My Last Day of College!

I am so terrible. My last day of my internship was last FRIDAY and here it has been almost a week and I haven't posted about it! I am sorry, readers! Although my last day of internship was last week, this week has been its own kind of crazy. I am the choreographer of a musical and this week is their "hell week" as we like to call it in the theater world. That means, first time in costume, first time with their microphones, first time with lights, etc. It has been a nutso week for us all. But the show looks wonderful and I see it tomorrow, so I will let you all know who it went! I am very excited!

But back to my last day...

It was bittersweet, for sure. I can't believe that I am finally done with my bachelor's degree! It felt like AGES. I was fortunate enough to have a wonderful class and a very supportive supervising teacher. I walked in on my last day and there were two wrapped gifts from her: 

The other wrapped gift were the sheets! So happy...

Then the students started coming in and all crowded around me with gifts and cards to open. I felt so loved and they were all so excited to watch me open things. I don't have a picture of everything, but I have plenty of pictures to share with you the love I received that day.

Large photo on left: A student made that for me! I love it!

Small photo upper left: That is the little bag the student made for me that he filled with "teacher stuff."

Small photo upper right: A pencil pouch that coincidentally I saw at Target the day before and thought was cute. ;)

Small photo lower left: A plant!

Small photo lower right: A wax melter and refills (not pictures) that smell amazing!

And the cards were just SO sweet (and hilarious).

The flowery one says "Go Noodle Rules!" I love it! If you don't know about Go Noodle, you need to look it up now! My kiddos loved it!

And the envelope on the bottom has a little drawing under my name. It is a thumbs up, which is something I do a lot and stuck with this student for some reason. They are so sweet!

And then of course, the class gift:

They made it with their fingerprints! My supervising teacher is the spider. Hehe.

Needless to say, I had a great day and a wonderful internship in kindergarten. Now it is just a waiting game until jobs are posted for next school year and another waiting game till I get hired somewhere. Sigh.

Half Way There!

Today was my mid-point for my current (and final!) internship. I was a little nervous. I mean imagine two of the people who hold your future in their hands in the next room talking about you! But it went great and I couldn't be happier. My supervising teacher and my internship coordinator both said I'm doing great and well on my way to becoming a great teacher! I am so excited for what the future holds. I have the remainder of this week and two more full weeks of teaching the full day and then I start to ween off teaching, until my supervising teacher takes control of her classroom again. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel and it is surprisingly bittersweet. I have always been the type of person who is always looking forward. The benefit of that is that I am usually a very prepared person and have lots of big plans I work for. The downside is that I don't live in the moment. One of my personal goals for a long time has been to work on enjoying the present more than waiting for the future. I have discovered though, that ALL teachers have to be like me and plan for the future. I mean, what other job does a person plan and plan and plan and plan and plan and plan? I am a very goal oriented person. What better job for me than being  teacher? I mean, really! A teacher's whole job is goal oriented. Everything we plan is a little piece of the big puzzle and a little step towards that big goal. I love it. I to think... Education was not my first choice! Thank goodness I had some divine intervention along the way and made the choice to go for teaching, because I love it! Now, once I graduate... I may be singing a different tune when I'm looking for a job... but I'll file that under "Don't worry about it and live in the moment."

This is a short post, but I am POOPED and it is only Wednesday! Enjoy the rest of your week, readers, and I'll "see" you on Friday with my next "Five for Friday" post!

Five for Friday (on a Saturday!) {Feb 15}

I'm linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching again this week but I regret to say that I missed the fact that yesterday was Friday! Between the busy day at school with the kiddos' Valentine's Day party, Valentine's Day dinner with the hubby, and the fact that I am definitely sick... I lost complete track of time and the day of the week. But better late than never right?

This week has been nutso! I'm sure everyone is in that boat. But here's my crazy week:

For our Weather unit, we have been learning about the different seasons and the different types of weather you see in each season. For our craft this week we made a Weather Mobile. It was much more labor intensive than I had realized, but I LOVE them and the kids really liked making them.

I cut out an umbrella (two pieces that were glued together) and they colored it. The four pieces are: a raindrop, a snowflake, a cloud, and a sun. The raindrop is covered in pieces of foil. The kids liked gluing something that was an unusual texture to them. However, it takes a lot longer for glue to dry on foil, so be aware of that if you tackle this mobile as well. We made the snowflakes out of coffee filters because it is quicker and easier to cut out. Plus, it made it such a nice round shape instead of a boxy shape like regular paper. Another benefit is its less weight for the little card stock umbrella to hold. :)

The next piece is the cloud and it is simply covered in cotton balls. And then the sparkly sun is covered in gold glitter. This was messy, but no one ever said Kindergarten was a clean place...

I love how they turned out and I would say it was worth the time and effort put in. I did have a parent volunteer to help, so I feel like I had an advantage, but getting the 19 kids in the class done was a little rough. We plan on attaching weather poems to the mobile next since we are learning about poems in ELA. Pictures coming soon!

This week being Valentine's Day, the kids were assigned to make a box of sorts to collect their valentines in for the party. Of course, being Kindergarteners, parents did a lot of the work at home. Most kids came in with a shoebox wrapped in decorative wrapping paper and stickers all over. They were so cute. I loved the see the students' personalities shine through these boxes. I did not take a picture of all of them and I'm regretting that now because I'll never see the boxes again, but I will share with you the ones that the kids were talking about all week long. Clearly, parents did most of the work, but you can tell the kids had a say!

The ninja box.

The adorable minion box. This one was made out of a cereal box.

And the crazy Frozen box. This was made out of cereal boxes and tissue boxes and comes complete with the dolls and accessories.

We had another castle box was that was adorable, but I didn't get a picture of it! And the Kindergarten class next door had a unicorn that I just wanted to steal and take home. SO CUTE!

We had a meeting this week through the university and I had to make my first day's worth of sub plans. No big deal! Hooray!

The meeting was great because we got to talk about graduation stuff and make plans for parties and get togethers. I will likely not walk at graduation because, quite frankly, it is really expensive. I am also at a remote campus which means my campus is in a different town. If I wanted to walk at graduation, I would also have to drive almost 2 hours south on the Florida Turnpike, which means I have to pay lots of tolls. Also a bummer is that the College of Education will be graduating with the College of Nursing, both of which have the largest number of graduates in the whole university. Sounds like bad planning to me, so I'm just going to save my money and stay home. I also don't want to leave anyone out by only having the five tickets, so we'll just party at home!

In the meeting however, we also discussed some different classroom management strategies that we are using in our classes and I got some really great ideas! I'm excited to start using them to see if they work for my class and me.

The day I had the meeting was also my husband's 28th birthday! Hooray! We went to Red Lobster with my brother, some friends, and my sister-in-law. It was delicious and we had a LOT of fun. Happy birthday, sweetie!

On Valentine's Day (yesterday), we did a lot of fun things before the Valentine's Day party. I read the book Love Monster by Rachel Bright which is such a sweet book that the kids really loved. If you haven't read it, I suggest going by your closest book store and checking it out. We read it twice for two reasons: 1) I'm teaching the kids that it is necessary to read things through twice before answering questions or writing about a text and 2) The kids loved the book so much they wanted to hear it again.

Like any good book, this one has a great website. This is the first book in what looks like an upcoming series, so the website doesn't have a huge amount of things to offer but it is definitely one to check out. In their downloadable section I found an activity packet which I downloaded.

For our project, I used the Monster Finger Puppet page and the kids made their own finger puppets. I then partnered them together randomly by pulling two sticks out with their names on them and had them create a Love Monster puppet show. This was a really exciting activity for them and they really enjoyed sharing with the whole class.

Sorry this one us blurry. Those monsters just wouldn't stop "dancing!"

And finally, Valentine's Day was just a wonderful experience. We had a great party! Parents brought in lunch for the kids. One parent brought in chicken nuggets from Chic-fil-a! Great choice! We played Valentine's Day Bingo and made little hats. But the most popular activity during the party was the Rice Crispie Treat Decorating. My supervising teacher made home made Rice Crispie Treats shaped like hearts and the kids decorated them!

We have a child with severe allergies in the class, so we had to be careful with ingredients. The rice crispie treats were safe for her, but not a lot of candy or sweets options are available to her. Valentine's Day was tough. But we made it through it! I really wanted to make some of the cute ideas I found on Pinterest for Valentine's Day but I just couldn't leave her out, so I made a little coloring book for them. I used graphics from My Cute Graphics and Creative Clips and taped a package of Smarties on them! She can have Smarties! They really liked the books and I had a blast making them, so it was a success!

My only regret is that I waited till the last minute and didn't get to upload it as a freebie for you guys! Maybe next year I will be able to. Keep an eye out, readers!

Happy Valentine's Day from Amanda and Daisy! Have a WONDERFUL 3 day weekend, teachers!

First Week Teaching

I am so very excited for this week! This week is the first week I get to teach my own plans. The past two weeks I have been essentially a para, co-teaching with my supervising teacher with her plans. It has been great to get acclimated to the classroom again after several months of being away from them and their routines.

I have some great stuff planned for this week, some I'm extremely confident about and others I'm not sure are going to work. That's the life of a teacher, though, am I right? I will keep everyone posted on how things develop throughout the week and keep your eyes peeled for a FREEBIE for Manic Monday with Classroom Freebies!

Trying to keep this in mind as I plan for the week. <3

What a Week!

I have to apologize for my blog absence. I have been asked a few times when I'm going to post about how AWESOME my first week in my internship class has been. Well, I've been busy to say the least! Once I get used to this busy schedule I will post more frequently, I swear. I did, however, post a couple of new products on my TpT store, one of which is FREE, so check it out HERE.

So this week was a great one! I was so happy to see these babies again and they were excited, too! That made me even happier! To see that they missed me and that they were excited to have me back made me warm and fuzzy inside.

Found this on another blog and I have been keeping it in mind all week. This will be my mantra for the semester, for sure. :)

A lot of this week was observing and just getting my act together. I brought my awesome binder with my beautiful cover page that I'm in love with (check it out HERE) and jotted down tons of notes and ideas for my semester with these cuties. My supervising teacher and I figured out my plan of action as well which was tedious. For the program I am in I pick up teaching one subject and then gradually pick up more subjects until I am the teacher and my supervising teacher is the para. That's good for more than one reason: 1) I don't feel overwhelmed in the beginning; 2) The kids don't get confused and overwhelmed; 3) My supervising teacher can guide me one small piece at a time until I am as awesome as her. <3

We decided that I am picking up Math first. I found out, much to my surprise, that I really enjoy teaching Math! Granted, I am in Kindergarten, so the content area is much easier than say 4th grade... but I like teaching the kiddos about numbers, so Math is up first. Math is also later in the day than the other subjects, so this gives me time during their Specials and playground time to prepare myself and make any adjustments that my supervising teacher or myself deem necessary.

I have a plan and I am SO SO SO excited. This is a 3-day weekend so I am going to start my planning for my first week of teaching Kindergarten Math. We are working on the teen numbers this week and we will start working on 20 and beyond the following week. They also will be reviewing addition and subtraction. I will definitely have some things to post on my TpT store in the following couple of weeks so keep your eyes peeled! Follow me HERE so you will be notified when I post some new stuff!

Orientation Jitters

My orientation was today for my internship starting next week. I was so anxious! Lots of information for sure and all of it stuff to be excited about. I'm trying to get all the things I need in order today and tomorrow because I will be playing in the snow this weekend in D.C.!

I just finished making my binder cover and I LOVE it. I'm linking it to a blog (HERE!) about what I am loving and making this year... I am loving my computer and my new teacher binder cover!

I'm working on the insides right now and probably won't have it entirely done for a while until I know exactly how I'll be incorporating it into my internship. More pics later!

Here We Go!

Hello everyone! My name is Amanda and I am the creator of Daisy Designs. Basically, I am a student-teacher and I am thoroughly enjoying my experience in creating and implementing lesson plans and activities with my students... So much that I would like to share them. With so many education blogs out there, I wanted to join the fun and start posting what it's like to be a student-teacher, on my way to becoming an elementary school teacher!

Currently, I am interning at an elementary school in Florida and I've been assigned Kindergarten! I never thought I would enjoy Kindergarten as much as I do. I always thought of myself as a 4th or 5th grade teacher. But when they (the university I attend and the school's district office) says "Jump!" you say, "How high?" So, Kindergarten it is! And I love it. I did spend a short time in 4th grade as well and I loved it, too! So, I guess I am just a lover of all things education. :)

Other than teaching, my life is pretty ordinary! I recently got married (5 months ago!) and I have two precious chihuahuas. In fact, Daisy Designs is named after my first little chihuahua, Daisy! She's small and yippy but SO full of love and snuggles. 

Sweet Baby Daisy

Isn't she beautiful?! She's my inspiration! My other chihuahua is also my inspiration. Her name is Pudgy and I toyed around with "Pudgy Products" being the title of my store (I really like word play #teacherlife), but it just sounded like another weight loss program, so I went with Daisy Designs!

YAWN...

But she's beautiful, too. <3

Keep checking back for more posts! And check out my Teachers Pay Teachers profile: Daisy Designs