Diet Coke and Mentos Experiment

I bought a pack of small 12oz bottles of Diet Coke on sale $3.33 at Target and a 6 pack of Mentos for this experiment.  It was a cheap experiment that my students loved!  

They put three mentos in a paper tube while pinching bottom of tube.  They then turned the tube upside down and inserted mentos in the diet coke.  The students loved watching the mentos explode the diet coke!

Pumpkin Themed Games

I love fall and I love doing a pumpkin theme in my classroom!  This year
I came up with a few new sight word/letter games.

Pumpkin Toss

I bought cheap pumpkin trick or treat buckets (only $1 a piece) at Target and used some ping pong balls I had at the house.  My students took turns tossing the ball in a bucket.  Then the bucket they tossed the ball in, they drew out a card or pumpkin.  My advanced group read the sight word.  My middle groups said the sound of the letter and my approaching group said the letter. I try to do the same thing in every group and just switch up the drill so that my students don't realize they are doing something different.  The students loved this game!  It worked their gross motors by getting them up and moving around.

 Pick a Pumpkin

Another pumpkin review game we played was Pick a Pumpkin.  I bought these orange plates for only $1 for 20 of them at Target.  I stapled a stem on them and wrote sight words on some and letters on others.  We worked on the same skills: letters, sounds, or sight words.

You can use both these games for almost any skills and even with older children: numbers, multiplication, division, addition, subtraction, colors, shapes, etc.  Make it a competition and almost any age would enjoy it.  I'm pretty sure our 8th graders at our school would even enjoy trying to toss a ball in a bucket! You can make it a matching game and have students work with partners matching uppercase A with lowercase a or 4+5 on one and 9 on the other etc.

Pre-K Progress Report

Every year I work hard on creating and editing a progress report for our preschool program.  I think I finally created one that hopefully will be final one; however, depending on my students each year, this one could end up changing as well.  I have searched the internet for pre-k standards, expectations when entering kindergarten as well as other pre-k and preschool report cards and progress reports.  Considering how much I have searched and looked at other reports, I wanted to share what I created with you.  If you would like me to email you a copy you can edit, let me know.