Class scavenger hunt {freebie}

We are going into week 2 of our new school year and I am looking forward to getting my new class. Besides setting rules and expectations, I am hoping to foster a positive classroom vibe to really make our year successful! This one of the activities I am planning this week.


Students go around and find people who fit each category. I usually make a rule that you can only have each persons name ONCE! This encourages more conversations and mingling among the kids. Click the pic below to download the file. There is two versions included - the one pictured and another, more generic version.

I hope you can use it and your students enjoy getting to know each other :)

Graduation Bands - FOREVER FREEBIE!

I know a lot of you are coming up to the end of the year.

And the end of the year gets expensive!! Craft, student and teacher gifts.....

So how about a fun, easy and no prep way to celebrate?

It is all on one piece of paper. Just print, colour, cut and glue! Easy and fun :)

And the best part is I have made them from PreK up to 6 so you can use them for years to come.

Click the pic to go and grab them from my TPT store and I would love if you left some feedback.

Reflecting on the week in KB

I have been a bit of an inconsistent blogger. We have been doing so much great stuff in Kindergarten and the kids are a dream! (well most of the time lol) It is one of those groups of kids that for the rest of their school career people will just say WOW (you know, like the 100 year flood, once in a lifetime and you'll never forget it) Anyway....here is a look at some of the things we have been up to in the last couple of weeks.

Every week we look at a letter in focus and end the week with Friday Funday (also known as double bee Friday, where kids get double the reward - bees on their chart). Every Friday morning, we do craft to compliment the focus letter and 2 Fridays ago we made these fun igloos. We try to incorporate many different art/craft techniques to get students feeling confident in all aspects of art and craft. For this one, we used sponges to do the background with paint, then crayon to colour the small elements on the eskimo and penguins and finally the cutting and gluing onto the painted background. I evn made my kids mount their own artworks, as it gave me a little look at their spacial awareness (could they place it in the middle of the backing page). Then for some fun, I sprayed them all with glitter hairspray (which got me in a tonne of trouble from the cleaner!)

For maths this week, it more dice pattern and numeral ID stuff. The kids got really great at it and by the end of the week ( as we played this game 4 days in a row) I only had 3 kids out of 22 who subitizing was not automatic. And of those 3, 2 of them were only struggling with the number 4 for some reason. You can grab these freebie game mats in my post HERE.

I shared this one on Instagram and FB - we have a new reading corner! I had the shelving, benches and mat, but last weekend my boss bought me this tent at IKEA. All it took was a little rearranging of furniture and ta-da. The kids beg to be able to go and read when they are finished so it is definitely working. Do you have a fun reading corner?

Ahhhhhhh book club! It is one of the best presents! Eve if you have to give it to yourself. With both of my own children at school (in K and Yr1) books are definitely devoured in my house. The top spread is all the ones I bought for home while the bottom row is more to add to the classroom library. And for the second month in a row, my book club bill has been over $100....dont tell the husband please lol.

Thursday we celebrated the 40th anniversary of The Very Hungry Caterpillar. We read the story in class and I was surprised to see how many students were not familiar with the story. Then we made these cute headbands to make us look like caterpillars from the story - the kids and the parents loved them! 

We dont just craft in Kinder, but these are the only other pics I took last week. We had a focus on R and made this gorgeous rainbow. The techiniques we use were chipping and gluing and it incorporated a lot of talking about colours as well as the size of the segments of the rainbow. The finished product, with cotton wool cloud, looks so fabulous hung in my room :)

Wow, what a week (and a bit). I will try hard to take photos of some other learning that is going on. AND I am almost ready for a classroom tour now my room is looking so colourful and inviting.

Healthy Lunch - Kinder Style

Wednesday last week was a big huge gigantic day for Kindergarten at my school. It was the culmination of our term of work on Healthy Choices. Our final activity was to host a Healthy Lunch and invite the families of our 46 students to school.

The menu was decided!

The RSVP's rolled in......116! Yikes!

So the prep began!
It began like this...plus 2 other trolleys!

The many hours we spent shopping then had to be translated into the hours we needed to spend CHOPPING!. I didnt get a photo of all the prep, but the teachers of my school (for the most part) were so supportive and fantastic! The last chopper left school at 9.30pm the night before the lunch.

Ill let the pics take up the story now!

Very hygenic! I did have to give lots of gloves to one boy in particular. He would take his turn at 'making' and then exclaim "This looks yum!" Then his hand would go straight in his mouth. I was killing myself laughing!

We divided into 4 groups and each group prepared 3 dishes. My group made Garden Salad, Crunchy Noodle Salad and Wraps

How cool is the watermelon shark? You have probably seen it on Pinterest? Well someone was showing this pic around when we were chopping and my awesome boss says....I can do that! So watermelon shark was born! I think kids who didnt even like watermelon had a try of some out of his mouth.

Our hall was so full of happy families and kids who were so proud of themselves.

It was a lot of effort and come Thursday morning there were some VERY tired teachers but it was so totally worth it.

This is your life!

I think we have all been here before heehee :)

Freebie Friday

Well apologies for posting twice in one day. But when I posted Therapeutic Thursday it was Friday here and now its Saturday so I'm posting Freebie Friday....I know it all sounds a little confusing but I find it hard to sometimes keep on blogland time.

But to the freebies. I thought I would post my current freebies all in one spot!

Friends of Ten Freebie - from my Sweet Shop Maths Pack

Word Wall Cards - Superhero themed (googledocs)

Division Mats (googledocs)

Magic Pot - A patterns activity

Making Groups and Arrays - a SMART notebook file

and finally!

Fraction Pizza Task Cards

I hope you can find something that you can use in your classroom! Happy Teacher Week!

Today we went on a bus and a FREEBIE

That's it! My (personal) children had been bugging me for aaaaggggesssss to go on a bus. So bus we did go. We traveled on the bus to the next suburb - all up about 10 minutes. Got off, walked around, bought a coffee and then jumped on a train and traveled 5 minutes back home.

And the result?

Much thanks from my babies

The freebie is two motivational signs, perfect for back to school. At times, we know kids can get a little down because people tell them they can't do things - or they tell themselves the same thing. These two cute signs feature sayings that I found motivational back in my competitive swimming days. Click HERE to go grab them from googledocs.

Tell Me More (linky party)

This looks like one awesome linky so I am jumping in too!

1. I am from Australia. I live in Panania, a small suburb on the outskirts of metro Sydney. It takes us about 30minutes to get into the city but to tell you truth, I hardly ever go there. Driving in the city freaks.me.out! Too many one way streets.

2. I was on the Australian swimming team for about 5 years. I competed at Pan Pacific Champs and World Champs. I tried out for the Olympic team in 1996 and 2000 but sadly, missed out :( Which brings me to #3

3. Due to my swimming abilities, I scored a swimming scholarship at Arizona State University. I remember talking to the recruiting agent on the phone and haveing him say to me, "Have you seen Jerry Maguire? That is our school!". I remember nearly fainting lol. And to this day when Cuba Gooding Junior says "I'm a Sun Devil Jerry!" I puff up with pride. Fork 'Em Devils.

Thats me with the sunnies on my head and some of my awesome swim team girls standing on the football field

4. I never wanted to go to university. I didnt apply for anything after high school. I wanted to work at a newspaper and start from the ground up. But going to college at ASU forced me to make a decision and for some reason that decision was teaching :)

5. I received an award last year for Excellence in Sport - promoting sport in school in my area. This was a pretty big shock, but sport in my area is on the decline because of families who dont have transport, cant afford it etc. So making school sport better is one of my driving passions at the moment.

6. Blogging is taking over my life!!!! (Is that a bit dramatic?) Since joinging the blogging world 3 months ago, I have improved my practice in ways I never thought of. This morning during our maths groups, My kids were playing all brand new games which I had created. I felt pretty proud.

7. I got engaged after 6 weeks of dating my husband. I was home in Australia for a holiday and we hooked up. Before I went back to the USA he asked me, I said yes and the rest is history. We have been married for 8 1/2 years.

8. I have a *secret* dream of writing a kids book. Maybe one day....

9. I have 2 babies - Madison 4 and Cameron 3. Madison starts school next year. When I think about it I freak out just a little!

10. I really appreciate everyone who reads my blog or follows my TPT store or even more awesome, buys my products. I love the whole feeling of community that this blog world has created for me!

Why not go link up too?

Growing seeds

We have officially started our unit "What's Alive" and we kicked it off talking about what plants need to grow. This week we have been writing rockstars! and written a whole information report. There was quite a bit of guided writing but that is ok as we are just beginning this text type, having not done information/factual texts since last school year.
Anyway, you may recall a post I wrote about Friday Funday. Basically, on Friday afternoon from 2-3pm last term, I chose a bunch of fun activities like free craft, movie time, bubbles and balloons. This past Friday was our last Friday Funday as we start a sports program in this timeslot next week. So I decided it would be a planting session.

Forgive the total photo overload that is coming :)

 Seeds from the cheap shop ready to plant.

 We made markers for our cups so we knew whose was whose. This is just a star coloured in and laminated, then stuck to a paddlepop stick.

 Seed diary created by me! Click on the picture to grab it from TPT for only $1.50

 Our other planting goodies

 Our finished broad bean cups. We used potting mix because it worked out to be cheaper but you can use cotton wool or even paper towels.

 I bought 6 little buckets and divided the class into groups. Each group was given 2 seedlings to plant.

 Cute hey?

 Our finished product! The two little pots were spares that I repotted - just in case :)

 Taaadaaaa!

 Close up of the broad bean cup. Each student got 3 seeds so hopefully at least one will grow.

Fingers crossed we don't kill everything :) I don't have a very good track record.

By the way, I have just joined Facebook! Come and befriend me (pretty please!)
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Teachable-Moments/358258877578193
Hopefully that link works. Can you please let me know if it does not.

Porthole Craft Activity and oh so close!

I have finally got some pictures of the cute porthole craft I did with the kiddos last week (the week of the spray paint incident). I found the idea somewhere on Pinterest - if you know where it is from, let me know and Ill give credit. 


 First of all, take a paper plate. You could paint it or colour it blue, but I found some blue paper circles so we glued these on. 

 I then gave the kids lots of different coloured paper, some green felt and some tinfoil and let them go nuts! They were cutting out fish, sharks, jellyfish, treasure chests and making treasure with the foil. It was great to see their creativity. 

  We then took another plate and cut out the middle so only the bumpy bit around the edge was left. This is what was going to frame the underwater scene. 

Then I spray painted it CAREFULLY (see here for information on how NOT to open a spray can hehehe)

 A bit glue on the back of the cut out plate and stick it on top of the sea scene and VIOLA! Port hole window craft

Hope you enjoyed it. My kiddos had a blast.


And as for the "oh so close" comment, I am at 96 followers! I honestly can't believe it and thank you all for following me and having the courage to read my ranting :) When I hit 100, I'm planning something special. Once again, thank you for the support

So I exploded a can of spray paint....

Oh wow. I had to share my disaster of a Friday morning with you.


We have been studying transport this term. This week we were talking about water transport and wrote a story about travelling on a submarine. So I thought I would do this super cool 'submarine porthole' craft I found on the net (and yes I know that not many subs would have a porthole haha). There will be pics to follow next week because they turned out super cute


But anyways...


The final step was the spray the 'frame' of the porthole gold or silver to give it that window-type effect. So I went and bought my spray paint (one gold and one silver) last night and intended to spray the craft this morning so it would dry before we put them together.


So there I was in my classroom. Have you ever tried to get a lid off a spray can? Its really much harder than it looks. My can said to pry the lid off with a screw driver. Well I didnt have one handy but I thought I could achieve the job with a pair of scissors. It was just jimmying the top off right?


Next thing I knew there was gold exploding EVERYWHERE! Spraying all over my kids desks, the carpet, their homework, my clothes. It even got on the blinds! But worst of all, it got on my brand new, less than a week old smartboard I blogged about last week.All I can say is thank god I hadnt got the lid off yet.


My heart sank.


Quick call to the other half to find out how to remove paint. Turpentine he says. OMG!!!


Quick trip to find some turps and there I was, sucking in fumes of spray paint and turps, vigorously scrubbing down my classroom before the bell rang and my kids came in.


The smell - WOO! I think we were all a little bit high this morning.


But the good news was I got the paint off my furniture and smart board. Now to work on my clothes.


And yes, I did spray the windows, just silver :)

Friday Funday!

I'm feeling a bit tired tonight. We had a huge cross country carnival today for around 750 students that I was in charge of so I'm just smashed!


So that meant I was out out of school today. My kids had a casual (sub) teacher. They are a great bunch with no major behavioural problems. Just a bunch of sweet kids.


I walked in the door with about 5 minutes to go with the intention of picking up some stuff I wanted for the weekend and walking straight out. However.......


"MRS BEYNON"S HERE!!!!" The call went out.


And suddenly, I knew what I felt like to be a rockstar.


I was swarmed by my cuties who all threw their arms around me.


After a minute I was in a 20 person group hug!


I have to say, its the best way I've ever ended a Friday afternoon :)

Excitement plus!

I am hope are all feeling a little bit warmer than I am. Last night/this morning we had a massive change in weather. It feels FREEZING! The wind is chilly and my feet are so cold - my kids keep trying to steal my socks....but thats a story for another day.
I'm excited! A cute change is coming to the blog :) I hope you'll enjoy it as much as I will.
A parting story...today is ANZAC day where we commemorate Australian and New Zealand soldiers who have fought and died in battle. At school yesterday (today is a public holiday) we had an ANZAC ceremony but before hand I wanted to make sure my Year 2s knew what was going on.
I asked the class if anyone knew anything about ANZAC day. One boy put his hand up and said "There are two games of football on tomorrow". Ahhh the joys of living in a bubble.
Until next time
Brooke

IKEA!!!

Good morning from soggy old Sydney. I must say, I am feeling slightly jealous of all the talk about warm weather, cute dresses and strappy sandals. All I can think about is tracksuit pants (sweats to my US friends), warms socks and how long can I wait to turn the heater on - not yet thank goodness! The craziness of living on the opposite side of the world. I must say though, I lived in Arizona for 2 years and experienced a Christmas there. I found it very hard to wrap my head around the fact that it was cold! I much prefer hot Christmases, swimming in the pool :)

But anyway.....IKEA!!! The word sends tingles down my spine. I am going there today to hopefully pick up some cute baskets for my classroom. What is your favourite thing about IKEA? Or have you never been?

Teaching wise, I am halfway through my 2nd week of holidays and think its finally time to get myself into gear. I spent a lot of the last 2 days laminating and cutting up all my goodies that I have been hoarding collecting from all the awesome blogs and Tpt stores I follow. But amist all the new 'stuff' I have some cool ideas for lessons this term which should be fun.

Courtesy of Mrs Lirette's Learning Detectives - Contractions match

Down Under teacher Place Value Dominoes (2 digit) - I also just downloaded the pirate ones which deal with 3 digit numbers 

Cupcake Alphabetical Order by ME! Free download here on Teachers Pay Teachers

Our big unit this term is transport. Do you have any favourite transport resources?
Until after Ikea.....
Brooke