Memory Card Lost.... and found - in time for the 100th day!

OK, so it's been awhile since I last blogged... but I seem to have "misplaced" the memory card from my camera!  I know I had it in my hand, and then.....   well, long story short, I eventually found it... IN THE BATHROOM!  Not sure if one of my cats carted it off (it was found on their favorite towel/rug to sit on...), or I am just completely losing my mind!  Needless to say, that was not one of the MANY places I searched for it!  So, this post may jump a bit from my last one,  as I couldn't take pictures of everything I wanted to (for obvious reasons).

100th Day has come and gone!  I was surprised to see how many people celebrate it in January!  I thought ours was really early on Feb. 4th, but then again we have a state law that says school cannot start prior to Sept. 1, due to the tourism industry.  Tourism, in Wisconsin?  Anyways, I'm sure there are several school who start in August, so that would make sense.  Here are a few of the things we did.  We couldn't get to everything I wanted as half my class was sick, and the ones who were at school begged me to have rest time where 5 of them fell asleep in under 20 minutes!  Clearly they needed it!

We did the standard 100 fruit loop necklace.  To help the kids count by 10's I have "counting maps" which seem to work a lot better than other ways that I've tried.

I also hid 100 Hershey kisses around the room.  I put dot labels with the numbers 1-100 and the kids have to find them - one at a time - to prevent hoarding.  Then they have to place it in the correct spot on the 100 grid.  I've done this activity for several years, and only 1 time we didn't find them all.

If they wanted to eat one (or more) I would hold up a number flashcard.  If they could read the number, they had to find that Hershey kiss, remove it from the number grid, and eat it.  YUM!

As a family project we made "100 day hats".  Each child purchased a bucket style hat (we ordered form OTC) which they had to decorate with 100 of something on it.  I am always amazed at the creativity!  I'd love to show you ALL of them, but I'm one of those people who don't like posting kid faces on the internet, so these were two shots where the whole face isn't visible.  1 kid put 100 safety pins, while the other put 100 buttons and 100 roses!  I had one kid put 100 yellow feathers - he looked like big bird!

We wrote our name on the 100 grid, and then colored all of each of the same letter the same color.  The kids thought it was cool to see the patterns it made!  Pick up a your copy HERE (along with few other 100 day activities!).

As a class we had to find and color numbers on the 100 grid that revealed a picture. (The number 100!)  I usually make each kid do their own, but decided to do it on the Promethean board together using the 100 grid from abcya.com.  This seemed to work out better as there wasn't any: "I can't find that number!  What was it again?  Is the 2 first?" etc.  I think next time I will make them stick to one color though!

In computers, we used the FREE Linux based program TuxPaint (kind of like Kid Pix) to create 100 pictures. Yes, it works on both Windows based PC's and Macs :)

ANd of course the excitement of the day was getting to 100 in our calendar routine!  We add a penny for each day of school, as well as a base 10 block, and today we got to trade them in for a dollar 9we think we are rich!) and a 100 flat!  Woo hoo!

 

We did a bunch of other things, but for whatever reason, I didn't take pictures of them!  Oh well, there is always next year!

It FINALLY snowed!

Well... we got our FIRST snow of the year on Thursday.  To say the kids were excited would be an understatement!  All morning they kept asking "Why isn't it snowing yet?"  Then, on the way to lunch, white flakes began falling from the sky!  (Did I mention it was 52 degrees the day before?)

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!

Ho! Ho! Ho! There's till no snow (part 2)

Well, I don't know about all of you, but the last week has been crazy!  We had full days of school through Dec. 22!  The excitement of Christmas, coupled with the flu, led to quite an eventful (and messy!) last day of school!  At least the temperature is in the MID-40's! making recess duty (and now cleaning my garage) not as unbearable as it could be!

Last time I shared some of my math related holiday activities. This time I will follow up with some literacy (and whatever I forgot before!) activities! Hope you enjoy (and get some ideas for next year!).

Literacy Centers

I called this "candy cane words".  The kids use paper candy cane pieces to spell names and sight words.  It's really interesting to see how they form some of the trickier letters out of the random pieces.  To make the pieces, I just printed red/white striped paper (pick up your copy HERE) and either cut different length strips for the "straight pieces" and then cut out several "o"'s using the die cut machine which I chopped into various portions to create curved pieces.

After the kids made a word, they had to record it on the recoding sheet.

At another center I the kids had a bag full of sight words, along with some Christmas Pictures (I think I got these from Victoria Smith at kinderkorner.com) and they had to use the words and pictures to make sentences.  My rule was that all the sentences could NOT follow the same pattern (I like, I like, etc.)

One of their favorite activities every year is going "shopping" for Christmas presents.  I print out small booklets that have a present with a letter in it on each page.  (Get yours HERE). I am lucky enough to have a copier that shrinks and creates booklets from regular sized sheets of paper!  If you don't, and don't want to print 26 sheets per kid, here is a condensed version.  Anyways, the kids look through toy catalogs and sale papers, and cut out "presents" and glue them on the correct page, based on what letter they start with.

I found a Christmas tree glyph from Shari Sloane's site that I modified and turned into an art center project.  We sponge painted the trees, and then used a scrap-booking circle punch to cut out the ornaments.  I was amazed at what a fine motor activity the hole punching turned into!

We made our own "Rudolph Rudolph" books (I got this idea from little giraffes) and the kids just loved how Rudolph's nose kept changing color, it rhymed, and had lots of sight words in it!  You can get your own copy here.  I imported mine into a Promethean board flip chart so we could ALL see and do word work together as well.  (Have I ever mentioned how much I LOVE my promethean board??)

We also made TLC type reindeer, which focuses on turning squares and rectangles into "art" while incorporating LOTS of math vocabulary (horizontal,  diagonal, center, etc).  I just love how every year there is that 1 reindeer facing the wrong way!

We made elves, along with an "Elf to do list" from an idea I got from Deanna Jump's website.  I just laugh when I look at how stressed out the one elf looks!  Kind of reminds me of myself around the holidays! :)

 

 Each month we make a "quilt" from different TLC type art activities.  This month's features the TLC Santa, and the Little Giraffe's Tree.  So Cute!

 Not to forget about Hannukkah, in order to try to broaden the students culturally (I work in a very NON-diverse area) some of the things we did was watch an Elmo Hannukah clip  and learned how to play the dreidle game.  The kids LOVED it.  Want a copy of the game, click HERE.  Not sure where I originally got the dreidles from... my ex-husaband is Jewish!

And... just because I love when kids surprise you...  We had pretzels for snack one day, and 1 of my students decided to eat them in the shape of the alphabet!  I you look carefully, and use a little imagination, you can actually make out each letter!

Well, I hope to get some school stuff done over break (like lesson plans for next week!) but also want to find some time to relax as well. Hope your holidays are enjoyable, relaxing and refreshing! 

Ho! Ho! Ho! There's still no snow!

It's officially the middle December is Wisconsin, and we still have not had any snow (other than the 5 minutes during writing time last week that inspired many young writers and caused quite the commotion!)  Nevertheless, we are continuing on with our Christmas activities!  Maybe by January when we do the bulk of our Winter unit there will be some on the ground to reference!  Anyways, here are some of the fun thing in math we have been doing this week!

Math Station Activities

Ornament Color: students use 3 different colored unifix cubes and see if they can find all the different ways to line them up.  There are 6 ways total.  I am always amazed at how well the kids do with this activity!  I have them re-order their cubes and put it next to each ornament to see if it is the "same" or if they found a "new way".  For more of a challenge, I give kids 4 unifix cubes and see how many of the 24 ways they can find!  (I just put four of theses sheets on 1 piece of paper, and have them color the hook as the 4th spot on the ornament.)

You can pick up a copy of this HERE

Christmas Pattern Block Pictures: I originally had a pattern block present activity that I had gotten out of the Mailbox magazine years ago, but since I "misplaced" about half of my Christmas file, it is missing so this is what I had to create for a similar activity. Can you spot the errors in this student's work? 

HERE's a copy to save you the trouble of re-creating it should you misplace your file :)

Help Santa Grow his Beard: To practice the concepts of adding and subtracting, we play this fun Santa game.  Students roll the +/- dice and add/subtract that many cotton balls from Santa's beard.  To help work on sharing and playing fairly/correctly, I have each student use their own Santa board, but they are to share the die.

Santa's Sleigh Drop: I really like how this activity is worded, color coded, and the concept, and the kids did MUCH better than I thought they would!  They put presents in Santa's sleigh (which just happens to be a 10 frame) and then - oh no!- Santa's drops some and they have to figure out how many are left!  I used erasers as "presents" because they fit in the squares so nicely!  I can't take credit for this activity at all though - I got it HERE for FREE!

Tannenbaum tallies: I got this from Deanna Jumps' and Julie Lee's Winter Packet and the kids ROCKED the tally marks!  I was so impressed that they remember that "number 5 goes across them all" and to leave spaces between their groups of 5!  Yeah!

Present Patterns: For some reason my class LOVES to color this year, so I have been letting them color patterns.  I have a sheet like this for just about every season/month, and the patterns get harder as we go along.  Here we are coloring and labeling a pattern.  I always include a "make your own" pattern on the back to see who truly understands the concept of creating a pattern that repeats..."no.... red, blue, yellow, blue, green,  is not a pattern...."  :)

Finally, I stumbled upon a new blog http://livelaughlovek.blogspot.com/ and got a few new centers from there as well!  We will be doing those next week (yes, we have school until the 23rd!) so I will post those, along with some of our literacy centers next week.

A Batch of GIngerbread!

WoW!  It seems like Gingerbread is the thing to do in kindergarten this time of year! Not only are the kids LOVING this unit - so am I!  It so great to see that so many people from all over are doing similar types things in kindergarten, it reaffirms that I am on the right track and "on par" with the latest, greatest and best in kindergarten!  While I have been seeing (and adding!) all the other great gingerbread men ideas from various blogs to my unit, here are a few of my own I thought I'd share to add to the batch!

In addition to reading and charting several versions of the story (this chart and corresponding activity are from/based off the Deanna Jump's gingerbread packet) we did a lot other fun things too!  I'll try not to repeat some of the more common ideas :)  oops... the flip chart is saved on my school PC!  So... the chart picture will be coming soon!

As a 6 Traits "word choice" activity we brainstormed other words instead of "popped" to describe how the gingerbread man got out of the oven.

At centers we worked on spelling our first and last names with only 1 capital letter.  To this day I don't understand why they are always throwing random capitals in!    Anyways, we are lucky enough to have a die cut machine for the gingerbread men :)  Last year I tried this having kids fold paper and cut them out to resemble paper dolls, and that was a DISASTER!  The kids used letter stencils I picked up through Oriental Trading Company a few years ago to spell their names.  We have also been having issues with appropriate glue usage, so I thought making them use  just a small dot on the hand/foot to attach them together would help their fine motor skills too.

The kids were so intrigued  about whose name was the longest, how many vowels, etc.  That next year I will be adding this sheet for them to fill out as well.  Grab it for FREE here!

Of course we had to do the "Which part of the gingerbread man did you bite first?" graph.  I just love making the kids cut out a gingerbread and then cut the part they bit off!  The data analysis sheets are from Deanna Jumps' gingerbread unit.

For our family project this week, the kids decorated a paper gingerbread man using food.  Of course we discussed what kind of food to use that wouldn't rot.  Somebody asked if they could use tomatoes!  Uh-- let's use things like cereal, uncooked pasta, candy, etc.  I am always so amazed at how great and creative these turn out!  (Ignore the hideous fabric background - it looked cute in the store, but not on my wall!  It's going to be changed very soon!)

 We practiced color words on the Promethean board with this idea I got from Julie Lee.  The kids have to write the color word in that color, and then they use the "spill the paint" bucket to color the frosting to match.  We made the book on the board, and then the kids made their own individual books as well.
You can download the Promethean Board activity HERE.

We labeled the parts of the gingerbread man and then wrote two sentences about him.  I'm impressed at how well our writing is coming along this year!  I also love how this student added lipstick to her gingerbread man!  Too cute!  This activity, and a few of the others, can be found in my "Stirring up some fun with the gingerbread man" packet.

Here is in area estimation and count activity we did.  Students estimate (im marker so they can't cahnge it later) how many --- they think will fit inside the gingerbread man.  Then they fill it up, and practice counting (and removing it as they count) to see if there estimate was close!  Of course, several guess "100" for whatever the object is, and then are shocked they weren't close! :P

Now it's off to have "visions of gingerbread dance in my head".  Enjoy!