This week we learned about colors and how to read the color words. Each day we celebrated a specific color. For morning seatwork each day students copied color words onto poems and circled other identifiable sight words.
Students read an emergent reader book called “I Can Read Colors” and colored the pictures based on the matching color word. Students practiced reading the books in school and then took them home to read them at home.
Also each day based on the color that we were celebrating, each student brought their favorite things for show and tell that matched the color of the day. Most students brought their favorite toys and one student brought crafts that they created.
For Fiesta Friday students got to make an art project and watch a video based on the book “Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?“. Students made a brown bear puppet that retold what happened in the story and put the story in the correct sequence.
This week we read many different gingerbread stories (Gingerbread Man, Boy, Baby, Bear, etc). The first story we read was the classic version Gingerbread Man. We retold the story using character cards and then did a cut and paste activity that showed the correct sequence of the story.
Then we brainstormed things that are scary to us and filled out a web thinking map answering things that we would run from. We then took our brainstorming, picked one thing that was the scariest and wrote about them.
 
The next day we looked at different ways to write the story of The Gingerbread Man. We made a list of different action verbs and then made gingerbread men with a mini verb booklet.
Last week was Thanksgiving and we did many activities related to the holiday. We read the story I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Pie and used pictures from Texas Kindergarten Teacher to retell the sequence of the story in our bellies.
 
For partner reading, students read the emergent reader book Thanksgiving and then completed the sentence at the end of the book writing something about Thanksgiving that they liked.
Today we read the story The Old Lady Who Wasn’t Afraid of Anything and used musical instruments to retell the parts of the scarecrow that follow the lady.
For writing students wrote stories about a spooky night. Some students chose to write fiction stories, and some students chose to write about things that really happened.
For art students used a dice and matched numbers to shapes that they have to draw. They draw each shape as a part of a body of the scarecrow. As students complete this activity they start to notice how they are drawing the scarecrow in an unusual way.
 
 
Finally students were given the instruments and the book to use at our dramatic play center for free choice centers to retell the story on their own.
The Little Old Lady Who Wasn’t Afraid of Anything Visuals
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. Â For math we’ve been learning about 2D and 3D shapes, and how to make bigger shapes from smaller shapes. Â 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. Â Then students filled in missing words using number word sight word knowledge. Â The Five Little Turkeys book and cards came from Kindergarten Fever’s TpT.
 
This week we’ve been learning about and focusing on spiders. Â 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. Â 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. Â 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. Â We watched the Community Helpers video on Brain Pop Jr. Â 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. Â 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.
