We Are Growing!

I wanted to share this book I just got at our book fair!  It's called We Are Growing, by Laurie Keller, and...  I cannot wait to use it.  I am sharing it with you before I even do anything with it, in case you want to get your own and have fun with it.  Maybe you already know about it, and I've been missing out.  Anyway- here it is!

I was so sad when the Piggie and Elephant series ended.  So sad... but I knew something else wonderful would be coming along, and it has!

In this story, Walt and his blades of grass friends are all excited to be growing.  As they grow, they each have their own personality and brag about why they are the most special.  "I am the CURLIEST!" I am the SILLIEST!"  Every blade is the something-est... except Walt.  He isn't the tallest, the curliest, or the silliest.  Along comes a BIG surprise that knocks everybody down (in more ways than one) and Walt discovers something special-est about himself that is all his own.

Here is a video reading of the story so you can see what it's all about:
              
Every year I have the children grow their grass hair people.  We haven't started ours yet because we just finished growing our beanstalks, but these are coming soon...

This was one from a few years ago.  I buy tiny ponytail holders and little plastic barrettes.  The kids love putting them in the hair- and... giving haircuts!

How perfect will this new book be to introduce this activity?

It's a great character education story, too. Everyone has special qualities.  We can talk about how everyone has LOTS of special gifts, and just because one person is good at something, that doesn't mean someone else can't be good at that, too!  We don't have the be the -est of anything!  We can have fun learning and doing lots of different things.

Once their Hairy Person grows, I'm going to have the children think of something they think they do the BEST.   Maybe they are the fastEST or the bravEST of the happiEST or the cleanEST or the friendliEST or the nicEST or the neatEST or the funniEST.  I am going to have them write a story all about them as the Hairy Person, and what they are the best at and WHY.   "I am the neatEST, because  I always help clean up my room before I go to bed."  "I am the funniEST, because  I can always make my baby sister laugh when I spin around and fall down."  This is another way to use that special word 'because,' too!

That's my plan for writing.

THEN-  for a quick math break, we'll go outside and collect dandelions.  The  children love to pick dandelions, so we turn it into class contest to see how many we can pick, working together.  When each child gets a group of ten, they put it down on the ground in one group.  We keep picking and making groups of ten.  At the end of a set time (I usually say 5 minutes because it's amazing how many we get in a short time!) we count by tens to see  how many we pick.

Here is one tip to consider... One year, I did this on Spring Picture Day.  One of my boys was wearing a white shirt, that turned out to be more of a "dandelion yellow" in his picture... oops.  Don't do this on picture day.

I hope you have fun with this new book!  I can't wait...

Thank you for stopping by!

Five For Friday- April 25th

I am linking up with Kacey from Doodle Bugs Teaching  for Five for Friday! Thank you, Kacey!

Well, before I even start, let me tell you that TONIGHT I will be having dinner with Dr. Jean.  YES. I. WILL.  She is coming to our little town for our 3rd Annual Kids' Bookfest, and because she wanted to have dinner with me I am on the Family Reading Partnership committee, I am going to dinner with her tonight.  I am PRETTY SURE this will be one of my favorite five next week.  Pretty sure.  It may be all five.  You just never know.  

We had a great week!  Here are some of my favorite parts...

The Vet Center made its appearance for Free Choice Centers. We have Free Choice (the activity formerly known as PLAYTIME) for about half and hour each day.   I put away the Grocery Store for a bit and switched it up with everything a good vet needs.  This week the cat and dog beanie babies had check ups.  Next week, it will be something different.  I found some great vet scrubs at the Salvation Army and bought lots of 20 cent pads at Walmart for writing prescriptions, appointments, notes...  

I love how he was just waiting for calls for appointments. 

Happy Earth Day!

We finally went on our Earth Day Nature Walk on Thursday. It rained on Tuesday and Wednesday.  It was only in the 50's and windy, but our adventure was described as the "best thing EVER" so I think it was a complete success. 

I used this fabulous Nature Scavenger Hunt from  No Wooden Spoons.

This is a great hunt, because it has some common things on it that the kids can easily find and feel successful right away. If fact, we BARELY got outside the doors before the kids started finding things and sticking on stickers! They would have had some of it done before we left the room, but I told them that the morning glory flowers, their green leaves, and any dirt, spiderwebs and/or ants in our classroom would not count since it was an OUTDOOR HUNT.  But it is that easy- you can even find some of this nature inside... It's a wonderful activity for spring- anytime you feel like you the kids need some time outside-  not just Earth Day!

 

I stapled a little strip of stickers to each paper so the children didn't have to use a pencil to mark off what they saw.  They only had to stick on a sticker.  We found everything except a fern and a butterfly. I think it was too early for those.  OH wait... we also did not find a CLOUD.  Can you believe it?  If you ever want to schedule an outside event, just have me schedule something for that day where I am trying to have clouds in the sky for the children to look at- then you are guaranteed a perfect blue sky with not a cloud in sight!  This was the exactly same beautiful, perfect sky we had on White Day when we were supposed to see shapes in clouds.  But... I am NOT complaining. I'll take it!

This week we read Birds written by Kevin Henkes and illustrated by his wife Laura . I just discovered that she was his wife, and it made me love the book even more.

 We had so much fun painting with feathers.  I had the children make two different kinds of pictures. 

I wrote a post about it here if you would like to see more or if you would like a copy of the paper I made for the children to use for their feather painting.  We had a ball!

We looked at different birds on my Bird Nest Prezi to decide just what bird may make which designs in the sky.

We also  colored this  Types of Birds Easy Reader from Debi Forsyth.  It is free at her TPT store.  

 

The kids are fascinated looking at different birds.  I have seen lots of birds with their mouths full of twigs and grass for nests. It's a great time to make a bird nest kit!

I also posted about my Mother's Day gifts for this year.  I am so excited for the moms to get their special books and candy bars!  If you would like the links to the free downloads for the Hershey MOTHERS bars or the M&M MOMS packages, you can get them here. 

Finished Product

The children are writing stories about why their mom is the sweetest to go along with the candy bars.  Here are just two of my many favorites to share...

This little guy is SO sincere and sweet.  He took such a long time with his mom's hair, and then told me that is exactly how it looks when she blow dries it. I think it hit home because  I can totally relate. Thank goodness for straighteners...

She said, "I can't live without you mommy because you are so special."  I have a feeling this may be her mom's favorite gift that she may keep forEVER!

Finally, I was the winner of these wonderful Good Karma Art Jars from Casey Jane at Wiggling Scholars.  They are so pretty- hand painted and personalized. 

 Thank you so much, Casey!   I will be putting some Hershey hugs and kisses in the big jar for me  the kids at school.  I can't decide what fabulous things I will put in the smaller jar for home.  She is such a sweetheart.  Casey put in some extra fun chevron goodies for me that just made my day!  Stop over and follow her blog!

Here are a couple other fun pictures that made me smile this week-

AHHHH!

 This little guy's dad took the time to send me a picture of his first "haircut."  SO SWEET!

Have a FABULOUS weekend! 

 

Five for Friday March 14

I am linking up with Kacey from Doodle Bugs Teaching for another Five for Friday. Thank you, Kacey!

It felt like much longer than one week since I linked up. I think that's because we had summer and winter this week. It was sixty degrees and sunny on Tuesday, and then snow/ice/wind and MINUS 10 degree wind chill temperatures on Wednesday. 

I saw some geese flying back.  Poor, confused things.  Sticking with the theme of confusion, here are my very random five of the week.

This project always makes me happy for spring.  I love to have these Spring Smiles up for Open House and Grandparents' Day.  The children love to figure out this challenge.  It's amazing how easy it really is!  I don't have this year's smiles up yet...I just took the pictures.    These are from last year. I can still remember every one of them. :)

Here is another project that made me smile.  We planted our grass seed to make our Crazy Hair People.  I took everyone's picture up close and printed them 3X5.  I used two sided tape to stick the pictures on to the styrofoam cups.  Hopefully we will have some hair to style soon.  I have some little tiny rubber bands that the girls love to use to make pony tails.  The boys love to give themselves haircuts. 

This is a reading comprehension strategy that is really for older students, not kindergarten- but I just shared it at our RTI meeting and thought I would share it here, too, just in case anyone can use it. I used it with an eight year old last year who needed some extra help with comprehension.

My little eight year old was having a hard time understanding what she read and having a hard time actually finishing what she was supposed to read. (I am just using Fox on Wheels as an example text to demonstrate what I mean because I had it here. )

When I worked with my little girl, I had her use these little post-its at the bottom of each page.  She had to put a green post it with a  period on it at the bottom of the page if she understood the whole page.

 She had to put a yellow post-it with a question mark on it at the bottom if she had a question.  (She didn't have to write the question- because that would be too difficult for her, and take her away from my focus for her which was reading.) 

At night when she read on her own, she had to do this for each page so that we could discuss it and see what she came up with the next day. We reviewed what she had read, and then looked at the yellow post-it pages.  She reread to find what question she had about the page, and we talked about it together.  Putting a post-it on each page really helped her to focus on one page at a time because she had a job to do after reading each page.

She was a little sticker lover, so next, I added a hot pink "!" post-it, that she could put beside anything that she read that was exciting or that she wanted to share with me.

After a while, I had her use the post-its every two pages. 

This was a wonderful reminder for her that she had a job to do- which was to read and understand the text.  If she did not understand, her job was to ask questions, so she could understand.  This also helped her to think about the main idea of the story, because she had to really decide what each page was saying.

I had a lot of success with this strategy.  She slowed down her reading and really had much better discussions about what she read. 

This strategy reminded me of this:

And then this...

Wednesday we got out early because of ice- so we didn't have time for our math lesson in the afternoon.  Instead, I turned snack into our math lesson.  Poor kids- can't just eat a snack without learning...  Anywhooo- I told them they were going to have to take a math test. Frowns.  Sighs.  The test was a taste test to see which cookie was their favorite! Smiles. Relief.  My little snack girl brought cookie packages, so everyone got one of each kind of cookie. (She actually brought enough for each child to have an entire PACKET... but nobody needed six oreos at ten o'clock.)  After a thorough taste test, we made a graph of our favorite cookie.  Here is my REALLY UGLY functional graph.

I just taped the wrappers on top- no title or anything- so not an official graph, I know... It was very last minute, but we did so much math with these cookies, I was actually happy with math that day so I am overlooking the ugliness. Then, I wasn't going to even share the graph and pretend that I had made a perfect looking one, but this is the real deal, like "celebrities without make-up."

After we made our graph, we talked about more, less, most, least- and the dreaded "how many more?" question.  I called up different children to match up and compare two cookies to see which ones were left without a match. That was how many more.

We also did addition and subtraction questions with cookies.  We had just begun talking about greater than, less than, and equal to symbols, so we did some work with that concept, too. 

We are working on Opinion Writing this week.  I could have had them write about the favorite cookie they chose, and WHY, WHY, WHY it was their favorite cookie. We ran out of time, but there is always tomorrow!

I also had the children sort my bins of "things" from biggest to smallest, or smallest to biggest, with a partner during our center time.

  They had lots of fun sorting.  (The magnifying glass distracted them for a while because they had to study everything they found with it, but they managed to finish their task eventually, and find every tiny mark on each item using the magnifying glass in the meantime.)  First, we talked about (and I modeled) how to line up the objects by having them all rest on the same bottom line to get an accurate measurement.

 Ta-da!

Apparently,  the kids had a good time with our math for the day, because after lunch this was on my desk because I "made short days fun."   Yes- I gave it back... but I took a picture first. I am thinking this may have been a bribe to get me to use more cookies in math. 

We had so much fun this week talking about and drawing emotions.  The artist we studied this week was Rembrandt, because he drew so many different faces. Here is my "emotional post," which includes some great TPT freebies, from earlier if you missed it. 

 

Morning Glory Update!

Have a beautiful weekend!  Thank you for stopping by! 
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