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