This week we started our unit on cold weather animals and the season of winter. We read the book Eskimo, Eskimo What Do You Hear discussed about different kinds of animals that live in very cold places such as the North Pole or Antarctica. We also read an emergent nonfiction text and student wrote about what their favorite polar animal is.
The next day we watched a science video about the Walrus and discussed different things that walrus have to adapt to such cold weather. For art we made construction paper walrus art.
Last week had our unit on cold weather animals or winter animals. We read an interactive story called “Penguin, Penguin” and labeled main ideas and details on a thinking map. Finally students made penguin glyphs based on their preferences about winter.
We also read nonfiction books about winter animals and got into partner groups and practiced reading easy reader books about winter animals. Finally we practiced following directions and made TLC art walrus.
For our last day in our mini unit on The Mitten we discussed the characters of the mitten and made a bar graph on our favorite animal from the story. Then we made mitten mini booklets on our favorite animal.
We continued on our mini unit on the book The Mitten. We made a text to self connection by writing about a time when we lost something. Then we painted mittens with water color and sprinkled them with salt. After the paint dried we brushed off the salt and it made the mittens look like they had snowflakes on them.
Last week we had our mini unit on The Mitten by Jan Brett, and we began with reading it whole group. Then we created an anchor chart and discussed the elements of the story.
Next we completed a mitten sequence cut and paste activity; illustrating the order that the animals entered in the mitten. Finally students retold the story by acting out the story using masks printed out from Jan Brett’s website.
This week we finish up our unit on weather and seasons. We also continued our study on tall tales and we read a story called Snow Globe Family. One of our reading skills we have been learning is how to visualize parts of the story or make mind movies. So I read part of the story to them without showing them the pictures first. Then we came up with the things we visualized in a class list.
We then created our own snow globes and wrote about what we would do if we lived in a snow globe. We hung up our drawings and writing in the classroom.
Continuing on with our Winter / The Four Seasons theme, we learned a new song / poem called The First Snow. We learned new winter vocabulary and practiced memorizing the words as we sang along to the song on CD.
Afterwards we cutout a picture of the boy from the song and helped him get dressed to go play outside. We colored and cutout the different winter clothes and discussed the correct sequence the boy would need to put them on.
Finally we wrote directions for others on how to get dressed for winter, and during centers students could create Venn Diagram to compare and contrast winter to summer!
As we move into our Winter & The Four Seasons unit in our K-1 All-Star class; we read a children’s classic known as The Mitten retold by Jan Brett. The class retold the story by doing a reader’s theater and acting out as different characters of the story. We used masks from Jan Brett’s website.
For math workshop we worked on The Mitten printable math centers kindergarten add-on from The Mitten Learning Printables. They included number / quantity recognition mats, ordinal number sequence cards, mittens size cut and paste activity, and number counting puzzles.
For writing we discussed the different characters we remember from the story. Then we wrote about our favorite characters and something they did in the story.
We are learning about describing words and we’ve been applying them to our 5 senses in writing. We read the Poem by Robert Frost “Stopping By the Woods on a Snowy Evening”. We identified descriptive words in the poem as well as other descriptive words that match our 5 senses.
Then incorporated our descriptive words into writing about our own winter woods about things we can see, hear, touch, taste, or feel.
We read Jan Brett’s The Mitten and discussed the characters of the story. We also retold the story by remembering the correct sequence and we retold the story using a blanket and masks. After the retell, students wrote about their favorite character.
