Feeling a Bit Brain Drained!

Hello Friends!
Boy, oh boy, I am feeling a brain drain! We as teachers are asked to do so much and sometimes, our bodies and minds just say "Stop! I need a break!" That is what I am feeling right now! It just seems that the past two weeks I have been going, going, going and have had no time to just sit back and relax! Taking the time to sit down and write an interesting blog post has just been plain difficult! Hopefully my drive will be back soon!

But...... here are a FEW things that we did this past week.......

We are working on the decomposition of the number 5.  By the end of the week, MOST of my kinders seemed to have grasped the concept of various combinations of numbers that EQUAL the same sum - Yay!

Here is a fun way that my kiddos decomposed numbers this week. They glued words on the bottom of their paper first, then painted an outline of a tree. They then counted 5 leaves and glued some of the leaves IN the tree and some of the leaves ON the ground. They then wrote a number sentence on their paper denoting their combination i.e.  3 + 2 = 5. They did great on everything, but it was a bit of a challenge to write the number sentence. They did it, though, and I think they had fun with this activity. I used fabric leaves that I found at Michaels, but you could easily use paper leaves or leaf prints!





We have our Halloween party on the last Friday of October regardless of the calendar date. I love doing it this way! We have our party and then they have the weekend to recuperate! Look at these fun Halloween treats that the Moms brought in for the party today! Bones (White chocolate pretzels with a marshmallow on the ends) and witch's fingers (string cheese with a piece of green pepper for fingernails)



Blog Hoppin is still having a Fall Feature! Hop on over to read some really fun posts about some fun resources!


I am late to the game on sharing these door decorations, but maybe you can put them in your file and use them next year! We have 3 kindergartens and these are the door decorations for the 3 of us. The little yellow circles are our kiddos faces blocked out, of course!



That's it for now! Have a wonderful week!

Until next time!

Fall Feature on Blog Hoppin!

Hello Friends!


Hop on over for some fun ideas for Fall at Blog Hoppin'!

Happy Fall, Everybody!

Blessings,
Cindy

How to add a hyperlink into a Keynote document

Hello Friends!

I have had a couple of blogger friends ask me to write a tutorial for how to add a hyperlink into Keynote. It is  super easy and once you get the hang of it, you will wonder how you ever lived without it!

Keynote is Mac's Power Point and can be purchased from the Mac App store. It is really inexpensive. I purchased my copy for around $20 and it has been worth every penny! There are many wonderful things about Keynote, but my favorite one is that Keynote holds your hyperlinks after you convert to a PDF which does not happen anymore in upgraded versions of Power Point for Mac.

The other nice thing about Keynote is that if you still want to create in Power point, you can continue to do that. Of course, you can create in Keynote, too! I love the option of having both word processing systems!

So I thought I would first show how to convert a PPT document to Keynote....

1. Open Keynote and click OPEN.

2.  Once you click OPEN, you will be given options as to what document you want to import.



3.  Click your document and it will be imported into Keynote. I usually have to do a little tweaking once my document has been imported. It usually involves text boxes that need to be re-sized or centered. But other than that, everything transfers very well.

Here is how to add hyperlinks:

1.  Highlight the image or text in which you wish to add a hyperlink...

 
 2.  Click the Inspector button. An options box opens.






3.  On the options box, click the hyperlink icon.

 

4.  When you click this icon, another options box opens. Check ENABLE AS A HYPERLINK. Choose "Link to Webpage." Highlight the URL and add your hyperlink. A small blue hyperlink appears letting you know that the hyperlink has been attached.
 Here is how to add a hyperlink for text....

5.  After adding your hyperlinks, you can convert to a PDF by clicking File, Export, PDF.



Voila! Your hyperlinks are saved!

Hope this helps!

Until next time!

Blessings,
Cindy

Insects eat too, Patterns are important, Fire Safety, and..... Do you still teach Columbus?

Hello!

Wow! What a busy week this was!

1.  We ended our Insect unit by talking about the mouths of insects. We talk about how bees have mouths like a straw, ants have mouths like clothespins, flies have mouths like a sponge, and mosquitoes have mouths like a needle - yikes! We were very lucky this week to have found a (dead) bee and fly to put under our large magnifying glass to do some insect observation. It was really cool to do this because we could see the 3 body parts, 2 antennae, wings, and 6 legs. We also were able to catch a praying mantis (alive) and observe it for awhile, too! My kiddos made an Insect book that they were able to bring home and share with their families all the awesome information they learned about insects!







2.  Patterns have been taken out of the Common Core for Kindergarten, but our Kinder team has decided that this is something that is just too important to remove, so we are keeping it in our Math curriculum. And lucky for us, we have an administration who supports us in our decision! As a team, we feel strongly that patterns set the foundation for many, many math concepts. Once children start to recognize simple color and shape patterns, this knowledge can be carried over to number patterns as well as recognition of patterns in nature and art. So, we spent the week talking about patterns and we DID keep in the letter pattern names i.e. ABAB, ABB, AAB, ABC, etc. Again, teaching kids to recognize pattern names gives them vocabulary to discuss the type of pattern that they see.


The pictures here show just the marker page that the kiddos used. We also used shape foamies as well as Halloween foamies to create the patterns. I just didn't think to take pictures when we using those other types of media!




Give me a few days and I will get the Pattern book uploaded to my TPT store!

3.  Another Math concept we discussed this week was MORE and LESS. We did a fun MORE/LESS activity using paint and large leaf stampers. I read the book "Red Leaf, Yellow Leaf" by Lois Ehlert and then my kiddos used red and yellow stampers to create groups of red and yellow leaves. The rule was that one of their groups had to be MORE than the other. I was pretty proud of how well they did and it made a pretty bulletin board display! Click HERE to download a link to the words.




4.  I just revised my Firefighters and Fire Safety packet. It has a 15 page Fire Safety book, songs with posters about fire safety, a Craftivity to create a fire fighter, a Fire Safety emergent reader, and a fun Search the Room fire safety sight word hunt.



5.  Do you still study Christopher Columbus in your school? I know many schools have taken this part of history out of their curriculum, but we still teach him. We use him only as a springboard to a study of explorers, though. We also use Columbus as a foundational step to a study of Maps and Globes. I wrote a blog post about how we do this on Blog Hoppin which you can find HERE


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Whew..... now hop over to Doodle Bug's amazing Five For Friday linky! I have joined late in the party this week (since it is SATURDAY!) and am WAY down the list, but that's okay.... there are so many wonderful posts to read before mine!!



Have a wonderful weekend!

Blessings,
Cindy