The Mitten

 

Today was mitten day! We read lots of mitten books, graphed with mittens vs. gloves, used mittens and gloves for math problems, and wrote an opinion piece about which one we preferred. 

I love Jan Brett's The Mitten.  I also have a few other sweet mitten stories that I love to share with my class.

 





 

This was a new, sweet book I found. (New to me, anyway!) 

 

(from Amazon)

One snowy day an elderly woman, Sarah, watches children gathering at the bus stop. While they never seem to notice her, she notices them, especially one little boy who has no mittens. That night, Sarah knits the boy a pair of cozy mittens and places them on the blue spruce tree for him to discover. It soon becomes a game, with the children looking for new mittens on the mysterious tree every morning, and Sarah joyfully knitting new ones each night. With its touching message and delightful illustrations, adults and children will enjoy this intergenerational tale for years to come.

 

After we read The Mitten- and did our usual retelling and ordering the animals activities.  I found some adorable freebies at TPT.

 

Erin from Creating and Teaching shared these great The Mitten Sequencing Cards.

Mrs. Quinn has a nice Retelling and Sequencing Activity, too.

 

 

Next, we made a graph to show which we preferred, mittens or gloves.  Gloves won!  The children can easily tell me which has more or less, but "how many more" is a tricky concept. 

 

I showed the children how to match up the dots and then count the ones that were left.  That tells us how many more were in the column.  We continued to practice finding "how many more" with many different number combinations. 

 

 

 

I used the "mitten vs glove" question as an introduction to what an "opinion" is.  I told the children that their opinion just means what THEY think.  Each person has different opinions. Opinions are not right or wrong, because opinions are what each person thinks. (Yes, I said the work "opinion" about 100 times so they heard and said it a LOT!) 

 

I also gave lots of examples to show that each person's opinion is important, and many times different from a friend's.  Many of the children love to be the same as a friend and not think for themselves.  I tried to show them that every one of them has special, different opinions about what they like best- and that is wonderful because it makes us each special. 

 

We talked about the differences between mittens and gloves, and what we liked best about each. After our discussion, I had the children each write a quick little opinion piece to tell me which they liked best, mittens or gloves, with a reason WHY they chose what they did.

 (My opinion is mitten.  They are fuzzy.)

 

For our math activity, I had the children bring in their mittens and gloves from their lockers, and added my extras so we a lot.  I sorted them into two piles that I mixed up really well. I divided the class into two teams.  Each team had to try to pair up the mittens/gloves in their pile first.  The kids had  a great time! 

 

 

 

 

This was a great activity for counting- and counting by twos, too!

Then, we rolled our big die and filled up our ten frames on the floor with that number of mittens.

I made these big ten frames on the floor with tape.  It was so easy to make, thanks to those floor tiles.  I have used it so much- and it is always there- ready to use!

We also figured out math problems using one ten frame.  A child rolled a number (up to 10), and we had to decide how many more mittens it would take to make ten. We wrote a word problem to go with it.

Deb Chitwood posted some fabulous The Mitten Freebies at Pre-K and K Sharing today!   Click on the picture below to go check them out! 

 

Here are some other great TPT Freebies to use with Jan Brett's The Mitten.

 

 

 

First Grade Hip Hip Hooray has a fun packet to go with these Jan Brett stories.

 



KinderKay has a wonderful Winter Rhyming Picture Match packet that I love!



Camp Kindergarten has a fun Mitten Class Book to make.

I love this Medial Sound Mitten Match by Imagine, Inspire, Innovate.  This is what we will be working on when we get back after break, so it will be great to use with this story.

 

Thank you for stopping by!