Category Archives: education
Dr. Seuss’s Birthday 3/2/09
We will be celebrating Dr. Seuss’s birthday along with many others tomorrow and here’s what we will be doing:
I will be dressing up like The Cat! I wear all black and my red and white striped stove pipe hat–no paint or anything! 🙂
Here is the link to Seussville.com (there are TONS of printables there and games for the kids to play online)
The Kinder. kids will be rotating through 6 stations, one for each table in my room. I will lay it all out in the AM, but generally here’s what the stations will entail:
Station 1: The students will color a white hat with red stripes (I’ll photo tomorrow) and then we will staple it on a pink/red sentence strip.
Station 2: The students will color and cut out a red bow tie and a button that says “I’m Hooked On Reading” (from Copycat Magazine)
Station 3: The students will complete a maze I got years ago from Seussville.com and try to get the cat back to his hat.
Station 4: The students will play the -at family word game and tally the number of times they roll each word
Station 5: The students will create a door hanger for their bedroom door so their family knows not to disturb them when reading! (from Copycat Magazine)
Station 6: The students will complete a rhyming sheet, matching two pictures that rhyme in the -at and -an families (from Teacher’s Helper Magazine)
We will be reading Dr. Seuss books all day long and listening to books on tape as well! Afterwards, we will graph our favorite Dr. Seuss book!
What do you do?
Stay tuned for pictures tomorrow! 🙂
Kristen 🙂
President’s Day #4 and #5
Thursday, we completed the graph that went with our Patten Block Snowflake (PDF page under “P”).
We also read Silly Sally and I showed the children how to act out the story using the Drama Props. We also did Cut Up Sentences and we really got some of the sentences mixed up! 🙂 We also completed our first 6×6 Sudoku puzzle (using shapes) and have started on another one.
We also checked in on the Monarch Butterflies in Mexico and watched a slideshow from www.journeynorth.org
We watched a movie about Dental Health and will talk more about that and Nutrition next week. I reviewed some of the basic topics covered in the movie (I got it from Colgate a few years ago, along with teeth brushing booklets and toothpaste samples and coupons and a board game). They still offer them, however you have to request them in September to be sure to get them in February each year. They are available in English and Spanish.
I also spent some time after school organizing my books by month/theme. They were like this already on the bookshelf, but I couldn’t find them when I needed them, so I decided to switch to this:
I’m still working on it, but basically each month has it’s own tub/or theme has it’s own tub and they are in the order that I use them in the year. I am in the process of dumping things out of other tubs to steal them to use for this project! 🙂 When the month changes, I can just pull the tub I need and set it on my bench and pull books from there all month long and then put it back on the shelf when I’m done with it and pull the next tub. I also need to have a general tub for books that can be read anytime. My hope is to take up some of the next shelf as well and add more books to each tub that are scattered around the room in several places. Today, after school, I plan on tackling the Library Work Station to reclaim my Arthur and Clifford books–hey, those are in tubs–I can steal those tubs too! 🙂
On Friday, I had the children play a different heads/tails game:
The children had to shake a penny in their small Dixie cup and then pour it out gently on their paper. They then had to cut out the appropriate picture and glue it on their graph. After 10 minutes, I stopped them and they totaled up their graphs and wrote those numbers down. We again, made a class graph to show the results of everyone’s papers and found that heads was again, most likely to come up! 🙂
I also introduced the children to a game I learned from my friend Karen Berman, called Enchanted Forest:
You will need Attribute Blocks:
or some other manipulative that has at least two attributes (like these farm animals have two sizes and are 8 kinds of animals, and come in several colors):
Here’s how you play:
1. Each child randomly picks one attribute block (I dump them all out on the floor and have a few children at a time choose one)
2. They put the block on the floor in front of them and you look to see what attributes you have to choose from (thick, thin, red, blue, yellow, big, little, etc.)
3. Choose an attribute and do not tell the children what it is. (for example, thin, yellow shapes) You can pick one, two, or three attributes.
4. Have each child one at a time ask you, “Will this key get me into the Enchanted Forest?”
5. If the shape meets your criteria, then you answer yes and that child lays their shape on the floor in front of you.
6. If you say “No”, then the child returns the shape to you and you put it away.
7. Let everyone have a chance to ask and then ask if anyone knows what the “key” was.
8. I then put the shapes back on the floor and we play again and again and again! They beg to play! 🙂
Have a great weekend!
Kristen 🙂
GBM Question/Review…
I got a few questions from Becky about my thoughts on the GBM: Holidays Around the World Unit that I completed and wanted to share my responses as well as some more ideas that I may use next year:
Q: Hi Kristen,
Thanks so much for your wonderful ideas! I check your blog often and get many great ideas. I love the gingerbread man twist on holidays around the world unit! I have done both of these units seperately in the past and was wondering how you liked it this year? Reflecting on the experience, are there things you would do differently? I am working on making up my unit for next year while it is all fresh and just wanted input from someone who has done it like this. Also- your Brazilian bird project… was there a link for the pattern? Did the finished project work out okay? You had mentioned something about them not drying as well as you anticipated. One more question- sorry this is long- what did you do for Australia? Thanks so much for your input/ ideas/ willingness to share!!!!!
-Becky
A: I loved this whole unit and will definitely be doing it again next year. I really liked how I could get both things in and give both topics the time I think they should have devoted to them. Intertwining them helped to save time, but also make it exciting for the children and they looked forward to everyday, coming in and finding a new package. I’ll also be working to get boxes and bubble wrap envelopes together to vary the packages. I’ll also post a shopping list soon of everything I purchased from the grocery to make it all happen! 🙂
Suggestions….I think I would have more community members or staff members find packages and deliver them–I want the kids to get to know areas around our school a little better too–It could almost be an Around the School theme within a Holidays Around The World theme.
I would also spread it out over more time–because of the point when I got the idea, I could not start as early as I wanted to.
I also need to rework the beginning. I would love for the GBM to either be cookies baked and shaped by the kids or have a package delivered from the beginning.
Because my kids took this in a CSI direction, this year, it would also be fun to get the police/security persons in and help take a description of the GBM.
In an economics workshop I took this summer, it was suggested that you could interview members of the community and video tape the. You could ask them questions about economic concepts (scarcity, abundance, production, loan, etc.) and then ask them if the GBM had been there (bank, car dealer, grocery store, etc.–think–places you use/get money/do business.
Also, bringing the police in would help to reassure the children that even though they could go missing, we will never stop looking for them–you could also get them all fingerprinted and photographed at that point too.
I would have also loved to have gotten to decorating the felt GBM that I cut out and that I was going to have the children earn our classroom Bull Dog Bucks towards–starting earlier would have helped, but we just never got there!
I’ll be beefing up the basic idea and adding/taking away some new things this year and into the summer. More books, crafts that work, letters that are written better and with more age level content.
A note about the Brazilian birds: I found the pattern by googling “brazilian/toucan bird pattern”. I found it on a site that had rainforest links for kids and was somehow tied to a play in a particular community–but I can’t find it now! I would recommend not painting them with vegetable oil–it was a mess, didn’t dry well, and didn’t really look any different than the birds that weren’t painted!
I would also include more writing, and GBM related math.
For Australia we got our letter, and included were items to make an Australian bellflower. I took pictures and thought I posted them, but I can’t find them on the blog right now. I think they may be on my computer at school. Basically, you take one of those paper condiment cups and glue yellow petals around the open bottom lip and then glue two green leaves on the top. We punched a hole in the top (really the bottom) of the cup and strung a bell on a piece of yarn and threaded it through to make a “bellflower!”. Again, I’ll post pictures when I’m back at school 🙂 We also talked about how Santa rides in to Australia on a surfboard and is pulled by white kangaroos. I’m sure that there is some site out there with more information-so I’ll be working to find it! 🙂
I hope this helps and I’ll post it on the main page as well!
If you have anymore questions, please ask–I’m more than willing to share what I know to help others or spark something in you!