What did we do before Pinterest?

I’m not sure how we survived before Pinterest. As I teacher, it is the go-to website for ideas.

I have been planning for a new entrants class (year 0/ kindergarten) for kiddies who have just turned 5 and are starting school for the first time. So in need of ideas I head over to Pinterest and a Facebook shout out to all my teacher friends.

I have found some GREAT ideas and resources and I wanted to share the best ones with you. If you are looking for ideas for 5 years old then hopefully this will help. You can also see them here on my new entrants school board.

Phonics

I have been using this Youtube video for my phonics help as all of the jolly phonic songs are one there with the words and actions.

We have also been using this letter find sheet from The Measured Mom to help the practice recognising our letter of the day. I did run into a small problem with this one as it only gives the alphabet letter and no phonic double letters like ss, ff or ll. So I created my own which I will put up as FREE DOWNLOAD (my first one) in a week or so time.

We will also be using these great letter outlines to create our letter of the day and past letters we have learnt.

Maths

We are also going use the same idea of creating our letter of the day with our numbers with these great number outlines.

I also love this idea of using ‘I can’ cards to help direct the kiddies with what to do for a maths station.

For maths, I had very little resources or ideas for this age group. I discovered the Teachers Pay Teachers site with loads of great resources you can pay for, also lots of really great free ones.

Some of the things I got which were free are

I’ve got your number – Fran Kramer – beautiful tens frames

Numbers Galore – Wild about Teaching – The number 1-20 with a selection of simple activities to do for each.

There is also a whole bunch of clip art from a variety of different shops including Krista Wallden.

Classroom Decoration and general teaching

From Teachers pay Teachers

Sweet and simple calendar headings – Maria Manore Gavin – months of the year display

Hello Fonts – Hello Literacy – For personal and classroom use this great fonts add a bit of excitement.

Developmental/ Fine motor skills

The sensory play guide on Little bins for little hands blog has been a life saver. Not only does it explain why you need a sensory bin but gives a massive amount of ideas for what to put in, both the filler and resources. I will be using many of the ideas from here in my classroom.

If you’re in need of a super simple list of ideas for what to put in Epic childhood has a list of the 200 items you can use.

As you can see with a little resourcefulness and lot of Pinterest time you can find anything you want for school. Next week we are going to look at the three little pigs for the week so I have booked in some Pinterest time to find ideas. I’ll share how that went next week and also some pictures of my new classroom, I’m still waiting for my laminating to come back and go up so it looks a little bare at the moment.