Happy Mother's Day!

Mother's Day presents went home today. The kids are so proud of them! I wonder how many kids will wait until Sunday to give them to their moms.

We made these cute daffodils using egg cartons, poster board, and green construction paper. The kids painted the egg cartons and cut out the poster board. I used a brass brad to attach everything together.

For the past week and a half we worked on creating a book about our moms. Here are some of the pages:

They made covers for their books and we stapled everything together.

They made little cards for their moms, too!

The class learned an ADORABLE song in music class. Click HERE to view it! 

Dinosaur Craftivity Freebie

Last week the kids made these cute dinosaurs to act as a cover for the books they wrote. Each day we brainstormed ideas for a writing prompt and they wrote a page for their book.  It was fun to listen to their ideas!

I'm very pleased with how their dinosaurs turned out. I made an example and let the kids decide what color they wanted. A substitute was in the classroom during this activity. (My poor little Chihuahua is in heart failure so I had to take him to see our vet before she went out of town. Dr. Brooke added a new medication to his daily regimen of pills and he is currently doing well!) I have a hard time giving up control to a substitute, but she was great and got everything done that was in my plans! 

Here is a close up of a dinosaur:

I love the eyelashes!

 They read Dinosaur Discoveries by Gail Gibbons and completed a KWL chart. The students recorded their favorite dino facts.


The class had a blast brainstorming what a hypothetical dinosaur would do!

 Take him for a walk and play the Wii. 

Go scuba diving. We would eat a hot dog. 

Create your own dinosaur books with my craftivity pages.
 

Sunflower House

If you are using Treasures, you will notice that I am a week (or two) behind the game. My teaching partner and I share materials for reading. It's not ideal, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the district will adopt new books for next year so that I can have my own set of materials!  My teaching partner has decided to stretch each week of Treasures to seven days to make it to the end of the year. With that said, we just read Sunflower House by Eve Bunting this week. The kids have been really into talking about plants.  They came up with great ideas when we brainstormed a list of things to do in a sunflower house. They wrote and drew about what they would do while meeting the CCSS standard of writing an opinion in response to literature.

I would read in my sunflower house, too!

 

In my sunflower house, I would play police horses with my brother Charles. My sisters and I would have done that, too! We used to be horse crazy as children.  My horse craze fizzled out as I grew up, but my sisters still have horses!

 

After the students completed their work, Mrs. O'Dell, my instructional aide, and myself checked their work. If they had a complete sentence with words spelled as they sound, a capital letter, and end mark, they received sunflower seeds to glue on their sheet. They thought it was amazing to see a sunflower seed! I offered them sunflower seeds out of the hull to sample during our snack break that day.

Head over to Kinder Doodles to get your copy of the Sunflower House writing prompt.

How An Acorn Grows

 Last week we worked a lot with writing How To stories with directions how to eat a birthday cake. This week the students used the same time order words (first, next, then, and last) to write How An Acorn Grows.

The kids worked on their own and then met with me or my aide to proofread and edit their work. Once the words were written the way the sound, the students got a cover for their story. I am really proud of how they did! 

President's Day Activities

We all enjoyed a long weekend over President's Day weekend. (We had Friday and Monday off!) To celebrate our country's leaders we have been doing lots of reading and writing about the presidents. Last week we made these cute Abraham Lincoln handprints. I got the idea from an email I received from Mailbox.com.

The students wrote what they would do if they were the President.

Yesterday we read So You Want to Be President?  by Judith St. George. The students enjoyed learning facts about the presidents. Did you know that eight Presidents lived in log cabins?!?

 

Today we brainstormed a list of jobs the President has to do.  The students wrote what they would have to do if they were the President. They came up with a lot of good responses!

 

(And I couldn't resist sharing this one!  I felt it very fitting for our cupcake themed classroom!) 

 

Literacy Stations

Although I have already set out the new stations for the upcoming week, I wanted to share the literacy stations we did last week.  The first half of the ninety minute literacy block is spent doing literacy stations.  We do two rotations of literacy stations each day.  During this time, two to three students work in a station. My instructional aide works with leveled reading groups while the rest of the class is working on netbooks to do differentiated Reading Eggs activities or at one of the eight literacy stations. Here are a few of my favorite:

Write the room. This week the students had to find words with one, two, and three syllables to record on their clipboards. 

Build a Word Family: They used the alphabet cubes to build words in the -at, -ad, and -it word families.  Producing rhyming words will be on the third quarter report cards, so we have been doing lots of word families to help the kinders practice coming up with rhyming words.

Writing Station: This week in the writing station, the kids made birthday cards for Alicia, the main character in the book for the week, Alicia's Happy Day.

Cupcake Words Families: I love the cupcake theme of these word family cards by Mrs. Phillips of Kinder Doodles. The students had to choose a word family and find the words that fit in that word family.

Three Star Story

My school teaches 6-Trait Writing. I use the Launching the Writer's Workshop book to teach the six traits. Recently, my class came up with what makes a three star story. They decided that a three star story has details in the words and pictures, cupcake words (that's what we call our sight words!) are spelled correctly, and sentences have capital letters and end marks. We discussed what makes a two star and one star story, too. The kinders were excited to try to get three star stories when writing our class book, A Snowman Should Not.... The great writing prompt came from Mrs. Jump's Sneezy the Snowman Unit.  Here are a few pages from our book.

The class LOVES to read the class book in our classroom library during center time!