November Fun in Kindergarten!

We were very busy this month! We did a lot of fun Thanksgiving projects. We talked about what we are thankful for. 

I found this cute thankful tree at Target and the students wrote things they are thankful for on the leaves and then we put the leaves on the tree.

We made thankful turkeys.

We wrote about what we are thankful for.

We colored cute turkeys.

We did a turkey directed draw.

We did a cornucopia directed draw.

We learned about Georgia O'Keeffe and made beautiful flowers.

We learned about George Gershwin and listened to his music all month.

We learned about St. Jude and made this adorable craft. 

We had so much fun!

Pumpkins! Pumpkins!

We have been learning about pumpkins over the last week so here are some of the adorable pumpkin activities we have been working on. We learned about the life cycle of a pumpkin and made this cute flip book. 

We explored the anatomy of a pumpkin and made a paper pumpkin craft. Then we labeled the parts of the pumpkin.

We used yarn for the pulp and real pumpkin seeds too!

We did a directed draw of a pumpkin. This one came out so cute!

We even tasted pumpkin seeds! The kids had a lot of fun learning about pumpkins. 

Salvador Dali Art

This is from last school year, but it was so fun. We learned about Salvador Dali and created a wacky bird picture to mimic Dali's style of art. I found the how to video on YouTube and the kids created their art using a black sharpie and watercolors.

 

Pentecost

Earlier this year we learned about Pentecost. The kids made cute hats to wear that day too. The hat is a tongue of fire colored orange, red, and yellow and then stapled to a bulletin board strip with children on it. The students drew tongues of fire above the kids' heads on the bulletin board strip. It was a lot of fun and the kids are SO cute!

 

Favorite Book Character Day

Hello everyone! It has been a crazy year. I have been blessed to be teaching in-person since September 1, 2020. Since our Kindergarten class was so big, we had to split the students into two groups. My co-teacher and I have a ton of fun planning awesome activities for the kids to do. These pictures are from March 2. We had Dress as Your Favorite Book Character Day. We did all kinds of fun Dr. Seuss and reading activities all week too. 

 K2

K1

First grade, K1, and K2 teachers had fun dressing up too!

We had a great day!

Personal Manipulative and Fine Motor Development Boxes

I have been thinking a lot about how to continue hands-on learning in my kindergarten classroom. I believe that kids learn best when they are actively engaged in what they are learning. Therefore, I have come up with the idea of personal manipulative and fine motor development boxes. I bought all the supplies at Dollar Tree and Target. 

These are the supplies that I have bought so far. I plan to add more as the year goes on. I will explain what I plan to do with the supplies in the rest of this post.

This is a picture of what will be in each student's box. These items can be used for math, word work, and fine motor development.  There is a can of play-doh. There are three little containers, one has 20 clear counting chips in it, the second one has 20 two-color counting chips in it, and the third one has pony beads in it.

This is a personal white board made out of a sheet protector and white cardstock. The bag on the right has a set of pipe cleaners in two sizes. I cut five pipe cleaners in half and I cut three pipe cleaners in thirds. The students can use these to make letters, words, numbers, or shapes. This is great for fine motor development and word work. There is a small container of bubbles on the bottom right corner of the picture. This is for fine motor development (bilateral coordination) and for calming down outside if we need a break. 

I got the tweezers, frog jumper, and chip clip (cat) at Dollar Tree. They are great for fine motor development and math. I am going to add task cards to the students' boxes and they will use these items in their tasks. The tennis ball is from Target. The tennis ball has a slit cut horizontally in it so that it can open like a little mouth. The kids can feed pompoms, addition problems, or sight word cards to the tennis ball creature as they count, find the sum, or read the word. Squeezing the tennis ball also develops fine motor skills.

The craft stick is used as a spacer when writing words and sentences.  There is a whiteboard marker is for the personal whiteboard. The green and purple pen is a dual tip pen from Dollar Tree. The kids can use this during writing practice. It is important for kids to practice writing with different types of pens, crayons, and markers so that they can learn about how much pressure to use when writing. The highlighter is for highlighting evidence in a text that we are reading and for highlighting their names before they turn in their work (this should eliminate no name papers). The last item in the picture is a reading helper (also from Dollar Tree). It highlights the sentence the student is reading and blocks out the line above it and below it. 

These items are for math and fine motor development. There is a bag of 20 pompoms, a bag of 10 white beads and 10 read beads, a bag of 20 mini erasers in five different designs, and a bag of10 cotton balls. 

I will post some videos later this summer of a student using these items. 


I bought these floor decals so that I can remind the kids where to line up (for social distancing). Teal is one of my school colors so I am going to cut the stripes and dots from the edge of each circle and use the teal center dot only. 

It may be a different year (and many things are still in flux), but my kindergarten students are going to have a great year of learning. We are going to have fun and learn in a hands-on way.  I plan to get a UV-C light wand to disinfect other manipulatives that cannot be made into individual supplies. This way a child can use the items, I can sanitize the items, and then another child can use the items. 

Distance Learning in April

Hello, everyone. I hope you are all doing well and that you have adjusted (as well as you can) to distance learning. I want to share some of the things my students have been doing this month. 

We have continued doing art masters; I think art is a good way to help the kids (and parents) relax and release some of the stress they are feeling. These are the Matisse cut paper projects that my students made.  

We have been learning about famous Americans. We made a flipboard for each famous American and then the kids put all of their flipboard together to make a flipboard book.  The students watched a video about the famous American we were studying and then they looked for pictures related to that person. Next, they glued the pictures to their flipboard. Finally, they wrote details about the famous American under each picture. Here is a flipboard about Cesar Chavez. 

This is what the student wrote under each picture.

We have also been writing persuasive paragraphs. The students were asked to write a paragraph about what class pet we should get. Here are some samples of student work.