Yearly Calendar For Parents!

I originally promised myself that I would not start working on school stuff until July but to be completely honest, I miss it and I miss it a lot. I do know however come about October or so I will probably be ready for summer again :). Anyway this is what I made tonight in my urge to be in touch with the classroom again. I got my original idea from a pin that a friend had put up! Here. I was looking at it and thought great I could highlight certain dates and give one to parents at the beginning of the year, plus it had a cute little space where kids could draw a picture. After I opened it I noticed it didn't include 2014 and I wanted something that spanned the school year not just 2013. So I made my own. I went to this website and downloaded their yearly calendar. I then copied and pasted it into Pages(like Word but on a Mac) so I could edit it better. It was a little time consuming but it came out to be exactly what I wanted. It has the whole year displayed and I was able to leave a little space for the kids to personalize it. I plan to use different colored highlighters to highlight half days, days off and special days. I was also thinking that I would put a small sticker of some kind of that specific child's birthday. I am then going to put a key of what each color means on the back and laminate them. I LOVE to laminate.  If you would like to download the calendar here it is! I apologize that it is two pages but you can just tell the printer not to print page two. I just wanted it to be big enough to be legible! Enjoy! 

2013-2014 School year calendar

Graduation Gifts

I know it's a bit past the end of the year but I wanted to share what I made for my students for their graduation gifts. They all worked so hard and I wanted to give them something special. I found my idea on Ketchen's Kindergarten! The puzzles she found were smaller than the ones I was able to find at the dollar store so I ended up making my own labels. I did use the same text as her since it was so darn cute. Here is how mine turned out. 

I found the smarties candies and the puzzles at the dollar store. I got princess puzzles for the girls and superheroes for the boys. That was what the store had and thats not to say I wouldn't have given one of my girls superheroes or boys princesses but knowing my students I knew doing it the way I did would go over well. I just printed out the label, taped it to the front of the puzzle and then taped the smarties to the top. I used two because of the size of the puzzle but one in the middle would look cute too. My kids absolutely loved these. If you would like to use the label I made here is the file for it. It is a PDF file. I use a Mac and the way I made the border doesn't transfer to Word but it should save and print just fine. :) 

Puzzle Labels

New to two worlds!

Hi! My name is Jessica and I am a first year kindergarten teacher. I started in January as my kiddos original teacher moved back home. It's funny for me to think of myself as a first teacher as I just finished a school year but here I am in May finding myself very nervous about August. I have never started out a school year before but I am also super excited to start out with a class and classroom that is truly 100% mine. One of the hardest things I have ever done was to take over someone else's class especially a very active( I may have only had 16 students but 4 out of the 16 had constant behavior issues)  class. As all teachers know when you first start classroom management is a big issue and this class taught me a lot about that! I started this blog in hopes that I would be able to share the things I have found helpful, things I have created, and to meet other teachers! So feel free to follow me and introduce yourself. I love making new friends and I'm always up for a good blog hop!