Guest Post: Ms. Kerri & Her Krazy Kindergarten

I'm so excited to be guest blogging for Laura. (She's my bloggy BFF) She was a guest blogger for me while I was on my honeymoon. Oh, I guess I should tell you who I am. I'm Kerri from Ms. Kerri and her Krazy Kindergarten. I would love it if you would come check me out after you finish reading this post.



I taught kindergarten last year and this year I will loop up with my kids and teach them first grade. So my brain is on to first grade but I thought I'd share some of the first day of school activities we did last year around the book Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. This is one of my favorite books to read the first few days of school. I know that I'm not alone in that.

Anyway, I have a cabinet in my room that is pretty ugly and large. My sister helped me make some palm trees. Well actually she made the palm trees. She used grocery bags and green butcher paper to make the trees. I put the words, Chicka, Chicka, Boom, Boom up on the top. Here's a before picture.

Once it was time for school to start, I placed all the letters of the alphabet around the school to different places I wanted them to visit. We went to the office, nurse, library, art room. gym, music room, and computer lab. We read the story, and then went on a hunt. The kids had so much fun trying to figure out what letter we needed to look for next. The letters were left up for about a week and several other classes enjoyed looking and identifying the letters too.  Then when we cam back we had an alphabet cracker snack. Ahead of time, I had cut out the first letter of all the kids names out of poster board. I let the students paint them. I had done one for an example. Then I put them up on the trees. We left these up all year long. I tried to find a picture of the completed tree but I couldn't. We do a staggered enrollment so I only had 5 or 6 students when I was tackling this project. So it made things easier. Then when I had my whole class there we reread the book. The kids loved getting to help "read" the story. I had a class that was 3/4 boys and 1/3 ELL. They enjoyed feeling successful at the first of the week. We also played games with the letters and made a class book. I've got two freebies for you. The first is a matching game with upper and lowercase letters. I made this before I discovered the world of clip art beyond Microsoft. I was going to redo it but the clip art isn't bad. The second is a page for a class book. This is my first time using dropbox to share a document. I hope it works.

Chicka Chicka Boom Boom Matching cards. Click here. 
Class book page. Click here 
There are tons of other ideas that go with Chicka Chicka Boom Boom on pinterest and other blogs. It was a great book to start the year off with. I hope that I gave you a few ideas for something to do for the beginning of the year.
I hope you'll stop by my blog. I'm planning a big giveaway for 400 followers and my blogiversary. 
Thanks Laura for letting me guest blog over here. It's fun being at someone else's house for a day.