We finished up our back to school unit last week with a lesson on cause and effect. We read the story If You Take a Mouse to School and labeled a cause and effect thinking map of the story. Then we did a cut and paste activity from Christine’s Stratzel’s TpT that illustrates the book as well.
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.
First we read the story “There Was And Old Lady Who Swallowed a Turkey”, talked about the different thanksgiving food she ate and what food group they belonged to. Then we created models of ourselves, with pictures of the things the old lady swallowed glued to our “stomachs”, in the correct sequence order.
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.
It has been a fun and exciting summer moving myself to a brand new city and school! I am now teaching solely kindergarten this year and all kindergarten classes are split up into 2 groups. One part of the class goes to school in the morning and the other part of the class goes in the afternoon. This is to help get students used to coming to school if they have never been before. We spent a lot of time the first day on procedures and school expectations. However in Mr. Bowen’s class we do have some fun activities planned for this week. Students came in with all of their supplies and as a school policy we keep their supplies in the class and share them. We had the students and parents sort the supplies so they are all ready to be stored and accessed when needed.
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When talking about rules and procedures we read the story “No David!” by David Shannon. We discussed rules that David broke at home and talked about they applied to the rules at school. Then we started on making David Popsicle stick puppets. When they are all finished we will use the puppets to retell the story. I got the David puppets from here!
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 read The Polar Express and talked about what the author is trying to tell us the problem is in the story even though it is not explicitly stated in the book. Then we retold the story using pictures and the words to complete a sequence.
After we read and retold the story we wrote about what would have been our pick as the first gift of Christmas. To end our Polar Express fun we watched the Polar Express movie while sitting like a train and drinking hot chocolate. We also discussed the similarities and differences between the book and the movie.
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.
We read the online interactive version of “The Ugly Duckling” from Starfall.com. We created a story map that narrated the beginning middle and ending of the story.
Students were then given either beginning, middle, or end part of the to illustrate in pictures. Students then retold the story by displaying their pictures and putting them in the correct order.
With our new reading program we have access to many different big books, and one of our books that we’ve been reading is called “Come With Me to School”. It is a book can also be sung as a song (to the tune of London Bridge) with repetitive text that is easy for young kindergarteners to retell and learn about sequencing.
The story goes through a day of school where students “walk to school, read a book, eat a snack, write and draw, build with blocks, and say good bye“. As a class we worked on putting the story back together in the correct sequence using a pocket chart and flashcards. Then students had practice retelling the story by acting it out.
While this book may not be easily accessible for those that do not have our reading program but this kind of retelling activity can be used with other repetitive books or songs.
