Anyways, now our winter unit might finally start making some sense! Here are a few of the things we did in the past weeks. (Too bad I kept forgetting my camera at home this week, otherwise I'd have more to show and share!)
When we came back from winter break, we talked about what a resolution is and created "Happy New Year" people with our goal from the year. (I think this idea may have originally came from Little Giraffes???) Well, this is one of the reasons I LOVE kindergarten - our goals ranged from: learning how to read, tie shoes, ride a bike, to touching the pedals on a tractor and learning how to slide down a pole! Priceless! (Hint: use hot glue to re-glue the tinsel, or it will keep falling off!)
If you want a copy of the goal sheet, click HERE
Another new thing we started after winter break was doing a "question of the day" on the Promethean board. The kids are so excited to answer (and read) the questions! The other day the question was "Which are you? Male/Female" You should have heard their descriptions of what a male and female was! Nothing like enhancing vocabulary at the same time!
We read the book Snowballs by Lois Elhert and then worked in pairs to create our own snowmen. This is the first year that they ALL actually look like snowmen and there was NO fighting over how to design it! Hooray! This snowman is supposed to be me :) The kids were quite proud of it!
We are STILL working on appropriate glue usage and fine motor skills, so we made snowmen out of marshmallows, pretzels, and left over candy corn and chocolate chips. This was on the kids favorite activities!
Don't you just love the expression! Of course, one of my little smarties had to make a miniature snowman using the pieces as well. He even put a pretzel stick in the middle to hold it together! I think he peeked at my plans for an upcoming special snack!
We also have been working out sounding out words (both in reading and writing) and some friends are having some confusion if the sound is IN the word, vs. starting with the word, so we did both of these sound related activities. For the letter snowman, students rolled a 30 sided letter die, had to write the letter in both capital and lowercase form, as well as two words that started with it (with the exception of x) Pick up your copy HERE.
At the writing center we colored a "winter kid" cut him apart, and wrote a sentence using describing words about each portion. This idea (and pattern) came from Kelly's Kindergarten.
My only math activity that I actually took a picture of, is the pattern block snowman. We have done a lot of these type activities where we had to glue paper pattern block pieces in place. This one was MUCH more challenging simply for the fact that the pieces weren't glued down, but were actual blocks!
Next time I hope to post more math activities, as well as some of our new centers - meaning I have to remember my camera! So long for now!
