fairy tales

What a fun day it was on Friday!  Come by and see pictures of the students all dressed up.  I am headed to print them right now!  I did not have them cover their faces, or I would have had pictures of them posted here.

pillars of character

I hope you will take the time to read what the students came up with for our circle maps on  pillars of character.  They are really amazing!  We are working on these in our classroom.  You could probably print these from this blog if you wanted to reinforce these at home, too.

The Little Red Hen

What better way to retell a story than to make a story board.  We have some budding artists in our classroom.  What precious animals they drew!  They loved adding the speech bubbles to their animal.  Everyone in the whole class had their very own part.  This was one of the activities we did in our study of fairy tales. 

patterns

Wow!  You can see how sophisticated we have become making patterns.  Now they are 3 dimensional. In the next couple of weeks, we are going to do additive patterns as well as number patterns (counting by 10's, 5's, and 2's).  Stay tuned to see those! 

observational writing

In writing, we are using tree maps to help us get ideas for observational writing.  Students are being really creative to come up with some of their own ideas.

Observable Properties

As scientist, we are learning to observe objects by mass, size, color, texture, and shape. We had fun using these properties to observe a rubber ducky and a small ball.

Greetings

I am changing from kindergarten to first grade!

Zoo 1



I am finally caught up with my blogs!  Where have the weeks gone?  After the zoo trip, we began a study of zoo animals.  Research tells us that students need to have the real experience before learning about it, if at all possible, so that they can link what they have seen to new learning.  The first picture shows what coverings the zoo animals we saw had.  The next picture was linking our learning to the first sounds of the animals.  What a good way to review all of the letters we have learned.  We did have to look up an animal for N and U.  Some of the animals we did not see, but most we did see.  We are still learning about zoo animals next week, too.   

Plants

We had some interesting hands-on activities with plants.  Our garden is the perfect spot for learning about plants.  I should have taken more pictures!  One fun activity that we did was list vegetables that grow above the ground and those that grow under the ground.  The chart was labeled tops and bottoms after a book we read with that title, Tops and Bottoms.

Earth Day

Have you noticed your child being more Earth Friendly?  They may be telling you how to reuse, recycle, or reduce.  Picture one showed uses for trees.  Picture two showed how to conserve and protect our water.  Picture three was our pledge to the earth. 

Baby animals

The week before Easter was our unit on Baby Animals.  I must have forgotten to grab my camera because I just had one picture!!!  I am so glad I did take this picture because it shows how students transfer what they are learning in their free time.  During free centers, this student chose to play with some animal counters in our math center.  She put all of the animal babies with their mothers.  I ask her to name the baby animals after she had sorted it in this way.   This is one proud moment for a teacher when a students shows their learning on their own.

Butterflies

Our butterfly unit was as exciting as our frog unit.  Pictured are some of our activities.  The first picture shows our double bubble map comparing and contrasting a moth to a butterfly.  We looked at their similarities and differences.  I always seem to learn new facts each time we do research.  The next picture was a math connection to the unit where we made a glyph.  The boys made caterpillars and the girls made butterflies.  The last picture shows a counting activity.  One math tub for that week was to use The Very Hungry Caterpillar book to count what the caterpillar ate through each day of the week.

Frogs

Our research project this week was on Frogs.  We did our research from non-fiction books, the internet, and magazines.  (I forgot to get a picture of our KWL-know, want to know and learned-chart.)  The first two pictures show our research paper and the graphic organizer we used to organize our writing.  We extended our frogs unit to math and did addition and subtraction using the song, Five Green and Speckled Frogs.  Our fiction book for this study was Jump, Frog, Jump.  The last two pictures show our main characters chart and the chart we used for main idea.  Coming up-Butterflies!

April Fool's Day

Is Mrs. Carter tricky or what?  I told students that a finger paint company had contacted me to test their finger paint.  The only color they had left was brown.  I told them I did not have any finger paint paper, so paper plates would work just as good.  When I started giving each student their spoonful of "finger paint", they commented that it smelled good and that it looked like chocolate pudding.  I told them I would tell the finger paint company those things.  It wasn't long before one student snuck a lick, and the other students screamed out that he had tasted finger paint.  I said, "What!!!!!  Put finger paint in your mouth........April Fools."  Then I handed out spoons and more chocolate pudding to eat!  The rest of the day, students were trying to play tricks on me!

Who Took The Cookies From the Cookie Jar

HANDS ON Subtraction!!!  We acted out Who Took the Cookies from the Cookie Jar with real Cookies (cereal).  Then each student wrote down the story problem on their individual white boards.  What a fun way to learn subtraction.

Spring

What authors and illustrators these students are becoming.  After making a circle map of some of the signs of spring, they put their favorite four signs on an accordion book.

Duck on a Bike

What a fun way to start spring out--by reading the story about Duck on a Bike.  There were so many great comprehension skills that went well with this book.  The students loved acting it out making the onomatopoeia sounds as well as what they said to duck.  Each animal had its own point of view (another comprehension skill) about a duck riding a bike.  We discussed the main idea of the book by doing the who, what, where, when, why, and how chart.  The students did not realize that they were using adjectives when we created the bubble map.  What great writing they did when we did a text to self connection writing of when they first rode a bike.

Wind

What a fun-filled week our Wind unit was.  We used the well known children's book, The Wind Blew, by Pat Hutchins, to spring board our activities.  It is a perfect book to sequence and retell the story because the wind steals things from people in a certain order.  It is also a rhyming book and provided a great opportunity to learn that some rhyming words look the same and some do not.  We wrote about flying a kite.  To end the unit on Friday,  we flew a kite!  Then we had outside centers that we rotated.  They were bubbles, wind socks, pinwheels, and wind tubes.  Why didn't I take a picture of that?