Five for Friday 12/18

Here is my quick post for Five for Friday!

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Props for our performance... "All I Want for Christmas is my Two Front Teeth!"

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Christmas themed projects...Elf created by Nicole Ricca and Santa created by Kendra's Kindergarten.

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Winter hats...created by DLTK.

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The transitional kindergarten students were snowmen in the performance.

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Students dancing and playing with twirlers at the Winter party.

Enjoy your well deserved break!

Five For Friday 11/20

I am happy to share what was a very enjoyable week, but a very tiresome one.

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The kindergartners made the large turkeys created by Krissy Miner.  The paper bag turkeys were made by the transitional kinders.

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Students are working on comparing numbers. This display was created to reinforce the concept. 

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This week we had our 70th day of school.  "Zero the Hero" came to visit and gave us instructions to make 100 using our the fingers on our hands.  I traced each students hands and asked them to color them in.  Then I wrote the numbers above each set of hands. Sorry, the picture is not great.

4

My student were able to make a pattern block Native American headband.

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I am off for 9 days! Finally to get some much needed rest.

Enjoy your Thanksgiving!

Aliens Love Underpants (and we love the book!)

This week we enjoyed activities with an alien theme.
We began with a read aloud of Aliens Love Underpants.

There were lots of giggles.

I made each kindergarten child a booklet with 5 pieces of plain paper and a 12x18 piece of construction paper.  The plain paper was stapled inside the folded construction paper. I gave them time to color the front cover. 

Each day I gave them one story problem strip to glue in the booklet.

I read the story problem and asked them to solve it in the booklet.

The children are very proficient with the process of solving story problems.  We practice on a regular basis.

Here is a copy of the story problems I used.  Feel free to download.

alien math

Of course, we had to make a cute alien craft! 

You can grab the head here.  The underpants were found here.

The body is a circle.  The arms and legs strips of paper.

My kindergartners had to write about why aliens love underpants.

I got the printable from Kim Short's store here.

The TK students aren't quite writing yet, so I used a different printable and wrote what they told me.  I got this printable from First Grade Blue Skies.  Get this printable here.

Next, we used Kim Swoveland's "Alien Adventures, Aliens, Outer Space, Unit Supplement FREE."  During this activity we sorted English words from alien (nonsense) words.

You can download this from her store here.

Finally, we sounded out and wrote English and "alien" words.  I told them the cvc word and they had to write it correctly on the proper side of their paper using their phonic skills.



We did other activities that I did not include in this post. There is plenty of fun learning that can be done with this theme!

Trick or Treat Blog Hop

Welcome!  I hope you are enjoying the hop, getting great tips and picking up fabulous freebies!

My tip for you is to start using Number Talks in your classroom, if you aren't already!

This short video will give you an introduction to the procedure if you aren't familiar with it.

Here's a little trick. Turn this into a craftivity. I gave each student six pumpkin cut outs and let them glue them in any arrangement.  Then I asked them how they saw the number 6.  We outlined the parts with yellow yarn.  Finally, we filled in the number bond.

My freebie for you are booklets that you can use with your number talks! There are various options to pick and choose from. I hope you find these as useful as I have! Grab these now! They are only available during the hop!

The hop is over. These books will be on sale soon!

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Hop on!

Five for Friday

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This double bubble map was created using interactive writing. I love these two books.

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2

After reading aloud a version of the Three Little Pigs, students set to work on building one of the three houses.

The house made of bricks....

made with these mosaic gems and modeling clay.

The house of straw was made with straws and modeling clay.

The house of sticks was  made with modeling clay and craft sticks. (I had to help this group.  They could not agree on what to do.)

When it was time to test, each student had to write their prediction on this worksheet. If you'd like, you can grab a copy here.

These are our results...

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The TK students decorated each pig's house. 

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I am ready for red ribbon week! The door is done!

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Humpty Dumpty Activities

We have spent several weeks working on the nursery rhyme Humpty Dumpty.  Here are some of the activities we did.

1) Our Humpty Dumpty egg experiment...

Here they recorded what happened.

Here is a copy if you'd like.

Recording Sheet

2)Humpty Dumpty Craft  

3)Assemble the poem

I placed a copy of the nursery rhyme out to make this activity easier. If you would like to make it harder, take the copy away.

Each child got a word or two from the rhyme.

They had to build the nursery rhyme in the pocket chart.  This means they had to use their literacy skills to figure out what word they had and when to bring it up.  Some tracked the poem and some used phonics to help them figure out their word.

4) An alternate ending 

Here we talked about altering the ending to Humpty Dumpty's story.  We brainstormed what he could fall on to keep from breaking. I charted the ideas and students had to choose from the list. They had a sentence starter to write the new ending and were asked to illustrate their work.

We had a lot of fun with Humpty Dumpty!