This week is Polar Express week! We started the week with reading the book Polar Express by Christ Van Allsburg. After we read the story we retold the story with sequence cards by putting the cards in the correct order. Then students completed a cut and paste activity to retell the sequence of their story. Polar Express retell came from Simply Kinder.
As we finished up our Thanksgiving activities last week, we read some more books about the first Thanksgiving and learned more about Native Americans and Pilgrims. For math we’ve been learning about 2D and 3D shapes, and how to make bigger shapes from smaller shapes. We made Native Americans designs from pattern block shapes.
During poetry time, we read the poem Five Little Turkeys using retelling cards and turkey pictures. Then students filled in missing words using number word sight word knowledge. The Five Little Turkeys book and cards came from Kindergarten Fever’s TpT.
This week we’ve been learning about and focusing on spiders. For science & math; we watched videos and read non-fiction books about spiders.
Then students completed a survey on whether they thought spiders were scary or neat, then we graphed the results and drew our own spiders. We also learned the song “Itsy Bitsy Spider” and made our own hand painted spiders to go along with the song.
We read the story There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly and retold the story using an old lady puppet and animals to put into the old lady’s mouth. Finally, students illustrated the main character and the other characters to make a character map.
We read the story The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything by Linda Williams and to help us tell the story we used musical instruments. For the shoes we used a woodblock, tambourine for the pants, maracas for the shirt, castanets for the gloves, and rhythm sticks for the hat. During free choice centers students got to retell the story on their own using the instruments.
During math students did a roll and draw to draw a scarecrow like the scarecrow in the story and learned the shapes that they drew. They added details to the picture after they drew the scarecrow.
Students also made paper plate jack-o-lanterns like the scarecrow face during art time and part of free choice center time.
This week we’ve been talking about helpers in our community and the tools they use to do their job. We watched the Community Helpers video on Brain Pop Jr. Then we picked different community helpers and sorted their tools.
We also read the story Officer Buckle and Gloria by Peggy Rathmann and students retold the story during free choice centers with paper bag puppets that we made.
This week is color week and we are having lots of fun with different colors! We read the story Brown Bear, Brown Bear by Bill Martin Jr & Eric Carle. We retold the story by creating paper bag puppets of the brown bear with the other animal characters in the story. You can get the paper bag puppets from Mrs. Ricca’s Kindergarten.
During math workshop there were activities that help students our to read color words, number words, and help students with their number recognition. Most of these activities come from the Moffatt Girls October No Prep packet.
Finally for our science experiment; students learned the word hypothesis and how to make a guess on what might happen as a result of an experiment. We took drops of a couple of colors in whole milk. Then we dipped Q-Tips in dish soap and then dipped the Q-Tips in the milk with the food coloring. The dish soap pushed the colors away and turned the colors tie die. The lesson plan can be found here.
On Monday we started our unit on fall. During our calendar time we sang the song Four Seasons in a Year by Harry Kindergarten and came up with movements to go along with the song. Students had fun trying to guess which season Harry Kindergarten was describing.
We then created a read life venn diagram to compare and contrast summer and fall. Students did a cut and paste activity sorting pictures into seasons that they best fit in.
We read the story Clifford’s First Autumn by Norman Bridwell and made a list of fall activities that Clifford and Emily Elizabeth participated in. Then students made a text to self connection by writing about what activity from the story that they like to do.
Today we went through a Brain Pop Jr. lesson on fall and did a autumn leaves finger stamping art project. Students pressed their fingers into ink pads and made autumn leaf trees and picked which fall color they liked the best.
