This week, we have been reading If You Give A Mouse A Cookie:

We used it to make our Predictable Chart:

Monday, we took a picture walk through the story and then I read it aloud.  We had 1/2 of the class finish the sentence on the Chart.  

Tuesday, we retold the story and then Choral Read it aloud.  The second 1/2 of the class finished their sentence.

Wednesday, we used props to tell the story and then touch read the sentences aloud.

Thursday, we echo read the story and then did cut up sentences.

Friday, we read the story one last time, acted it out and then we made a class book using the sentences from our Predictable Chart.

We’ve also been learning about Abraham Lincoln and celebrated his 200th birthday.  We looked a the 4 new pennies that are being released in honor of the day and read a book about pennies (see below).  We also read a book called Honest Abe (see below) and the children had a good discussion about honesty.  Pictured below are the books that we have been reading this week (a few will be next week!)

This is my favorite book about Money–in pictures it shows the process of how coins are made–very cool! 🙂

This is my MOST favorite book about Abraham Lincoln–it’s written for a young child’s level (I usually leave out some of the details about how he died from the story though), but has just the right amount of details and the pictures are interesting to look at (they’re all paintings).

Monday, I introduced my students to the wonderful world of Sudoku.  We started with a 4×4 puzzle and have worked our way to a 6×6 puzzle and the children did a great job! 🙂  Tuesday, I gave them a blank 4×4 puzzle and they were able to finish 2 on their own.  I got several Sudoku books at Books-A-Million and also at Borders and Barnes & Noble in the kids section.  I also found one last year at BAM called “Sum-doku”.  The children have to add while filling in the boxes in the puzzle, so the sums have to add up across and down–way to hard for most Kinder. kids, but I had several students a few years ago who LOVED them! 🙂  Some days I put them on the overhead, ELMO or I just hand them a copy.  We are all addicted now! 🙂

Tuesday, we did another Sudoku puzzle and then finished our pattern block heart (found on the PDF page under “P” or do a search on my site for “Pattern Blocks” and it will come up.  

Wednesday, we completed the graph that went along with the heart.

Thursday, we sorted, counted, added, and graphed our candy hearts. Those pages can be found in my last post (below this one):

Friday, we also did our Roll-A-Valentine (see 2 posts below for the sheet we used).

I also introduced a new Literacy Work Station called Playdough Station.  We were having trouble keeping Name Work Station organized, so we substituted this one in it’s place:

I explained to the children that this station is meant to help develop their fine motor skills (we talked about what that means) and help them become better readers and writers in the process.  There are laminated file folders with numbers, shapes, and squiggles, as well as rings of upper and lower case letters and sight words for them to form with playdough as well. 

Next week, we will be reading Silly Sally! 🙂

Kristen 🙂