We have a winner!


Congratulations, Kelly!  You have won your choice of literacy centers from KindergartenWorks as well as a $5 gift card to Starbucks.  Please e-mail me at kindergartenwhaletales@gmail.com to claim your prize.  Thank you to all that have supported and followed Kindergarten Whale Tales as well as everyone who entered our giveaway!

First 100 followers....time for a GIVEAWAY!

I am thrilled at how much I have enjoyed blogging over the past 5 weeks.  I am shocked by how quickly I have gained 100+ followers.  Thank you so much!  To celebrate 100+ followers following this blog, I will be hosting my first giveaway!
The lucky winner will be chosen on Monday evening (June 13th) when I return from my Vegas vacation!  This lucky winner will receive their choice of one of KindergartenWorks' fabulous literacy centers and a $5 gift card to Starbucks!  These literacy centers are created by my favorite teacher friend who I am blessed to work with daily.  She helped me to implement some of these centers in my classroom this year and the results were incredible.  After helping me to start a TpT store, a blog, and answer my crazy oddball questions every day, she also graciously offered to be part of my first giveaway.  She's amazing!  There are many ways to enter.  Just make sure to leave a comment on this post telling what you have done to enter:

*(one entry) Follow Kindergarten Whale Tales and KindergartenWorks.
*(one entry) Follow Kindergarten Whale Tales on TpT.
*(one entry) Add KindergartenWorks to your fav. shops on TeachersNotebook.com
.  (You will need to register and click on one of the products.  Then click "Add to your fav. shops" on the right.  Check out this site, too.  It's kind of like TpT.)
*(one entry) Blog about this giveaway. (You may use the image above if you would like.)
*(one entry) Grab each of our blog buttons.
*(one entry) Add us both to your blog feed.

Thank you so much for your support and good luck!

My Word Walls

I'm joing Ms. M's linky party as my very first time as a participant!  Yahoo!  Even though it's the end of the year and I already took one of them down, I decided to put all the words back up just to take a picture for this.  Here is my sight word "popcorn" word wall.  We learn songs to learn how to spell each of these words over the course of the year.  Then they go up on our wall.  I also put the students' names on this wall but have taken them down already.  There are magnets on the back for when I was in my old room that had a magnetic white board.  I had to improvise this year and had to use those sticky clips instead to make the words moveable.  That way my thinkers can take the words down to work with them if they need to.
We also have a sight word popcorn game that we play with these words that I have blogged about below.  I plan on sprucing it up a bit more with a colored background next year.  With moving classrooms this year, it was not a top priority.

My other word wall is on the opposite end of the room on our closet doors and is an environmental print word wall. 

At the beginning of the year, many kinder thinkers are nervous because they don't know how to read.  I help them to ease the transition into reading and help them to see themselves as readers through a unit on environmental print.  For this activity, students are sent home with a baggie and are asked to bring back 5 environmental print words that they cut from boxes, magazines, wrappers, and newspapers.  Since they can read these words, they begin to see themselves as readers.

Then we spend some time figure out what letter to put each item underneath.  They love this word wall especially in the beginning of the year.  They also use it throughout the year when they are finding words around our room to write down during our read the room write the room center.

So there are my word walls.  I'm looking forward to checking out some other blogs who link up for Ms. M's ward wall linky party!