Growing Kinders

Pin it to Win it Instructions….

I’ve had some feedback that some are having trouble seeing the Punchtab widget to enter. It looks like this….

If you are having trouble viewing the widget, you may need to update your browser.

I used this widget because I could not get Rafflecopter to work for me the other day. I will go back to it next week! Sorry for the confusion!

I’ll go over again how to enter the contest!

1. You need a Pinterest account to play. If you don’t have one, then sign up here:

2. Next follow my Pinboards on Pinterest.

3. Come back to Growing Kinders and find something on my blog that you want to pin to one of your Pinboards. I just installed the Pinterest hover tool, so it should be easy for you!

4. Finally, find this widget at the bottom of

THIS PAGE (<---click there) and enter via e-mail or through Facebook.

Once you log in, you’ll see a Facebook banner pop up – it says you can earn additional entries by sharing on your FB. This is something that PunchTab does (that I didn’t know about). You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to!

But, click the little blue arrow below that and you’ll see this screen:

Click on “go there” to make sure you are following my Pinboards. Then you will be entered! You can use the arrows to see how you’ve entered the contest.

Remember to use the #growingkindersfavoritethings on the picture that you pin from my blog.

Like this:

I hope this tutorial helps! Sorry for the confusion!

Now, go back to this page and enter!

Favorite things Day 1!

Ooooh! Are you excited?! Sorry I didn’t get this up earlier today, but I dropped off my 11 year old at language camp for 2 weeks today! This is her 4th year at the camp, and her 2nd year going for 2 weeks. If you want your child to learn a language, this is the place to do it! The kids have a BLAST!

If you are a frequent visitor to my blog, you won’t be surprised by my Favorite thing #1!

I LOVE these roll and learn pocket dice! I use them all.the.time. In fact, I have multiple sets – I probably have about 8 of these babies. They are great to have on hand for centers, and when I have to be out and don’t want to run centers. I’ll prepare a roll and write activity and each table group will have their own dice.
You want a set? Well, you could order them at Amazon. OR, I can send you a set.
Here is what you need to do:

This contest will be open for ONE WEEK. I will close the contest on Midnight on Sunday June 16th. I will post a NEW favorite thing on Monday June 17th with another contest!

Have fun pinning! Good luck!

My Favorite Things…

So, I thought it would be fun this summer to give away some of my favorite things to my wonderful blog readers! You all have been so supportive to me over the past 2 1/2 years (almost 3 – gasp!) that I thought I would spread the love!

So, starting TOMORROW (Monday), my first favorite thing will be up for grabs! (This time it is an item you can use in your classroom!)

So, be watching the blog tomorrow – I have to take my girl to camp tomorrow, so I’m not sure when my post will go up. You will need a Pinterest account to enter, so if you don’t have one – go sign up! It will rock your world!

You will also need to follow my Pinterest boards, so if you aren’t doing that yet go to my page and follow my boards for another head start!

See you tomorrow!!

Whole Brain Teaching–Learn Along with Me!

I have been slightly intrigued by the Whole Brain Teaching phenomenon over this past year. Like most of us, I don’t have a lot of free time during the school year to read professional books. But, once summer comes, I LOVE to get my hands on professional books. I decided that my #1 read was going to be this book:

The “challenging kids” part is what caught my attention. I’m sure you’re all thinking of a few challenging kids you’ve had over the years in your head, right?

I’ve watched a few YouTube videos, read a few blogs and have a BASIC understanding, but really wanted to dig deeper and learn for myself from the creator of the Whole Brain Teaching program (Chris Biffle).

So, if you’re interested, you can follow along on my little learning adventure!

First up, Chapter 1.

Here are a few things that I highlighted!

Yes! Of course they do! Whole Brain Teaching is FUN – they make their program fun to follow so children will WANT to be part of the classroom environment in a POSITIVE way. Children learn to work together to make their teacher happy and because they love to play the teacher and teach their friends.

Biffle says the program is more like a GAME that all students want to participate in. There are penalties and rewards when “playing” the game.

I am very excited about this part! Learning about how the brain works in learning to read has been another item on my list of “to-do’s”. Chapter 5 goes into greater detail on how Whole Brain Teaching uses all parts of the brain.

I hope that you join me on this WBT journey! If you want to jump ahead, go ahead and order the book from Amazon, or go to their website. What is amazing about this program is that there is so much information on their website that is absolutely FREE!

I would love to hear your thoughts – leave a comment below! Do you use WBT? Are you intrigued? Keep checking back this summer for more WBT posts!

Fun at the Beach! Math Centers

Well, I guess it took me a week to post my beach math centers! Sorry!!

Here they are!

At this center, the children scooped out shells from the bucket, counted them and tallied the number.

Practicing subtraction!

My kiddos LOVE to play Flip 5 and practice sums to 5. I made an Ocean theme for them to play at centers.

We also practiced reading the dime with “digital numbers” – this was tricky for some! But, we’ve been working on time to the hour, half hour, and even quarter after and quarter to during our calendar time!

School is out for me now, but I’m already thinking and planning ahead to next year. I’ve got a long list of ideas to work on and books to read this summer!

I would love to hear what you would like me to blog about this summer – anything that you’ve been wanting to know just comment below and I’ll try to blog about it this summer!

Here is me and my girls on the last day of school! My oldest will start middle school next year *gasp!* and my youngest just finished Kindergarten. I love these girls so much and am looking forward to spending the summer with them!

Yep, we’ll be doing a lot of this this summer!

Fun at the Beach! Literacy Centers!

The last few weeks of school are simply CRAZY! Constant interruptions, assessments, organizing, special events and so on! I try to keep the day as consistent as possible for the kiddos.

They loved our literacy centers this week. Here is a peek of what we did!

We used our Lakeshore fishing rods (love these!) to go fishing for sight words.

Had a little beach ball fun by rolling the ball to each other and writing the sight word that was closest to our hands when we caught the ball.

Played some CVC UNO.

and unscrambled our sentences.

I am so happy that the children love our centers – they stay engaged the whole time, and I am able to pull kids for assessments, for small groups, or for one on one work.

These centers are all from my Fun at the Beach unit if you’re interested! I’ll post pictures of math centers tomorrow!

Wild and Crazy Insta Review…

If you’re not following me on Instagram – find me @growingkinders – I try to post something everyday! You can get a little peek into my daily goings on in my classroom! Stop on by, I would love to have you!

These last few weeks have been wild and crazy in my house!

First…it was recital week. If you are a dance mom, you know that these are crazy times! My 11 year old danced in 9 dances this spring. Phew. That meant 9 dress rehearsals. Add in the 6 year old and you have 2 more dances. Dance week is CRAZY in my house! But, we LOVE it. I LOVE seeing my girls on stage doing what they love!

We also had our exquisite wedding of q and u! This is one of my favorite days of the whole school year, and the children just LOVE it. We chicken danced, bunny hopped, and macarena’d the afternoon away! And of course, we had wedding cake!

We had so much fun doing our animal research projects! We gathered data from book and from websites – compiled our info sheet, wrote our books, and then published using eduCreations. SO fun!

We went on a little lion hunt…

and made our kiss boxes for mom!

I know this time of year is a bit crazy for everyone! I hope you’re having fun with your kiddos and enjoying the last days and weeks of the school year!

I’ll be back soon with a peek at our ocean centers!

I appreciate you :)

It’s that time of year again! The time we fill up our shopping cards with items to help us make it through the rest of this school year and the beginning of next year!

Thanks Hope for the cute graphic!!

I will be discounting the items in my shop 20% and TpT will kick in an extra 10% if you use the code TAD13.

If you’re looking for a few things from my shop to finish out the year, here is what I use….

Just had our wedding on Friday – this is always a blast for the kids!

We are also finishing up our farm centers:

and Fix-It Up sentences are always a great time filler:

and reviewing those tricky teens!

We will also be starting our end of the year beach/ocean unit

and playing some more Flip Five! (my kiddos LOVE this game!)

and now is a great time to grab my calendar set. I’m testing out another version that I’ll be adding to this set – so grab it now and you’ll get the updates before the price increases!