First Week down.

Wow my first full week of school is over and I am exhausted. So glad to have 2 days to regroup and relax. 

I just have to ask my whole two followers out there... am I the only preschool teacher who feels totally inadequate at the end of the first week? No matter how much I tell myself and intellectually understand that my class at the beginning of the year is NOTHING like my class at the end of the year I always forget how large that difference is. I did remember to take it slow, do lots of modelling, do lots of modelling again and laugh a lot but those small (feels like huge) behavior problems just knock me for a loop. I know it will all get better - it will won't it? :-)

Another reason for my exhaustion is the week prior to school we had our all school inservices. I was totally honored to be asked to give a full day inservice on Literacy and Math workstations for our preschool teachers. I worked so hard preparing all the workstations and my 6 hour session and then was so nervous I almost made myself sick. I was so relieved when it was over and all my friends/co-teachers enjoyed it and were totally excited to get a stack of workstations and my interactive big books ready to go for Monday morning. 
Also during the summer I did a book study of Debbie Diller's book: Math Stations. One of the best ideas I got from the book was using assessment cards for quick and easy assessment. Debbie uses index cards, adds the children's names to the bottom and then arranges them on a clipboard. This is a picture I got off Pinterest that shows an example:

I made some of my own and pre-programmed them with upper and lower case letters so it will be easy to mark each child's progress.

To celebrate the success of my workshop and the end of the first week of school I am offering an assessment pack with two easy and fun-to-play games for you all! It contains literacy assessment cards (cards have upper and lower case letters as well as letters to mark for sound knowledge with space for comments), math assessment cards (numbers 1-20 on each card with space for comments) PLUS 2 games that can be adapted to any objective! This pack fulfills several CCS. Click here for yours.

Hope to hear from someone...........anyone....