PreK Skills Checklists

In my classroom, I am lucky enough to have an aide throughout the day! 

One thing that I decided to do this year is to use my aide as a second pair of eyes when observing student skills. When deciding to do so, I couldn't figure out how exactly I should make sure my aide was aware of my expectations. This is when I decided that checklists, not just for her to use, but for myself to use throughout the day, would work wonders! I don't know how many times I have thought to myself in my morning class, "Oh, Justin is doing such an awesome job with his letter recognition today!" only to later forget to make note of it in my Student Data Binder. 

I plan on updating my Student Data Binder this year!

With this having been both of our first years in the classroom, their were many things that did not go as well as I would have hoped. I was unaware of ways to use my aide around the classroom (because let's be honest, there was no college course on working with paraprofessionals.) My aide herself had never been in a classroom before, went 6 weeks with the first teacher and finished out the semester with a long term sub before I was placed in the classroom. 

One of the main problem areas I noticed was our communication regarding students and their progress. This year I hope to change change this into one of our best assets as a student support system, so I designed checklists that will work best with the way that my classroom is set up and the activities that we will do.

I have made myself a total of 10 different checklists:

Class Participation MWF

Class Participation TR

Cutting Skills

Coloring Skills

Art Skills (based on our first 4 art projects)

Social/Emotional Development (to be used during free choice centers)

Miscellaneous Skills (goes with activities planned)

Math Skills

Oral Language Development

Emergent Reading/Writing Skills

I have yet to decide how to do class participation yet. I'm thinking that this will be observed during our circle time daily. I have made two different checklists for participation: My aide will use the Monday, Wednesday, Friday checklist to observe those days and I will observe for participation on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

 If you are interested in my checklists, please feel free to comment with your email address and I will send you the file!

Back to School Already?

As I walked through Wal-Mart this morning, I saw the usual summer pile of parents and kids in the school supply aisle. Parent trying to get the exact supplies on the list, and kids fighting for the more "in" products on the shelves.

After witnessing two or three of the above scenarios, Imuttering to myself "Oh, those poor moms. I'm not looking forward to when I have kids to take back to school shopping," reality hit me like the Texas heat outside! It's back to school time! Parents are shopping for school supplies! THINGS ARE GETTING SERIOUS!!

You see, I have been avoiding most stores this summer after seeing the Back to School ads around mid to end of June! JUNE PEOPLE! That is way to early to break my summer vibe.

But this trip was different. This trip I realized that the mile long list of work that I need to get done before school starts on August 22nd, is something that I need to get busy with! Sure I've marked a few things off over the summer here and there. But I have less than a month before students enter my classroom!!! I mean my classroom MUST be super cute and organized!!

So after finishing my Wal-Mart trip and getting everything put up at home, I headed to the school. Only to find wet paint signs before I even scanned my badge to get in the building! The doors had just been painted. So I had to make a quick decision, was this sign just a warning to be careful or was it telling me to go away? I decided that I couldn't put off starting in my classroom much longer, so in I went.

My classroom was bare! (I should've taken before pictures, but I forgot) Everything neatly boxed up and moved so that everything could be moved for cleaning and painting!

I am proud to say that my classroom no longer looks like it did when I left for summer vacation! Now it looks like a disaster zone! Anyone else have this problem?? I decided I needed to go through things (until I was about halfway through with one shelf) and now I regret every decision made after my reality check in Wal-Mart earlier!

Just wait... It gets worse.

This is about when I decided that going through things was a bad idea!

That was my FOURTH filled trash can!!

Maybe my whole classroom will eventually look as nice as my aides corner!

As soon as my classroom starts to look back to school ready, my posts may not have much helpful content in them. But I am proud to say that if you were like me and waited to work in your classroom, my post might make you feel a little less behind! Haha. Maybe my after pictures from tomorrow will put me at ease a little!

Happy organizing and decorating fellow PreK Ninjas! 

Welcome to Diary of a PreK Ninja!

As I sat on my couch a few nights ago, feeling the emotional downpour of just finishing binge watching my favorite series on Netflix,

 

I asked myself what I was supposed to do with all the "free time" I was going to have. I say "free time" because let's face it, I wasn't just sitting on the couch with all my attention on the TV during those 11 seasons of Criminal Minds... I was writing lesson plans, designing posters, making checklists, cutting lamination, cleaning my house, packing my apartment to move (there is never a good time to move as a teacher,) or anything else that I needed to get done.

The answer to what I was going to do with all my new found free time ended up coming to me as I surfed Pinterest and Facebook looking for fun ideas for my PreK classroom. There are so many blogs for teachers out there! Like SOOO MANY! But every blog has something that I can learn from, use in my classroom, and grow as a teacher.

After a few days of stalking some popular teacher blogs, 

(just to name a few of my faves)

I signed up for Blogger, designed my blog page, and here I am. So I decided to give this blog thing a try! Keep an eye out for my first education based post!