Winter Celebration

Thank you to all the parents who donated their time and/or  donated snacks and goodie bags.  Your help made our party great!! Thank you for all the lovely gifts.  I feel grateful for all the parent support I have received!!!

We played some games before (or after) we ate our snacks.  Here is a picture of the ring toss game.

We also played a dancing game that is a variation of musical chairs.  Students dance in place to the music and when the music stops, they must sit down on the floor.  The last one to be seated is out.  The game continues in this manner until only one student is left dancing and he/she is the winner. 


Each student made a card and it was attached to the bag containing the snowman gift.

It was a perfect day to make Heidi's holiday hat.  We also wrote the numbers by tens on the ornaments.

                         

Here is a picture of children in the hats.  They looked adorable.

More Hanukkah and Christmas Activities

Last week we had a great time playing the dreidel game with our PM reading buddies.  The children learned how to play the game with hands on experience!

We also made Heidi's Hanukkah craft.  

Spoiler Alert for Parents! 

  Each student created a present for their parents for the holidays

shown below.

 

These are made with air dry clay, beads or google eyes, pipe cleaners, and felt.

We practiced some sight words with an activity from Making Learning Fun.

The words are written on the trunks. The trunks are available as a part of the activity, but I was trying to save paper, so I asked students to draw those themselves. 

 Teachers, the link for your copy. Christmas Tree Sight Word Puzzles

Not a holiday activity but very fun and a good way to practice positional words....

This activity comes from Kizclub. All the children kept asking me if this was Cookie the Cat!! This would have gone great with Cookie's Week if I had found it back then!!

Teachers, here is a link if you want to pick up a copy: kidzclub

 

Decomposing Numbers to Ten and Holiday Activities

Update:  See my post K.OA. 3 and K.OA.4 for more on decomposing numbers.

Decomposing numbers to ten is one of our new common core standards.  We started with a tens frame and some double sided counters.  I rolled a big foam die and that number was counted out with the red side of the counters.  The remaining spaces were filled with the yellow side of the counters.  I charted our number sentences and color coded the numbers red and yellow to match the counters on the frames.  

We followed up with a decomposing numbers Hanukkah themed worksheet that I created.  Students are starting to catch on to this difficult concept, but we will be practicing more in the future.

Here is a copy of the worksheet for teachers: Hanukkah Themed Decomposing Numbers Worksheet

Here are a few of the finished products from our Hanukkah thinking maps.

     

Here is a copy of a bubble map writing for the gingerbread from Lori Rosenberg.

These Santa projects were inspired by Deanna Jump's.

   

 We were able to do this activity today from Primary Reading Party.  We had to discuss some of the vocabulary for a few of  these Christmas items. We also had to decide which words we wanted to choose to call the objects, since different words had different syllables.

Gingerbread Activities Continued..

We had a fun Monday!  We were finally able to graph what our first bite of a gingerbread cookie would be!!  I had been looking for an appropriate cookie at the grocery store for some time.  I thought we were out of luck until I discovered these gems in the bakery section.

So we each got a cookie and we graphed our first bite!

Then we followed up with an language arts activity that required students to use some of their beginning reading skills. They had to unscramble a sentence telling about the first bite they took first.

Teachers:  I have shared a copy of this scrambled up sentence page with you if you wish.  It is not pretty-just done with regular Microsoft word, but it might save you some time.
scrambled sentences

We also used the gingerbread teens activity from Kindergarten Crayons. 

I also have my own gingerbread set of numbers for 5's. You can use these for a headband or just to put them in order.

Gingerbread Numbers

Last week we completed a sequencing activity for the story where we placed events in order.

We will finish up tomorrow with a writing activity describing the gingerbread man.  Here is a picture of our bubble map.

We also did our version of Kim's shape tree activity.

I love how these turned out.

A Freebielicious, Free Snow Emergent Reader!

     Thanks for visiting my blog!!

 I have some things for you!! 

Free Snow Emergent Reader

Just project this slide share to your big screen and read as a class as many times as desired.  You won't need to write up the text on sentence strips!

Snow Emergent Reader by Kinderblossoms from stinablossom

Also scroll down to the end of the previous post for a Hanukkah Thinking Map! The link is at the bottom of that post! Here is a picture of what that looks like!

If you look around more, you'll see some of the activities I have tried that were created by some of the authors of Freebielicious and other fabulous bloggers! You'll also see some of the things I have just tried out myself. I hope you find something useful!

Gingerbread Fun and a Hanukkah Thinking Map

We have been having a great time with The Gingerbread Man story. This is the cover of the version I have been reading.  It has a little different ending where the fox tricks the Gingerbread man by telling him he can't hear him and to come closer.  Of course, you know the rest! 
We discussed and reviewed story elements:  character, setting, problem, and solution using this book. I was pleasantly surprised by how well the students remembered these concepts!

We have also made a Gingerbread man glyph.  Students colored eyes to match eye color, counted out buttons to show age, and used yellow or green yarn to show gender.

Gingerbread Man Glyph

The dark brown men were done by the AM group and the light brown men were done by the PM group.

This was the writing activity done to follow up the glyph project.

(I have more than 24 students.  A few children did not get to make a gingerbread man.)

 When the students arrived in the morning, they were all a buzz and counting the gingerbread men on the wall.  Some were trying to see how many students have blue eyes.  Some were trying to determine the number of boys and girls. Charting the class totals was on the day's agenda, but originally not intended to be the first activity!

We still have some more activities planned for this story.  Next month, we'll get some Social Studies by learning about other holiday traditions such as Hanukkah and Kwanzaa.  


TEACHERS:  I have had at least two of you request a Hanukkah Thinking Map so I am sharing this.  You need to download both parts separately. Sorry.  

Hanukkah Facts page is found here.
The Hanukkah Thinking Map is found here. 

I hope you find these useful!

 

Thanksgiving Activities... Continued

Here is the second version of the giant turkey.  The wings are painted with colorful dots.  

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This interactive writing activity was done from the perspective of a turkey.  Students helped to generate sentences and helped with most of the writing.  I had to support the children in friendly letter format, as they were not familiar with this structure.

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Finally, we did some study of the pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving.  I showed a video of the first Thanksgiving from the Discovery Education site to create background knowledge. I reread the same Thanksgiving story. During the first reading, I realized this was a very abstract concept for the children.  Their understanding increased after viewing the video. Each child was given one of these to take home.

 

 I got this idea from  the Dollar Tree's website.  I created the Mayflower tag and added the pilgrim.  The pilgrims came from the Making Learning Fun web page. I loved how these turned out!

Thanksgiving activities

Thanksgiving is not supposed to be this fun!!  

 

We had a good time this week with these Thanksgiving activities.

     

These kids are "tickling their turkeys" with this emergent reader.

Here is a closer look.

Here are some "turkeys" who wanted to show off their head wear!

This was a cut and paste activity where students had to put the turkeys in order by 10's.

This project was my favorite!  
It is a variation of K. Miner's turkey project. I used a painted paper plate for the body and added a small tag to his wing.

But were aren't quite done yet...

Come back soon!