Five for Friday (for once!) and Freebies!

I always take the pictures and tell myself I am going to participate in Doodle Bug's Five for Friday, but I always come home dead to the world on Friday nights!

So I'm super excited to be participating this week :)

 
Every morning (except Fridays), we do one of DeeDee Wills' Read, Trace, Glue, and Draw activities as our morning work. It is amazing! No more, Miss M, how do I do this? EVERYONE knows what to do. I can't wait until they can actually read it :)

Our kindergarten assessments this year were re-made to reflect the CCSS better, and that means they are harder! My kinder babies are expected to know a lot, including word problems (boo!). So, we used this farm scene from my Oh What Fun! K.CC.A.1 math pack to help us practice our mathematical language.

I would dictate a scene to the students, like "There are 5 horses in the barn" or "There are 3 chickens on the roof" and they had to show me on their farm scene. Next week, they are going to practice making up stories for each other. This will naturally lead into addition and subtraction word problem practice!

After our whole group practice, we did math tubs. I am trying REALLY hard to implement the ideas/techniques I got from Debbie Diller's math work stations book. So my kiddos and I work together to make charts of what they must/can do at each math tub. (Side note: Making the charts is a lot more work than I thought...but when I tried to skip them, it was chaos. I need to stick with it!) Here is the chart we made for our Roll and Color game. And another of the kiddos playing :) You can get the game for free here!

For reading, my class does a reader's workshop routine, which we call "me" time and "we" time. We have actually gotten really strong at "me" time (our independent reading) but the kiddos worked really hard to be "we" time (partner reading/table reading) experts this week! Look at these intense readers!

Even though most of my kiddos do not have the letter sound or sight work knowledge to actually be reading their books yet, they are very focused on reading the pictures! Even so, I wanted to give them something to build their confidence in reading the words. So the song book was born! This thing has been a favorite since day 1! They LOVE it!

I put the lyrics to any song that we sing in class in their songbook that they may read during our reader's workshop. We have especially been loving the color songs from Frog Street Press. I have made a freebie lyric page for all of the color songs that you can use here :) These songbooks are amazing for practice with one to one correspondence.

Since our stamina is not quite built up to a full fledged reading workshop, we are also starting to learn literacy station games to build up to actually having literacy stations. And to do that, we have been playing name games. I know I'm not doing anything new and different that you haven't seen before, but these games are working for my kiddos!

 

(Sorry for the shiny lamination picture)! This game gives the students practice writing their friend's names. On the large name, it also has a picture to help the kiddos build their letter/sound correspondence too!

This game has a card with each child's name on the front and their picture on the back. Then, they use the letter cubes to build the name of their friend.

This game has envelopes with each child's name and picture on the front. Inside, their name is cut up into pieces and the student has to put them back together.

After playing our games, we came back together whole group and made an ABC order list of our names.

In writing, we are working on adding details to our pictures (Lucy Caulkins). Obviously, my kinders have no idea what "details" means, so I did a little activity to show them! We made "1," "2," and "3" pictures.

A "1" picture is a picture with no color. It was rushed and does not look nice. There are scribbles.

A "2" picture is a picture that has a few colors. The illustrator spent a little more time on it, but it is still not their best work.

A "3" picture is your best work. It has tons of colors, all pictures colored in, background, and more. It is what all of our pictures should look like.

We went into a lot of discussion about how the pictures need to be detailed to help the reader understand our story. We hung them up on the wall and I reference them all the time!

Right now, we are learning about seasons in science. We have just finished up our unit on summer. We ended with making our own summer person. We talked about the types of things we wear in the summer and what we look like.

This little guy cracks me up. The bottom of his face is red because it is "burnt" and he has blue spots all over his body because he is "wet." So cute!

So this is a few more than 5 pictures...oops! Enjoy your weekend and I'll have my visual plans posted tomorrow :)

Eating the Alphabet and Zack's Alligator (and activities to go with them!)

I have been MIA for a while because I am on SUMMER BREAK! I have been for a few weeks now and I cannot seem to drag myself away from the pool!

But now it's back to business! I am looking for a new teaching position for next year and am starting to send out resumes, resumes, resumes! Anywho, I will be doing a lot of tutoring over the summer, and I wanted to share some of the activities I will be doing with my kiddos! I am working with kids PreK-4th grade so it will be pretty widespread!

For my little to-be kindergartner, I planned a little mini-unit with Lois Ehlert's Eating the Alphabet: Fruits and Vegetables from A to Z.

I got the idea from these cute little fruit erasers that I found in Target's Dollar Spot Section! I swear I could spend hundreds of dollars there (and many times I'm close!). I decided that it would be fun to introduce the little guy to graphing in a really hands-on way.

I gave him a handful of the fruit and we sorted them by type of fruit. After we sorted them, we placed each type of fruit on the graph above. We discussed what we had the most/least of, and how we used the numbers on the side of the graph to decide that. Then, we removed our fruit from the graph and actually colored it.

Next, we used our graph as a reference to answer some questions about our data. Since my PreK friends generally need help with using scissors and glue, this next page is a cut and paste activity. The edge of the page is a picture of each fruit that we used in our graph, that my kiddo had to cut out in the little square. Once he decided his answer, he had to glue the fruit on the square next to the question.

You can grab a copy of this little graphing activity here!

I also know that for this little guy to be really ready for kindergarten, we need to work on his letter recognition and letter sounds!

So we did a little newspaper scavenger hunt for fruits and vegetables! I glued this paper to a big 12 x 18 piece of construction paper.

We searched the local grocery store ads for fruits and vegetables, decided their initial sounds, and glued them in the correct letter space. He loved it! You can get a copy of this little activity here.

After working with my little preschool buddy, I am also tutoring one of past students (it's weird to say that I have those now!) who is going to be a second grader!

For her, I made a little mini-unit for Zack's Alligator by Shirley Mozelle! This will be available on my TPT store sometime this week :)

After reading the story together, we completed an integrated science, writing, and math experiment. Once again I hit up Target's Dollar Spot and got a few of those little growing animals! However, when I showed it to her, I didn't tell her what was going to happen to it! I just told her to measure it each day and see what happened! She's so excited!

Here is an example of one of the response pages we did together. The most exciting activity in this TPT pack is a measurement, estimation, and graphing activity using a grow animal. This is a paper your students would fill out before they "water" their animal (As Zack would say!).

Hopefully I will have this pack finished by the end of this week! I hope everyone is enjoying summer vacation as much as I am :)

Happy Wednesday!

Sarah

Wait...there are only 8 planets now?

Wait...there are only 8 planets now? This is the question that I am getting from every single one of my first graders. We are doing our solar system unit, and my first year teacher salary does not have the funding to purchase newly published books...so all of my space books still include Pluto! It is so hard for them to understand that it is not considered a planet anymore!

I started my whole unit with an anticipation guide. I read the questions to my students and they had to decide whether it was true or false. It was amazing how little they knew about the solar system! We had a lot to learn!

Anyway, we are having a "blast" with this space unit ;) I got a ton of ideas from The Techy Teacher...her ideas are so awesome!

We performed her "Planet Roll Call," painted pictures of the planets, created our own constellations, and so much more!

Yesterday, we read The Magic School Bus: Lost in the Solar System. I LOVE this book. It took us almost 40 minutes to read it because it was jam packed with so much information. And it was all completely understandable to my students! They kept asking question after question!

The only tidbit my kiddos were having a little trouble with was an orbit. So I thought of an awesome activity to reinforce it!

I am lucky enough to have a special right after lunch on Wednesdays, so I ran outside to our empty parking lot with some chalk and drew my heart out! I drew the sun, and then 8 orbits around it, getting bigger and bigger for each planet's orbit. My kids got out of music and walked outside and they were speechless!

Each of my kidsgot to be a planet orbiting the sun at the same time. One of the facts in our book said that some planets have shorter and longer years than Earth based on how far away they are from the Sun. We didn't really understand it until today! The kids were able to see that the students on Mercury and Venus' orbits, made it around 5 or 6 times before Uranus or Neptune. I saw so many lightbulbs going off it was unbelievable!

We are finishing up our unit on Friday with a performance of our "Planet Roll Call" and some watercolor pictures of the Sun! Lastly, we will be going over our anticipation guide to see how much we have learned!

Enjoy this weather....snow is coming :(

Sarah

Science Week Favorite Video/Website

And it's almost hump day! I don't know about anyone else, but it seems to take my kids until about the middle of the day on Tuesday for their classroom behavior to kick in. Mondays are always the worst! But today, they did a really good job getting their work done quietly and quickly!

So anywho, today for Science Week, we are posting our favorite science video/website! Mine is kind of a double-whammy. My school has a subscription to Discovery Education and I L-O-V-E it!

Any topic I could possibly choose (and not just science either) has some kind of video or multimedia to go with it! Matter, animals, bubbles, you name it! You can find anything and they are completely safe and educational! Awesome right?

Right! Have a nice night :)
Sarah

It's Science Week!

Hello all! I have not blogged in so long I just thought I would do a bunch in one day :) I am linking up with Teaching Blog Addict this week for Science Week!

Considering I have been a teacher for a whole 4 weeks now (haha), I would have to say my favorite science books to teach with are the Magic School Bus series. My students just always have so many questions and it creates such a wonderful discussion among the students

I especially love these two and plan on using them during my space and weather units later this year!

I will give updates when I actually use them with my students :)

Sarah

PS: I am new to blogging and am slightly confused on how a few things work. How do you grab buttons and put them on your page? How do I create an automatic signature? How do I add my favorite blogs and labels to the side bar? Help!

Our Five Senses

Hello everyone!

I was really nervous about teaching science and social studies when I started this year! So I decided the best unit to start my year with for science is to review the five senses. The kids have been having so much fun! We started our with reading The Magic School Bus: Explores the Senses by Joanna Cole. This just introduced us to the five senses and gave us a little more detail as to how each of our senses work within our body. It was a little over their heads, but they were very interested!

First, we studied our sense of sight, and what it is like not to have it anymore! I blindfolded each of the kids and gave them a classroom item that they had to identify using other senses. They flew through this so fast I had to scramble to find random items for them to try to identify!

Next, we explored our sense of touch. We made an anchor chart of all the "describing" words that we could think of. We came up with words like: fuzzy, hard, soft, flat, bumpy, ect. The next day, I made up a chart for the students to go on a scavenger hunt around the room. Their scavenger hunt was to find different items in the room that felt the same as their describing word. I think my favorite response was "round" for the doorknob. How creative!

Then, we did our sense of hearing. I went on Youtube and found a bunch of different random sounds...some easy and some hard. They were things like a baby crying, door slamming, a sneeze, the ocean, a helicopter, a motorcycle, ect. I played each sound a few times and the kids had too draw a picture and write what it is they saw. They LOVED this! They were so excited to hear the answers at the end. None of them got the door slamming though. However for that sound I got a rock falling, a car crash, a toilet lid slamming down, and a dog barking? What were they hearing?

All of these activities were awesome for my really academically diverse class, because it was so easy to differentiate. Some of my kids could absolutely do words and pictures, but the students that could only do pictures were still expected to provide a clear answer.

Next, we worked on our sense of smell. This one was probably the funniest one to watch. I made "smelling jars" aka cups with different foods and such in them covered with tissues (really high tech, I know) and gave each of the students a response sheet in which they had to match the given smell to the number on the cup. I did toothpaste, garlic powder, peanut butter, vanilla, etc. I was realy surprised how fast and how accurate they were! Way to go firsties!

Last, of course, is our sense of taste. I will update on this at the end of the week when we use our sense of taste when making our own applesauce :)

Yay for our five senses!

Sarah