Mrs. Greene's Kindergarten Korner

The Very Hungry Caterpillar

Okay, I was bound and determined that I was going to take some pics to share with you before leaving on Friday.  

So there I was on a Friday afternoon, feverishly setting up my classroom for the next week.  

I am sure you can visualize.  If not, it looked something like this...

1. put out your theme center work only to realize you placed the wrong letter work at two centers (ugh).
2. pull out theme books (I have so many they all won't fit into my front facing theme book holder, remember I have been teaching for 19 years)
3. search for that certain big book amongst the million others that your children read and never seem to put back in the correct location even though you go over your organizational system every week
4. open the "stash" closet and needing to move 20 million boxes around to find the certain game you want
5. cut up 20,000 squares of the correct colored tissue paper for the following weeks craft (as you are cutting, you realize that your paper cutter really needs to be sharped because it is ripping the paper so you end up needing to cut all them up by hand).

I think you get the picture....I feel like I need an organizational intervention (Sounds like an organizational challenge for The Clutter Free Classroom).

However, I must say that after all that ...

I am so proud of myself because I FINALLY remembered to take pics (insert applause here)!

So here are a few of the items that I am using next week during our "Bug" unit of study (I prefer to say Insects but our reading series calls them bugs).

During this unit, we talk about all insects but the big book that I use for the week is...The Very Hungry Caterpillar.  

So...here is a pic of the very cute craft project we make this week.

The children use watered down glue to attach all of the different squares of tissue paper to a piece of white construction paper.  When it dries, I have a stencil we use to trace the caterpillar shape onto their creation and then we cut it out and add the details.  They always turn out so cute.  We do a writing activity where they innovate the story by completing the following sentence  "He ate through (insert number word) (insert food), but he was still hungry."

Next, I love to do retelling activities with this book so here are a few pics of some I use.  The first is a picture of an interactive chart that I made years ago (it is holding up well).

As you can see, it currently is not in the correct order (I was so busy I didn't even notice when I took the pic).  But you get the idea.  The food items have velcro on the back and can be added to complete the sentence.

Here is another retelling activity:

This is painted on a cookie sheet from the Dollar Tree (as you can see, this one is well used, the paint is chipping).  I just colored and laminated the small pics from a book that I had and put a magnet on the back.  The children use this to retell the story or as they are reading along with the book.

Here is another retelling item:

It is a stuffed toy that someone was actually selling at a garage sale.  Can you believe it?  It has all the items that the caterpillar ate through inside of it's body (I can't believe they were all there too!).  The kids use this at the puppet area after I model using it.  It is always a HOT item.

Here is another garage sale find:

And, sometimes it is just fun to put out new puzzles for them to explore with.  This is one of my favorites simply because I love Eric Carle.  

Now of course, there are many other items that we are using, but most of them are items that I got from different teacher resource books (i.e.  retelling coloring sheets, caterpillar measuring activity, metamorphous sequencing worksheet).

Now, back to my organizational issue (or lack of organization).  

I have noticed that when I set up for each week, I have so many different items in different places around my room (theme books, big books, worksheets, games, puzzles, retelling items, etc.).  Although many of these are organized in their own spaces and, for the most part, easy to find.  But it sure seems like a waste of time having to go to all these different locations to retrieve my items.  

I was wondering if anyone has any suggestions to make my Friday set up time more efficient. I would love for you to share what you do.  

Until then, Happy Blogging!

Ann