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

Long I, Fractions, and Lots of Eggs-citing Activities!!

Holy moly! For all of  you that had a spring break and are back in school, I can say haha because I FINALLY have a break! Granted, it still isn't anything like most of you, but tomorrow at 1:00 starts my week long break until next Thursday! Yes!!!

We have had so much fun the last couple of weeks. It was the only way I could keep my kiddos engaged (they need this break as bad as I do!).

As a class, we read the story Owl and the Moon by Arnold Lobel. It was the cutest little story about an owl who thinks the moon is following him home in the night sky. The spelling pattern that went with this stoy was long i: i, igh, and y. First, we made our own owls and moons! The moons were really fun to make because we got to take our paper outside and rub it on the blacktop to make the craters and colors! Then, they wrote all the long i words they could think of. They turned out so cute!

We also did a writing activity that really tested my first grader's critical thinking skills! The activity was called "What Am I?" asked Capital I! Each child picked a long i word, and they had to write 3 clues to describe it to their friends. Then, they got to create an actual Capital I friend with construction paper. I am so mad I didn't bring my camera this day! Here is the document we used for the writing part.

We started our work with FRACTIONS! Woo! We started learning about whole parts, and how they can be split into halves, thirds, and fourths. When I introduced equal parts, I gave my students a "grocery item." They had to show the class, and tell us what their food was, and if it was split into equal parts, or unequal parts.

I LOVE this packet from Second Grade Math Maniac. It's called Fun With Frogs and Fractions! I loved the quiz at the end becaue it was a true assessment of who got it and who didn't! We also used Amy Lemon's My Book of Fractions.This was SO fantastic because not only did it truly show my student that fractions, no matter how small are all part of a whole, but I could differentiate it for my more advanced learners! And what more perfect activity to go with our fractions then Cara Carroll's Owl Fraction Craftvity. They just thought it was so cool that they got to put the owls anywhere on their camp scene. Putting the owls under the tent was very popular!

Since it is getting close to Easter, we have been doing many Eggs-celent activities! My kids LOVE learning new sparkle words (big vocaulary words) and oviparous just took the cake! First, I explained that an oviparous animal is an animal that lays eggs. I showed them pictures of different animals, and we sorted them by whether or not we thought they were oviparous. You can have my animal cards for FREE!

Then, we watched a movie-reading of Chickens Aren't The Only Ones by Ruth Heller on Discovery Education. After watching this, we redid our animal sort and were very surprised by the results! And if anyone is lucky enough to have the Reading A-Z series, we then read Whose Eggs Are These? as a class. Such a good reinforcement! I loved all the activities that they provide with the story too.

We have just finished most of the long vowel patterns, and I wanted to do a mini-assessment to see who really remembered them! So I made this fun word sort: Find the Alligator Words. We had so much fun with this because...you need a magnifying glass to find the words hidden on the alligator (who we knew was an oviparous animal of course!).

 Then, we did a super fun writing activity. I wrote a little story called the Mysterious Egg. We are practicing visualizing, and making "movies" of the books we are reading in our heads as a reading strategy. This story was a perfect activity! You can get the story here.

 Then I told the kids to open their eyes and write down what oviparous animal they saw come out of their egg! We had snails, chicks, scorpions, chameleons, and more! You can get the mysterious egg writing page here :) After we finished our writing, the kiddos got to make their own construction paper creations of thei animals, and we made cute little opening eggs to put them in! Here are some of the finished products!

Next we did an egg-feeling activity. Miss Moellering did the best she could to come up with examples of how different egg would look and feel, and the first graders had to guess what kind of animal made that egg. We are also working on using adjectives in our sentences, so they had to think of three adjectives to describe each egg. Here is the response sheet we used to go with our activity.

We tried to incorporate eggs into everything that we did this day, so when we wanted to practice writing fractions, we did so with "rainbow eggs" aka Fruity Pebbles! We are working on collecting our own data to create graphs, so the students each got a dish of rainbow eggs, which they had to sort and then count using tally marks. Then, they graphed it creating a pictograph. Finally, they counted how many eggs they had all together, and wrote fractions for how many of each color they had. My kiddos are really hard workers, and really get satisfaction out of finishing an activity, so they worked straight through all three pages, but you could easily break it up! I also have differentiated answer sheets for your advanced ones. You can have them for free here!

What an eggs-ceptional day :)

The next day, we learned about nocturnal animals! We read a Time for Kids article: The Night Animals. We have been talking about facts and opinions, and that a fact is something you can prove is true. So we made a class list of all the facts we learned about nocturnal animals. Of course, our day would not be complete without a craft :) We could not BELIEVE that porcupines were nocturnal. I'm not kidding. I've never seen jaws drop before and that's how surprised they were. We ended up making a little porcupine craftivity! We have been working on our handwriting skills a lot lately, and for this craft, the students had to pick 2 facts from our chart, and write them on their writing paper in their very best handwriting. Then, they got to put their porcupine pieces together, and add real pricklies! They turned out adorable.

We also played a fun nocturnal animal game. One of the facts that we learned when reading our article was that nocturnal animals use their sense of hearing instead of their sense of sight. So we wanted to see what it was like to use you lose your sense of sight and use your sense of hearing to get around. Each student got a chance to be blindfolded, and they had to walk towards the bell in one part of the classroom. Their friends were all around them and I was right behind them the whole time so it was safe! They loved trying it and were surprised at how difficult it was.

Lastly, today we made a cute little bunny glyph! I will be putting the questions, answer sheet, and template for the bunny on TPT soon! Here are some pictures of the finished product :)

Phew! This is officially the longest post ever. I applaud you if you read the whole thing! I only have 15 more hours until I am on break and I am counting down every minute!

Have a wonderful Easter!

Sarah