Letter R

We are studying the letter R this week and I want to show you some of the activities we are doing.  This is our dictionary page.  The kids find the page and color the pictures.  They can refer to this dictionary when they want to know how to spell a word.

 This is Rowdy the Rodeo Rat.  We use the Frog Street Press characters for our letter of the week.  The kids love them and so do we.  This is drawn using verbal directions.  They listen, they see what I draw and they copy.  Sometimes what they draw is much better than mine!

 This was  book they cut and colored.  It has words that begin with R.

 This is a syllable sorting activity.  The pictures are not wonderful because I was learning to use the color copier last year when I printed these.  They clap the name of the picture and determine how many syllables it has.  They put the card in the correct number row.  The kinders have gotten very good at this!

We are working on teen numbers.  It is such a hard concept for our kinders to grasp!  We are rainbow writing and then on the back they color the correct number of ten frames.

 This is the vocabulary word.  I used Kim Adsit's vocabulary unit and it is amazing.  I made the poster using her unit and the kids have their own journal they copy the word to.

This is our 5th grade reading buddy!  She did a great job of reading to us.  She was in my Kinder class six years ago.

Winter

What is winter?  In West Texas, we often have great weather year round so it is not always so easy to tell when the seasons change.  We did try to record our schema (what we think we know) and this is what we came up with.

We read a few winter books and discussed what the illustrator showed outside the window.  We created a snow scene using white chalk (which they loved!) and then glued the blue paper onto black paper and added the "window bars"!

We read The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats and recreated a scene from the end of that book.  We also talked about what Peter felt, heard and saw as a review of the 5 senses!

We have read lots of snowmen books because it can be more than a year for our littles kinders to see snow sometimes!  We want them to know what a snowman is.

 They recorded the information to their own tree maps.  These great ideas came from Kim Adsit and Deanna Jump and their great units on Teacherspayteachers!

 Mrs. Voss found this on Pinterest and she created this with her class.  I love it!

We read There Was A Cold Lady Who Swallowed Some Snow and we listed what she swallowed to create the snowman.  We made a snowman salad with the whole class choosing which part to make.  Some of the fast finishers tore the salad paper and wrote the list of ingredients.

We measured ourselves against a snowman to determine if we were taller than, shorter than or the same as he was.  Then we recorded the information and created a graph.  Most of the kids were taller.  I should have added some legs to my snowman!

Mrs. Voss and the other teachers on our team also made a snowman using the letters in each child's name to build a snowman.  If your name was long, your snowman was tall.  If your name was short, your snowman was short.

These are our literacy tubs for the week.  They are going to begin to include sight words and blending sounds for those kiddos that are ready.  The first one just matches upper case and lower case letters.

 This is one where they laid out the pictures and then tried to find the words that matched.  It was a little hard for them and I helped when needed to prevent any meltdowns!

 This tub had 2 different concentration games and a book about snowflakes.

This was the favorite!  They had to use their pincher fingers to pick up the pompoms with tweezers and put them in the suction cups.  The little ducks were bathtub stickies that we turned face down so we could use the sticky cups!



Happy New Year!

This is the first time I remember just having 2 days when we come back after Christmas.  We decided to do lots of New Year things instead of getting into letters and any other units.  We talked about what a resolution was and we all decided on things we could do better this year. 

We read a book about New Year's Day and all the things included in that celebration. 

 We talked about staying up late and made a bar graph showing that most of our classmates stayed up super late.  It has been 5 days since New Year's eve and super late could mean anything to someone who is 5!

 We learned about a tradition someone had of putting a trinket in a cupcake.  Whoever got the cake with the trinket had good luck.  We practiced our ordinal numbers and glued trinkets under all of these cupcakes from the first to the eighth!

We made a book of opposites to reflect how we look back at our old selves and promise to change to a new self in the new year!

 We also learned about the southern tradition of eating blackeyed peas and cornbread for luck and we all became food judges to taste and graph our results.  I forgot to include a picture of the graph but 2 kids only liked peas, 2 kids only liked cornbread and 17 kids liked both peas and cornbread!

 We practiced counting backwards from 10 to 0 and blew our noise makers at 12:00 (noon!).  The kids cut and glued these little bitty numbers down a strip of paper and did a great job.

 We made a year in review from what we could remember.  The kids then copied onto their own tree maps.

These ideas are from Kim Adsit's Happy New Year and a mini unit from Brooke Perry created last year.  We have become pinterest addicted also and get great ideas from that source!

Merry Christmas and have a blessed New Year!!



Christmas Break!

Well, Christmas has come and gone for 2011.  It was fun and everyone enjoyed their gifts and the food.  I tried to make everyone's gift from ideas I got from pinterest.  My family seemed to love everything!  I have not been to the classroom since we got out on the 21st of December.  I did get my Christmas stuff down but have not organized for when we come back!!  So.....on Monday I will be there working and planning.  I have my Jump and Adsit units on my computer at home so I can look here and then decide what I am doing.  Thinking of doing New Years stuff on Thursday and Friday when we get back just so we can talk about a new leaf and following the rules, etc.  I have several mini units in my stuff and I got Kim Adsit's newest unit so I am all set, just have to decide!

The Grinch

 We read the story of the Grinch and talked about how Mr. Grinch was at the beginning of the story and how his heart changed at the end of the story.

 We made ourselves into Grinch's and talked about what would make us happy and make made us grumpy.  We had some examples of both types of personalities this week!!

 We recorded ideas of ways to make the grinch happy.  I have got some great artists coming along.  Now if I can just get them to write!!

I was a grinch sometimes myself!  Merry Christmas everyone and see ya next year!!

Three Billy Goats Gruff

This was the week of letter G and we did lots of activities.  I read the story The Three Billy Goats Gruff.  Most of the children knew it from pre-k and they helped me as I read.  They created the setting on a piece of manila paper using their markers.  Then they colored and cut the characters out and placed them in the appropriate place for where they belonged in the story.  Some put all the goats before the bridge and some put the goats after the bridge and the troll was upside down in the water.  It was fun to see if they could use the right order of things.

 One of my brilliant children wrote a sentence using the sight words when we did the literacy tubs!  I was so excited!!!!

This is the picture of spill the beans.  It was a great game and they are learning to share and take turns!

 Mrs. Shelton's class recorded their reindeer research in the hall.  They traced their hands on a piece of fun foam and the antlers are pipe cleaners.  They added lots of details like hooves and a red nose.  Some of the reindeer are in the blue water because reindeer are excellent swimmers!

 Her class also made lights with the children's name on them.  It was interesting to see if the kids could put their letters together in the correct order from left to right!

 Mr. Grinch is getting full of good random acts of kindness.  We hope to fill him up the 3 days we come to school next week!

Mrs. Shelton and Mrs. Jordan made stockings with wants and needs on them.