We Have a Winner! Plus I Need Advice/Input...

The winner of my 100 follower giveaway is Kelly B. Congratulations Kelly and thank you so much to everyone who participated!! Don't worry if you didn't win because if you had your eye on some products in my store, I am throwing a sale through May 1st! Go check it out and stock up before the sale ends! Also, go back to the giveaway post to check out the awesome bloggers who helped out if you were interested in some of their products.

Okay, now for the advice and your input for a chance to earn a free product from my store. One of my best friends is getting ready to start her teaching blog and asked for my help. I'm excited to meet (internet date!) with her this week to get her started, but she got me thinking. First of all, there is a chance that I might get to loop onto 1st grade with my kiddos this year. If we don't do it this year, we might do it next year. This is where I need your advice and input. When I started this blog, I never thought I would get so serious with it like I am now. I am beginning to wonder if I should switch over to a new blog that is more general and doesn't specify the grade level in the name. I love Kinder Krazy, it fit perfectly for me, but what happens if I become a first grade teacher? My friend made a great point that it would be easier to switch now when I don't have a ton of followers (don't get me wrong, I am stoked with the 127 followers that I have now) but hopefully many of you would switch over with me to my new blog.  :) So here are my questions....

1. What are your thoughts on the switch since I will likely be in a new grade level sometime in the future?

2. (For the free product) What should I name my new blog? I'm thinking something with my name (Mrs. Berns) in it. It might be neat to keep the Krazy theme too, but I don't have to. Thoughts?! 

I would love to hear what you think and if I choose the name you come up with, then I will reward you with a free product from my store! Either leave a comment below or email me! There will only be one winner, so get your creative caps on! :)

As always, thank you so much for your support! I am so excited about all of the friendships I've made through blogging this year! :)

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Last Chance! 100 Follower Giveaway Ends TONIGHT!

Hurry before your chance to win some amazing prizes is over! The giveaway ends tonight and the winner will be chosen! Click here or on the picture below to be taken to the giveaway and enter in!

I've also been working on some new backgrounds. I'm in love with the ones I just posted and I can't wait to use them in my products! There are 75, that's right, 75 different backgrounds! Click on the picture to check them out at my TpT store! I'm motivated to create more backgrounds too, so be on the lookout! :)

Thanks for all of your support!!

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4 More FRIDAYs...Kind Of!

That's right, only four more Fridays before we are summer bound! Technically we only have 3 more Fridays with the kids because we have a professional development on May 3rd. Fridays are great, but for some reason the last few Fridays I have come home completely exhausted! I've either gone to bed extremely early or taken an entirely too long of a nap. It is CRAZY! So now, after waking up from my 2ish hour nap (Yikes!), I am linking up with Doodle Bugs' Five for Friday!

1. We planted our grass heads! This was my first experience with this and overall it went well. We had stations and while they weren't at a station to make their grass head, they were writing about their grass head. Of course it was wild at times, but it's all about the experience right?! :)

2. We had our kindergarten concert this week and the kids were adorable!! It was so much fun to see them in a different light and just step back to watch them and not be "in charge" like usual! The last song was so cute! "1 little, 2 little, 3 Lincoln Lions. 4 little, 5 little, 6 Lincoln Lions. 7 little, 8 little, 9 Lincoln Lions. 10 Lincoln lions ROAR!!" They really got into the "ROAR" part as you can imagine! :)

 3. We've had the craziest weather this week. One day it's snowing on the green grass and the next day it's almost 70 degrees and sunny! Then today we got more rain! It's wild, but I think, I HOPE, the warmer weather is here to stay for a while!

4. We were hoping the cute little ducks we made last week would help bring back spring! I am so excited and impressed with my kiddos' writing. They have come such a long way this year! *Tear* Now it's almost time to send them off to 1st grade...

"I like to splash in the mud when it is raining. I like to catch the water on my tongue when it is raining." 

"I like to play with my legos. I do not like rainy days."

"I like to get wet in the rain. I like to watch TV."

"On rainy days after it rains, me and my brother get mud. It is fun and we stay inside and drink hot cocoa."

5. We have 18 days left of school!! Where did it go?! I am almost no longer a first year teacher and THAT, my friends, is exciting!!

One more thing, don't forget to enter in to my 100 follower giveaway! It ends this weekend, so go now!! Click here to take you to the post and have a super weekend!!

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SMART Board Calendar Routine

I don't know if you have a SMART board or not, but I love mine and we use it all day long. I started the year off with doing calendar the "old fashioned" way, but quickly decided to switch over to doing it on the SMART board. I still have a calendar posted in the room because I think that's important, but for our calendar routine, my students are much more engaged when we use the SMART board. Then I realized that we started to lose engagement since only a few students were interacting with it. I decided it was time to make a Calendar Notebook to keep everyone busy and engaged throughout all of calendar time. Although we've been using this since the beginning of second semester, I decided I should go ahead and blog about it since it works nicely in our class. If you like the idea of a Calendar Notebook and would like to incorporate it into your calendar time, you might be interested in mine that you see in this post. Click here to take you to the product on TpT. I'll admit, this was one of my first products and it has been a work in progress. I plan on adding pages and organizing it better over the summer, so if you buy it now you will be able to download the update again later at no extra cost! :)

When we first come to the carpet, we fill in the next date on our calendar....

 ...and fill out this page in our Calendar Notebooks including the day of the week, month, date, & year. You can also see we have begun our countdown to the end of school! 19 DAYS! WOW!! 

Before we move to the next slide, they peek out the window and draw the weather they see in their window in their notebook.

Then we go to the next slide and sing our days of the week and identify yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

Before turning to the ten frames page, I have the calendar helper add a dot to our ten frames and then we count by tens together and write the number of days we've been in school.

 To eliminate too many page turns, it works better to completely finish that first page and then turn to the ten frames and add our own dot. 

 Next we find the number on our hundreds chart and count by tens off decade to the number of days we've been in school. You could also count by ones to that number which we did earlier in the year.

We then turn to the back of our notebook to the weather graph. Our calendar helper steps out our door to check the weather and then graphs it. We talk about how to read a graph, how many more, how many less, etc. with the graph. As you can see, we've had a lot of variety in our April weather!! 

The next part of our calendar time that I will add to the pack this summer is a "What's the Number" page. It is a great way to help students truly understand numbers in many different ways. At the beginning of the year, I kept it to numbers under 10, but now we are doing teen numbers too! We use a random number generator and spit out the number. Then the calendar helper gets to call on friends (boy-girl-boy-girl) to come up and complete the steps on the board. We fill in the ten frame(s), write equal to, less than, greater than, and decompose the number. These kids have got it down pat by now and I'm so proud of them! :)

The next part is one of their favorites (specifically the balloon pop!). We review our sight words with either a random word chooser... 

 or the balloon pop game!

 They love throwing this little guy at the board and aiming for the balloons. It makes for a fun and exciting review!

The last slide isn't too pretty, but it has been effective. We roll a die and shout out the number that goes with it to make 10. For example, if we roll a 2, we say "2 and 8!"

Well, there you have it! Our calendar routine on the SMART board and using our Calendar Notebooks. Like anything else, it takes a little time to get the students use to the notebook routine, but after a full month with it, they will be pros! I hope this gave you some new ideas and I would love to hear what you do with your calendar time that you love! 

Oh, don't forget to enter my 100 follower giveaway! It ends this weekend, so click the picture below and go now! :)

Happy Friday tomorrow!!! Enjoy!

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Taste the Rainbow ~ Skittles Game!

First of all, I want to say how shocked and saddened I am by the Boston tragedy that happened today. Like everyone else, I can't believe it and I'm praying for all those families and people involved. I didn't hear about it until the end of the school day when I found out that one of our teachers' daughters was running in the marathon and couldn't get ahold of her. I can't imagine how many families and friends of people that were running in the marathon were feeling after hearing the news. Luckily, I have recently heard that she was able to get in touch with her daughter and she was okay. 

I hate being sad and I hate hearing about tragedies, so I guess all I can do in these times is pray and think of better times. So to "brighten" this post up a little bit, I am linking up with Latoya for her "Let's Get Acquainted Party" since it seems like forever since I've linked up!

This week's game is the Skittles game:

Here is the code:

Red - Favorite Ice Cream Flavor

Orange - Favorite Memory from College

Yellow - Favorite Sports Team

Green - Favorite Fast Food Place

Purple - Wild Card (Tell anything about yourself)

Red - My favorite ice cream flavor is Bunny Tracks! YUM! It is killing me to talk about ice cream, haha, because I'm doing a 90 Day Fitness Challenge right now...killer, I tell ya! ;)

Orange - My favorite memory from college would have to be Thursday nights during my last full year at K-State. I was already married and living 40 minutes away from school and my girlfriends and I had class on Thursday nights and no classes on Fridays one semester. We made a point to have a girls night sleepover almost every Thursday night and boy did we have a blast! I miss those days for sure! 

We all met and majored in elementary education and graduated together! Aren't our caps sa-weet?!?! :)

Yellow - My favorite sports teams are the Kansas Jayhawks and the Kansas City Royals! I grew up a KU fan, and even though I graduated from that "other" school (K-State), I still have to root on my Jayhawks! I love me some Royals baseball too even though they have been pretty bad the last few years...I'm not a fair weather fan! Hey, speaking of which, they WON on Sunday when I went to the game! Woot woot! :)

Green - My favorite fast food restaurant...hmmm...I'm thinkin' Arby's!!! Hehe! My husband doesn't care for Arby's, but I LOVE it!

Purple - Hmm...anything about myself, well what do you wanna know?! I guess I'll go for telling you about my huge family! My mom is one of 12 children and my dad is one of 9 children! Wow, right?! I am one of 5 and I LOVE my big family! Family get togethers are always a blast! I don't think I can talk my husband into having any more than four kids and that is pushing it...we shall see though whenever that time comes!

Don't forget to check out my 100 follower giveaway! There are some great prizes!! Just click here to send you to the giveaway! It will end on April 28th! 

Have a great week!! 

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Kinder Krazy 100 Follower Giveaway!!

Well friends, the day has finally come! I have reached 100+ followers on this little blog of mine (thanks to all of you!) and I've put together a sweet little giveaway to celebrate! I am also celebrating my first year of teaching coming to a close! I can't believe all that I've done and learned in my first year of teaching. Besides having 24 little kinder friends and doing my best to prepare them each day for first grade, I never thought I would've started a blog (and kept up with it), started a Facebook page, AND started a TpT and TN store in my first year! Some might call a girl like that CRAZY....Kinder KrAzY to be exact! :) I guess my blog name fits me then! Alright, let's get to this sweet little giveaway shall we?! Check out the awesome prizes you could win from these amazing bloggers and teachers by clicking on each picture! It will take you to either their entire store or the item they have donated to the giveaway. Be sure to check out and follow each of their blogs through the Rafflecopter below. Again, THANK YOU for all your support this first year and caring enough to stop by my blog! I really appreciate it and love reading all of your comments!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

The giveaway will be over on April 28th, so be sure to spread the word and enter in as much as possible before then! Good luck and have a super week!!!

Graphics by Dream Like Magic & Sonya DeHart

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