Printable Bat Mask


My daughter and I had a little 'bat' activity filled afternoon. She asks me all day if we can do 'school work' - can February come any sooner!? She as been very interested in learning about the thousands of fruit bats that fly over our house every evening. I have promised her that we will research it and find out where they are all flying to each evening.

We made this printable bat mask. Just print, colour, cut and stick to a craft stick. You can find it in our free Pond Coloring Club website!



We read these books from our home library.



Five Fab Friday Free Teaching Resource Worksheets

free worksheets for kindergarten

I love Fridays! Mostly. Today was... well... one of 'those' Fridays... I am sure you have had one. For many reasons, and every single one of them reminded me of the need to have patience and understanding, and to have faith that people will eventually work things out for themselves.

I am planning a relaxed weekend... heck, who am I kidding, I am planning a very busy weekend, but hopefully including a few relaxing sessions of teacher-blog reading, hot cups of tea, fun filled play sessions with my two beautiful children and maybe a little creating.

What do you have planned? Maybe, just perhaps, you may have time to add these little gems to your bank of wonderful teaching resources! Checkout this little round-up of free pages available to you right here on my blog!

Each of them comes from a larger resource available in our store - we hope you can find them useful to support your little readers and writers. 


free letter writing page
free directed drawing page

free letter writing for letter m

School Bus Craft

Name Activities for Back to School

Have a great weekend!

More Spiders

I made this simple spider drawing activity for my daughter today.

You can get it HERE at google docs

Simply print it...


And trace 4 fingers on each side:


Then colour!

Free Font Friday.... A Few Days Late

Free commercial use kid writing font


Over at our graphics blog, we have a free font giveaway every Friday. We list them in our TPT store and you can use them for commercial projects if you are a teacher-author (small business).
 
I've had a busy couple of weeks and didn't get to post one last Friday, so here it is. Aptly called Free Font Friday.
 

Lesson Ignition - Let's Light Up Their Minds!

 
How do you ignite the learning in your classroom? Lesson igniters are short and snappy ways to begin your lesson or session. Igniters snap your students to attention! Igniters are simple, focus on an explicit, or narrowly defined learning area.
 
We have created a set of igniters for the interactive whiteboard! These are short one screen games that will help you revise (or introduce) basic kindy content. There are no fancy animations or voices in the games, which although I admit, can be fun, will let you control the ignition and allow you to guide your students the way that suits your own learners.
 
We made them in PowerPoint so that they will open on most whiteboards.
 
These ignition mini-lessons are simple and short - as if you are anything like me, you want to control the amount of unnecessary screen time your students are getting. I like to incorporate some Smartboard into most of my lessons, but just for part of the lesson - like the 'ignition' or at the end to conclude the lesson.
 
This packet includes 5 games and can be used when you are teaching the same content areas, or use them just for review or to fill in those little five minute empty spots in your day!
 
I did all the graphics for this file and kept that as simple and clean as possible. Here is one, where the students practise their 'counting on' strategy and then drag the little bees to the correct beehive.
 
There are games for adding, number counting order, cvc words and matching upper and lower case letters. You could do these activities with a small group, or the whole class.
 
Head over to TpT to see the listing
 
 


Big Bad Wolf Craftivity

Here is something I just finished - a nice simple writing activity that will integrate well with a Fairytale study or when you teach The Three Little Pigs or Red Riding Hood

The Big Bad Wolf is a character that holds student interest and provides many discussion points! This packet includes four writing options and a simple, yet effective page topper to help you make a gorgeous display in the classroom.

Find it in my TpT store HERE

Big Bad Wolf Craftivity


I blogged around this time last year with some other big bad wolf free writing pages - if you missed them, they are still free!

A Spooky Stew

If you are unable to integrate Halloween spookiness into your curriculum, think beyond the ghosts and ghouls!
My recent post on wombats and the many comments and emails I received about how utterly fabulous wombats are, got me thinking. There are so many wonderful wombat stories, and one of my favourites is 'Wombat Stew' by Marcia K. Vaughan.


Wombat Stew 

Wombat Stew is the story of a dingo who captures a nice fat wombat, with plans to cook him up in a stew. Various other Australian bush animals happen by and offer Dingo suggestions as to what he should put in his stew before adding the Wombat. Dingo follows their advice, adding all sorts of weird and wonderful bush ingredients. In the end, Dingo is encouraged to give the stew a taste test, and let's just say that our lovely plump wombat friend is saved! The text has a lovely, captivating rhythm and the illustrations are very entertaining. 

 

A Non-Spooky Halloween Alternative

The billy can that is used to make the stew, looks a lot like a cauldron! It would be great to read to your class in the lead up to Halloween along with, or instead of stories of witches, spells and cauldrons. Meg's Cauldron is one you find find appropriate for kindergarten.

After reading Wombat Stew, you could possibly follow it up with a writing lesson on procedural texts. Talk with your class about the purpose of procedural texts and the organisational features of them.

Procedural Text Project

My daughter and I jointly constructed part of a procedure for Wombat Stew (see photo above). We just did the first half - 'what you need' part. In the classroom, I might have done the what to do part as well.

We cut a simple billy (cauldron) from black paper, and a worried looking wombat from brown paper. I then helped her recall the text and find the ingredients that were needed to make wombat stew and wrote each of a different piece of coloured paper. Making an enlarged version of the procedure will help students to understand the organisational features of the text type. You can have it in your classroom to not only talk about and discuss, but as a decorative display.

Here is a writing worksheet that you may like to use in conjunction with Wombat Stew or another story in the upcoming weeks. Your students can decide what they will make in their cauldron and list the ingredients they will need. 

I'd love to share it with you from Google Drive: Wombat Stew Writing Page


Five Freebies for Back to School

5 fab friday freebies from the pond

1. About Me Worksheet

This free worksheet will help your first grade and kindergarten learners engage in a getting-to-know you activity in the first week of school!

About Me Worksheet

2. I go to school first day of kindergarten worksheet

A worksheet for the first day of Kindergarten!

3. Free All About My Name Worksheet

Students will write their name in decorative letters and explore the letters included!

4. Free Classroom Posters to Inspire

Print these pretty posters to add some positivity to your classroom!

5. Free What Makes Me Happy Worksheet

Students can draw 3 things that make them happy! This page (boy and girl version provided) is free over in our Coloring Club!



We love making printable teaching resources! We hope you love them at that your students are excited to learn with them. Follow us on TPT so you never miss a new freebie!

Wombat Went Walking


My daughter is LOVING 'I Went Walking' at the moment. It is a great read, but she loves it even more now she can read it TO me! I have read this to her since she was a baby, and it has a very similar pattern and rhythm as Brown Bear, Brown Bear, by Bill Martin, which we also love. I Went Walking is a modern Australian classic written by Sue Machin. If you have not got this in your home library, you should!  The beautiful illustrations are done by Julie Vivas, and my US friends may be familiar with her work in Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge.

I have purchased a set of felt board characters from Felt Fun for this book. They make retelling the story lots of fun for my students. We can also work with ordinal numbers in maths, by talking about which animal came first, second etc 


I found this little beauty yesterday! It is another Australian book called Wombat Went A' Walking, with beyond-superb illustrations by Lachlan Creagh. The story follows a familiar pattern of animals going on a journey, and collecting a new animal with each page.

Wombat begins walking and stops to cool his feet in the creek. He meets turtle... and the adventure begins. This book features SO MANY action words it would be perfect for starting a lesson or unit of work on verbs with your students. Lachlan's illustrations are PERFECT for bringing the action words on each page to life. Your students will gain a sense of the meaning of a verb, just by looking at these illustrations.

I always introduce verbs to my kindergarten students by challenging them to get up and move around the classroom. I tell them that 'jump' is a verb, because we can DO it, and 'clap' is a verb, because we can DO it...
'Chair' I tell them... "Computer" I tell them...... and we all laugh as they realise that they cannot 'chair' or 'computer" like we can 'run', 'skip', 'talk' and so on. We play a fun game of calling out words, and if they are action verbs they perform the action. If the are 'things' or nouns, we pretend to take a photo of them.

This book will now be my staple for introducing verbs and action words in the classroom, and playing this game.

Here are just some of the verbs I found in the book today with my daughter:


We also did a retell of the story with my collection of puppets. I have been collecting hand puppets for a long time, and buy them whenever I see them. The wombat and platypus are my favourites and I picked them up at Toronga Zoo last time we were there. The koala puppet was a dollar bargain at the dollar shop. Tim the Emu was named by my students on a school excursion I had with a kindergarten class back in 2006. He is very special!

Puppets are a wonderful tool for helping students to retell stories and think about the structure of the text.



Here is a close  up of my wombat puppet... isn't he just too cute!

If you visit Australia,  you simply must take the time to try to see some wombats, they are adorable... very sleepy, so you may have to wait around to see one come out of its burrow.


I made these writing worksheets to use with my daughter this week, and you are welcome to download them to use if you get the chance to share this wonderful story with your class. For my Australian friends, stop by your local Big W if you can and get it, I got mine yesterday for around $10. Awesome value!

Click on the image below to get the worksheets from google docs. Thanks to scrappindoodles for the lovely clipart.




A NSW font version is included in the file too!