The Kindergarten All-Stars are having fun with our fall theme. To support the skills we’ve been learning in class, we’ve been enjoying fall related literacy centers. We’ve been working on rhyming words, initial sounds, color words / sight words, and differentiating between letters and words.
We also read the story “The Falling Leaves” and enjoyed making leaf rubbings with completting a sentence starter with sight words we’ve neen working on so far in the past few weeks.
We learned a new song called “Autumn Leaves” by the learning station. We also read the story “Autumn’s First Leaf” and talked about our favorite fall colors and practiced completing sentences with our sight words.
We also added a new poem into our poetry journals and made tissue paper fall trees.
As the first official day of fall is around the corner we start our unit on autumn with the story “When Autumn Comes”. We talked about what we learned about fall by creating a hoola-hoop Venn diagram that compared and contrasted fall and summer. Then the class sorted pictures into winter, spring summer, or fall.
We read the stories “Brown Bear, Brown Bear” and “Mouse Paint” and learned more color words. We then created brown bear paper bag puppets and learned about mixing colors with a Mouse Paint painting activity.
This week celebrated our colors and learned color words in Kindergarten. All of the school dressed up on a specific color each day, and in kindergarten we have had various activities to go along with color week.
Here are the colors that everyone dressed up as for each day.
- Monday – Red
- Tuesday – Orange
- Wednesday – Yellow
- Thursday – Green
- Friday – Blue (Spirit Day)
The first day, a few of the kindergarten classes created a bar graph of their favorite color. We used the bar graph to decide the most popular color.
Students also worked on a color page each day at centers that corresponded with the color of the day. At the end of the week (tomorrow) students will take all of the pages and make them into a color book.
Today students found things in magazines, cut them out, and added them to the corresponding color poster.
In math we’ve been learning about sorting and positional words. We’ve also been learning how to read simple books using the projectable books on Reading A-Z, on the SMART board. This is done whole group first to introduce students on how guided reading is done. Since we’ve been working on the sight word ‘the’ this week; we read the story “The Classroom”.
As a class we main idea and details by talking about the school items found in the book. Then we sorted pictures into three categories; things in the classroom, clothes, and transportation.
We read the book “Don’t Need Friends” as we continue with our friends and feelings theme. We learned about the academic vocabulary problem and solution. A couple of students came up and helped match pictures to the problem and solution and described each. Afterwards students colored their own problem and solution.
During free choice centers students were paired up with someone in the class and they learned their new friends favorite colored, and did hand print paintings.
To celebrate the letter B, we read the story Two Greedy Bears and talked about the importance of sharing. While reading students got to practice sharing and passed along the two greedy bears. Then we learned how to create a web thinking map that brainstormed things we can share.
We took our ideas and created a “share bear” and wrote our ideas using the sight words we’ve been learning. Students also drew pictures of what they could share in the bear.
We started our new unit on friends and feelings and to start us off we created a circle map on friends. Students were given the opportunity to illustrate our ideas as we came up with them.
Then we read the story The Little Red Hen and discussed on how the characters were not good friends. We used Popsicle stick puppets to retell the story as a whole group and students created their own Popsicle stick puppets. Then during free choice centers they got to retell the centers with their friends.
The next day we used sequence cards to put the story back in the correct order. Then students worked on cutting and pasting their sequence cards onto construction paper.
Little Red Hen sequence cards and character printouts found here.
As we learn to become more comfortable in our classroom community, we read a book called I’m Gonna Like Me: Letting Off a Little Self Esteem. We talked about how to be happy and proud of who we are. We also shared about ourselves whole group and learned how we are special. This activity helped students feel confident in who they are so they feel safe to share with others in class. During centers you could see how happy and comfortable the class felt with working together.
