Brain Breaks

I purchased this BRAIN BREAKS pack on TPT and my kids love using them.

During every transition, I put on a fun movement song from my YOUTUBE videos and choose a popsicle stick with a brain break.

Play-Dough Recipe

Sparkle Box is a GREAT website where you can find a ton of play-dough printables.

I also use these play-dough letter stamps from Lakeshore.

Shapes

We begin studying shapes in September as part of our Geometry unit in math.

First we learn about 2D shapes.

Shape Cracker Graph 

While learning about shapes, we also explored "food" shapes in our world. We brought in various crackers and sorted, graphed and ate our favorite shape crackers.

We also created a PBL bulletin board.

We asked kids, "Where can we find shapes?"

Kindergartners were encouraged to bring in objects from home to share.

Shape Cookie Monsters

First, we watch these adorable Cookie Monster Youtube videos about cookie shapes.

Next, we made our tray of shape cookies (just foil and paper).

Then we created our own shape cookie monsters. 

They all turned out so unique and cute!

This is the poem I made up to go on the back of our cookie monsters.

After  learning about 2D shapes, we begin 3D (solid figures)

Spooky Haunted House (2011)

My favorite shape activity is our 3D haunted house made completely out of solid and recycled figures from home. After learning about cones, cylinders, spheres, cubes and rectangular prisms, we create a spooky haunted house. We created a spooky haunted house using household, recyclable objects. To make this project more meaningful, students brought their own items in from home.



Step 1: We found cylinders, spheres, cubes, rectangular prisms





                                     Step 2: Allow students to glue the objects on the board





Step 3: Paint it black





                 Step 4: Add cobwebs and spooky objects (we added lights and cheap Halloween trinkets)



Follow-up activity: 

We made a class book called "Our Spooky Haunted House".

A _____________ lives in my spooky haunted house.  

We have mini-october conferences, so this was a fun way for parents to see our first project displayed.

Students were able to point to the objects and name the shapes. 

                    This is the start of our 

haunted house for this year! (2012)

We collected objects.

We brainstormed how we can build it.

This is it! the kids decided on every single placement!!!

They are so creative!!!!

Let the BLACK painting begin!

WOW! Look how great it looks all black!

Next, we started adding spooky items to our haunted house

(we got most of the items form the Dollar Store).

Last, add cobs webs!

We put some skeleton lights on it (from the dollar bin at Target)

and glow sticks.

The final assessment:

Bring kids back one at a time and see if they can name the shapes and/or point to the objects

(cylinder, sphere, cube, cone, rectangular prism)

These are some really fun Youtube videos all about shapes.

We listened to the everyday during this unit.

New WESTERN Book Nook box

I love our new 

WESTERN BOOK NOOK BOX.

My student teacher, Ms. Buck, put so much time into making it look so
creative and colorful.

The students will be able to choose this as one of their books nooks during
READ TO SELF.

The front is THE BEST WESTERN with adorable swinging doors.

The next side has a cowgirl on it.

This is an angular view of the front and side.

This is the back. It's a Western jail.

It has a Sheriff badge, wagon wheel and cactus on it.

The bars are wrapped in foil.

The other side has a cowboy.

This is an angular view of the back and side.

I LOVVVVVVEEEE IT!!!!!!!!!

Letter and Word Munchers

I made these cute little LETTER and WORD MUNCHERS from trash cans from the Dollar Store.

I am going to hot glue a mini clothespin on each of them and change what the "munch" on.

For example, when we are learning the "at" and "an" families, I will put the words out and kids will need to read them and determine if what MUNCHER will eat them.

AUTHOR STUDY:Kevin Henkes

Making Connections between all the books:

I made this Kevin Henkes Chart. I found the pictures on his website.

This is from Kevin Henkes website.

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Introduction:

Show all of Kevin Henkes stories and explain that the students we will be learning all about a special author. Explain what an author is.

Opener: Show Youtube video "Meet Kevin Henkes"

 Chrysanthemum

-Practice reading the pictures and the words

-Activity: Color their own names and count how many letters they have

*Optional homework: Name Study.  Send home a note and have parents tell their children why they chose their name; what it means; where it came from; and any other neat facts.

-Later, graph their names "How many letters are in your name?"

(compare and contrast names using math vocabulary: more, less, equal, most)

-Activity: Rip art names (write names with white chalk on black paper and have students put paper strips on their letters

Show Youtube Video of Chrysanthemum

While watching the video, do Crinkled Heart activity:

Display a large red heart and explain how it looks so crisp and beautiful.

Hand the heart to a student at the rug and give him/her instructions to crumple the heart every time they heard something unkind or mean in the story, and then pass it to the next person. By the time the story is over our heart is very tattered, ripped and sad looking. Ask 2-3 students to try and iron it out. We talked about how hard it is to make our hearts look and feel better after hearing such mean and unkind words. I wote the kids names on bandaides and asked them to come up and say a "heart" word or kind word to try and make it better. One by one, they put the Band-Aids all over the heart (and even repaired the rips and tears). This showed them that it is impossible to take away those unkind words, but we can always try to help and make things better. Then we followed up by talking about how we will always use kind words with others and brainstormed a list of kind things we can say. Now we have the heart hanging in our room to serve as a visual reminder to say kind, heartfelt words! 

Note: this is not my idea. I want to give credit where credit is due and I am having a hard time finding the original blog where I found this idea.

Owen

 Compare and Contrast the Owen and Chrysanthemum

Click here for OWEN

Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse:
I dress up as Lilly and also dress a student up as Lilly.

I made my own purple purse from flannel and put plastic inside.

I created a booklet about 3D shapes (since it ties in with our math).

We learned about writing a friendly letter. We used Lilly's body to label the 5 parts of a friendly letter:
 date, header, body, closing, signature. 

Activity: We wrote a friendly letter as a class to our kindergarten friends in the room next to us. Then, the students chose someone to write a letter to and did this independently.
We will continue to look at Lilly when we start writing letters to our pen pals.

We also read: Sheila Rae, The Brave
Wemberly Worried