin, Tally, and Graph

ABC order

Digraph Write the Room

I also have a Winter Games FREEBIE in my TPT shop that you can download today!!

Well, that's about it for me, friends! I'm off to my yoga mat and then, okay, FINE, I'll take a shower. It's only 11:45 a.m.!! HEEHEE

XOXO Kerri B

Sunday, January 19, 2014

Kindness and other Winter randomness! (Plus a Kindness freebie!!)

Happy Sunday Peeps! Kerri here...
Actually, Happy GLORIOUS Sunday, since we have no school tomorrow! HOLLA!!

I am about to get my Downton on (was last week's episode not TOTALLY SHOCKING and HORRIBLE?? I hated it.), and after that I just might get my SHERLOCK on too! Anyone else watch Sherlock? I just discovered it and OHEMGEE...I am in LOVE!

I keep forgetting to bring my camera to school, and then when I finally bring it, I forget to bring it back home! DURNIT! Please forgive the following photo dump...I have over a week of Wintery goodness (said with much *sarcasm*, since it has been over 80 degrees the entire week! Ugh...) to share with you, plus a new mini-unit on Kindness, AND a FREEBIE too!

We started the month of January with our snowman art and poetry writing...snow much fun!

We also wrote snowman stories...I love that this snowman lives in Mammoth, however I am NOT loving the printing here. Gotta work on that!

Isn't that baby snowman and ice cream cone so precious??

We also worked on writing Wintery Super Sentences. More on that later! Stay tuned...

Of course, we had to have our Word of the Week literacy center on the word mittens...

And then, of course, we made Tacky the Penguin...my absolute FAVORITE of all time~

I am especially loving my Tacky the Penguin bulletin board right now...

So much Wintery fun, and not a drop of snow OR rain or EVEN chilliness to be had. Did I mention that it was 86 degrees this week? Here's proof...

So gross...

Moving right along...Our school is having a month long focus on Kindness for the month of January. Our theme is "Got Kindness? Pass It On!" and we are doing activities all month long to promote Kindness! It is pretty SWEET!
Here is a look at the marquee outside my room...

We also made our front doors have a kindness theme this month. Doesn't my student teacher have some CRAZY MAD ARTISTIC skills? She cut those letters free hand. I kid you not. She is like a walking CAMEO machine!

In class, we have been working on reading books related to kindness and then filling out thinking maps about Kindness. We are turning all of these pages into a book and we will write stories about Kindness at the end of the month. So sweet!!

School wide, we also each made a Kindness Quilt after reading the book called, "The Kindness Quilt". I just love how ours turned out. We will be displaying all of them in the MPR the last week of January, which is our big Kindness Week!

We will also be taking the Great Kindness Challenge the last week of January, and our students will each be filling out a Kindness checklist, as they perform random acts of kindness.

If you are excited about teaching your kidlets how to be more kind, and spread Kindness to others in your school and community, I have created this little writing pack with all sorts of Kindness activities in it! Introducing...