Monthly Archives: November 2010
The Little Red Hen
After we had talked about how people get ready for winter, we decided to move on to animals getting ready for winter. Now, The Little Red Hen, doesn’t exactly fit, but it did go along with our idea of harvesting. My kids also wanted to know more about corn–they were wanting any information they could get about corn. So we went in that direction for a few days. I had some feed corn kernels soaking so we were able to split them open and look inside with our new class set of magnifying glasses! I’m going to put this in a slide show because it will take forever to load individual pictures! 😉
LWS in Action
I thought you might like to see what the entire classroom looks like when everyone is up and about doing Literacy Work Stations. I had to wait to get a picture where everyone was looking away from the camera or they all would have posed! 🙂
This is what it looks like most days! Everyone hard at work in their various stations. 🙂
“-at” family
We’ve been working on the -at family for a little while now. We’ll learn about a new word family soon, but I wanted to share two ideas for introducing the -at family.
This chart we made right after halloween. I had it all planned out, but the kids didn’t know that! We were reading Five Little Bats Flying in the Night and someone noticed that “bat” rhymed with our sight word “at”. We started talking about all the other words that also rhymed and decided to make a list of them. One of my other students happened to find a Kit Kat bar in her lunch that day and let us have the wrapper to head up our “-at” family list.
I may have shown this last year, but I thought it was worth showing again. This is one of the games I have in my ABC/Word Work Station right now. The children roll the two dice and make tally marks next to the appropriate word. They keep playing until one word gets 10 tally marks. I laminated them so the kids can use a dry erase marker on them and erase when they are done.
Stack, Tell, Spin, & Win
We’ve been playing this game to help us learn about more and less than. It’s from the Math Their Way book and also the Developing Number Concept book by Kathy Richardson.
Basically, the children start with 10 cubes (or 20 if you want to make it harder, 5 if you want it to be easier). They put the stack of cubes behind their back and say together, “1, 2, 3 Break!” and they break their stack in two parts. They then choose which stack to present out front to their partner. They hold them up to compare:
The person on the left would say, “so and so, I have less cubes than you” and then the person on the right would say, “so and so, I have more cubes than you”. They would take turns spinning the more/less than spinner to determine who gets to keep the other persons cubes plus their own. If it lands on more, the person with the most cubes would get all the cubes showing and likewise if the spinner landed on less, the person with the fewer cubes would keep both stacks. The kids play until one person has no cubes. They then re-stack their cubes and start again if time permits.
Kristen 🙂
Harvesting
My school is in the process of applying to become an IB world school. We have been hard at work designing new ideas and units to use in kindergarten. The latest one we’ve done is “How we express ourselves” it involves patterns in our world, methods of communication, and customs and celebrations. We’re still in the middle of this unit; it will last from November until December.
Last week, we got into one of the patterns that happens every year, Harvesting. We also included How animals get ready for winter, how we get ready for winter, and a little bit about day and night. Here is a slideshow of some of the things we did:
You will see pictures of us planting–you can’t harvest anything if you didn’t plant it!! I wanted for the kids to understand that we cannot plant cans in the ground and expect to get vegetables. We also brought in cans to make vegetable soup–after we read Growing Vegetable Soup. The extra cans we did not use, we took to our Community Closet and donated them. Our Community Closet is a place where we have supplies, clothes, and instant meal in a bags for families in our school community who might need them. We thought this would be a great place for the food to be used rather than sitting in our classroom! 🙂
Science Center
It’s been awhile since I’ve posted some new pictures of our Science Center, so here are some on several different days. The children can visit the Science Center during our Literacy Work Station time as well as during our Discovery Time.
Morning Message
I’ve been trying some new things with our Morning Message, leaving out parts of words, not including initial consonants, talking up the sight words, etc. Here are some pictures of a few of our recent ones:
Science Cart
We were lucky enough to have another grant funded through DonorsChoose.org. This time is was for a science cart, with enough materials for each child in the classroom to have one of something. We got goggles, tweezers, microscopes, magnifying lenses, funnels, thermometers, pipe cleaners, and a few other basic science things. Here are some pictures of the cart:
Election Day
It looks as though I’m behind on my Election Day coverage!
Here we are peeking into our school gym to watch the adults vote:
Then we voted for our favorite flavor of ice cream:
Then we made Ice Cream in a bag in the winning flavor–Chocolate!!
Here is what one table looked like!
Holy Huge Mess Batman!!! 🙂 It was fun to make, fun to eat, but not so fun to clean up! 😉
Kristen 🙂
Blogging Bus!
It seems as though I’ve fallen off my blogging bus! I’m going to be posting lots over the next few days, just to catch you up on the last month and a half! I can’t believe I’ve fallen that far behind! If you took a look at my calendar you’d understand why I have no time for blogging! I’m working on my Master’s degree, preparing lessons for our new IB units, being a mommy, wife, sister, daughter, zoo keeper, science coach, grant writer, cook, driver, and some more things that I can’t remember right now!
I hope to get back to some sort of schedule soon…thanks Vicky for reminding me to post SOMETHING!! 🙂 I hate to keep you waiting a few more days, but I’m going to have to…got to find five websites about word study in Kindergarten and they can’t be sites with instructional ideas…they have to be researched based–and someone has to read the research and then write a handout on it to present to my professor–who could that be?? 🙂
Thanks for being patient! 😉
Kristen 🙂
Kristen's Kindergarten 