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.
Last week we celebrated Dr. Seuss’ birthday by having a week full of Dr. Seuss related activities! The first day we started by reading Cat in the Hat and Oh the Places You’ll Go. We wrote about what we would do to get rid of the cat in the hat, and took pictures of ourselves and made them to look like the cat. We also made and colored easy readers using the sight word “you”.
Sorry this is so late, things have been busy over here. A few weeks ago we celebrated Presidents day and we learned about two famous presidents; George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. We read stories about both presidents and read an easy reader called All About America.
After we read the story about George Washington; we made a list of describing words to describe George Washington and wrote about what we learned. Finally we made two presidents out of construction paper and cotton balls. On one side we made George Washington, on the other side we made Abraham Lincoln.
This Friday was our Valentine’s Day party and we had great time! We started out by handing out the rest of our Valentines for the end of the day and read Valentine’s Day books. We then colored and completed books called I Love…
For shared reading and writing we read the book Will You Be My Valentine and then made a list of Valentine’s Day words. We picked our favorite words and made Valentine’s Day mobiles.
For Math we enjoyed candy hearts math centers. We graphed with our hearts, sorted them by colors, and estimating the number of candy hearts that can fill a bigger heart. We also enjoyed Valentine’s Day snacks.
For science we used alca-zeltzer tabs and water to make candy hearts dance. Students learned how to make hypothesis on simple science experiments. They guessed what they believed would happened to the hearts.
We read the story called A Book of Hugs and labeled the main idea and details of the story. For writing we wrote in our journals about what kind of hug do we think is the best. We also made flip books about things that we love. Finally, in preparation for our Valentines Day party, we decorated our Valentines envelopes.
Today we talked more about the differences between the day and night. We read the book “Can’t You Sleep Little Bear” and made easy read mini books called “Who is Sleeping?”
We watched a day and night educational video on youtube. Then we played some related games that show what happens when day turns into night and night turns into day. Finally students illustrated what they learned by coloring half of a house during the day, and half of a house during the night.
Our Title 1 team put on a pajama party and invited parents to come and read to our class. This also helped launch our class into our day & night science unit. We started out by enjoying cereal for snack and then for drop everything and read, students got to snuggle with their pillows and stuffed animals.
Finally our class built blanket forts, listened to a bedtime story on the SMART board and had our parents read to us at the forts.
Then starting this week we learned about what causes day & night. We read a non-fiction book about what makes day and night and watched a video on youtube about how the earth rotates and revolves around the sun.
As a class, we created a venn diagram that show things you can see in the sky during the day and during the night. Then the class filled out their own venn diagram in a cut and paste activity. At the science center students got to explore the concepts of day and night using a globe.
As we near the end of the school year our kindergarteners have been working on becoming independent readers and learning about elements of a story. We read one of our Read On Your Own decodable book called Max and Quin. This story had words that students could easily decode as well as the sight words we’ve been learning throughout the week. In the story there are two characters that have distinct characteristics.
Students got into their reading partners and read the book to each other. Then they picked a character (either Max or Quin) and described a character trait. They were able to use the text to find evidence of their findings.
On Friday we read the story The Costume Party by Victoria Chess. To continue on our study about character’s we discussed the different character’s of the story and what costumes they picked to wear to the costume party.
We then made a connection to the story and talked about how we will have a costume party in our class on Halloween Day. We created a class graph as a class discussing what kind of costume we will wear to our Halloween Costume party. We also talked about which category has the most students in it.
We read the story An Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly and retold the story by shoving animals into an old lady puppet’s mouth. Then we discussed characters of the story and talked about what a main character is. We drew illustrations or wrote the main character as well as three other characters in inside the story to make a character map.
