Free iPad apps for Kindergarten

My colleagues and I have each received 6 iPads to use in our classrooms.  I am looking for some really good free educational apps to use for my intervention groups.  So far I have found ABC Magic which is very easy to use and I can focus on all of the skills that we need right now.  Does anyone know of any other good apps that work on letters, beginning sounds, phoneme segmentation or blending?

Sight Word Smartboard Game *Freebie*

I just posted a new smartboard game on TpT.   It is called Find the Turkey and it is like my other games where you have to click on a picture and try to find something.  On this one I decided to practice sight words so I added the sight words that we have covered in Reading Street so far this year.  Click on the picture below to check it out!

Teaching Tip Linky Party

Hadar at Miss Kindergarten is hosting a Teaching Tip Linky Party.  I love to hear new ideas from other teachers!  I can't wait to check out everyone's tips!!  Click on the picture to go to Miss Kindergarten's blog.

Here are a couple of things that I do in my classroom that help me. 

"Speedy Letters"

First is something I call "Speedy Letters".  To help my students with letter/sound id fluency and improve their scores on DIBELS I use a small magnetic board with letters across the top.  As I push a letter from the top to the bottom of the board the chidlren say the letter name or sound (whichever one I called out before we started).  I always have the magnetic board handy with letters that we have covered in class.  I grab it during transition times and it only takes a few minutes.  After doing it together a few times I can call students up to do it individually, this gives me a good idea of who needs help with fluency.

Page Protectors

If there is one thing that I use a lot in my room it is page protectors!  It is probably not much of a tip because I am sure that everyone already uses them but I use to think that I had to laminate everything until a colleague handed me page protectors and I was hooked.  I use them for all of my math mats, playdough mats or anything that I need to be protected from those little hands.  I even hang them on my PDSA wall to slide in my new goal each cycle.   Many of my math mats require the students to write an answer so the page protectors are perfect because the students can use white board markers to write on them and it wipes right off.  They are great!

Don't forget to head over to Miss Kindergarten to see all of the other great teacher tips!

Using "Mini Anchor Charts" in Stations

I have been using anchor charts for many years but now that I am in the blog world, and have access to pinterest, I am starting to try and make them a little cuter (I definitely need to work on this).  Not that they have to be cute, but I have tried to jazz them up a bit.  But I am also finding other ways to use them.  At the beginning of the year my students and I created an anchor chart to help them remember the terms; more, fewer and same. 

I drew the lovely pictures (don't judge) and wrote the words on sentence strips and the students taped the words to the correct picture showing the meaning.  When they are at math stations I want them to be able to see the anchor chart and use it as a reference.  However, during stations I allow the children to spread out around the room and they cannot always see the chart from where they are sitting.  So I decided to take a picture of the anchor chart and print it and then everyone had a small version of it at their math station.  They used it as a tool to discuss the new vocabulary we had been learning.  Here is a picture of the math station and the mini anchor chart.

The game they were playing was a game from enVision Math.  I adapted it a little to make it larger but it is called Collect More.  Each child pulls a number tile out of a bag and puts it on their box in the middle and then builds that number on the ten frame (obviously these children were not quite finished when I took the picture) and then they use the mini anchor chart to discuss the results. 

I also figured that if I have to take an anchor chart down to make room for more I will have the mini anchor chart to still use as a reference!