Saturday, November 10, 2018

Nocturnal Animals Research Project

Nocturnal animals are seriously fascinating for kindergarteners.   What kindergartener wouldn't want to stay up all night? Plus, we get to learn cool words like mammal and echolocation. We started our research project by sorting between pictures of nocturnal and diurnal animals (not pictured) and watching a video from the Let's Find Out magazine website from Scholastic.  I use those videos for EVERYTHING. They are just long enough to peak the kids interest and stir up a lot of questions.  With our interest peaked, we decided to focus in on bats and owls. Then, we labeled a bat as a group and then on our own.



After labeling a bat, we read through some non-fiction bat books that I have from Scholastic and National Geographic Kids. We used these to help us complete our can, have, are chart.


This chart was not completed in one session.  We started it and then added to it as we did more research. I love how kindergarteners can do research by looking at photographs in non-fiction books. My students were fascinated that bats eat so many types of food, even watermelon! 

Next step: learning about echolocation. This is always a fan favorite. We watch the episode from "The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That" with bats that shows how echolocation works and then make our own bat ears. 


The kids wanted to be sure that they were using colors that made sense so they looked through the books to check. Then we simulated echolocation by rolling a ball to the wall and watching it come back to us while squeaking like a bat.


It wouldn't be a fun unit without a snack! We made bats with double stuffed Oreos, frosting, and decorative candy eyes. They turned out super cute! (full disclosure: this is not my hand... it is the hand of one of the speech pathologists at my school who is much taller than me and has longer arms to better take a picture...lol)


The kids were so excited about all of the things they learned that we made two posters to teach others what we learned about bats. We painted the background with tempra paint and then used our favorite non-messy Kwik Stix paint to make the bats, trees, and bat food. If you haven't tried Kwik Stix, I promise they will change your life! They are solid tempra paint sticks that dry in 60 seconds. Can we say game changer?
Bats during the day:
 Bats at night:

We compared and contrasted bats and owls and made another can, have, are chart to help us organize our thinking.

We labeled and owl and then we made an owl snack. To make this snack you will need graham crackers, marshmallows, m&ms, and candy corn.


What activities do you do during your nocturnal animals unit?

Happy Teaching!

Saturday, October 27, 2018

Apples and Pumpkins Unit

Hi everyone! I’m back with a blog post about our most recent unit in my classroom. We have been talking about apples and pumpkins. This unit is one of my favorites (I think I say that about all of the units we do, lol). I like to start with apples towards the end of September and then move into pumpkins at the beginning of October.

We always like to start a unit by talking about our schema and asking questions about a topic. I like to make sure my bookshelf is stocked because looking through books always helps us come up with more questions. So many of my books are from Scholastic Book Clubs, but when I don’t have enough books about a topic, I go to the library and grab some more.


During our apple unit, we read books about apples, talked about the apple life cycle, dissected apples, labeled them, and taste tested different color apples. Then we made an apple pie in a cup!


Our favorite part was smashing graham crackers with a toy hammer!


After we learned about apples, we began learning about how pumpkins grow, pumpkin features, and things we could make with pumpkins. I always like to start this unit in early October so we can carve our pumpkin and watch it decompose throughout the month! So spooky!

The can, have, are thinking map is one of my favorites. We talk about how we can make sentences about pumpkins using those words.


We studied the outside of the pumpkin and made predictions about what would be inside. When we check to see if it would sink or float. To most kids surprise, it floated!


Then, we talked about how we would carve a pumpkin. We sequenced how to carve a pumpkin before we actually did it. This way the kids could direct me in carving the pumpkin based on what they knew from the sequencing work they have done.


These are part of my Sequence and Write: How to Carve a Pumpkin pack on TpT. If you are interested in getting these cards for yourself, you can find them here.

We put our pumpkins out in the garden next to one that we didn’t carve and made predictions about which one will decompose first.


Our unit wouldn’t have been complete without a food activity. We made a pumpkin patch with chocolate pudding, smashed Oreo cookies, candy pumpkins, and green Sour Punch Straws. You can find the original recipe here.


We also added some super simple fun fall activities to our workstations. The kids have been making pumpkins, pumpkin seeds, apples, and fall leaves on the light table.


We have also been using beads to build pumpkins and leaves on our mirrored tray (I found that at Target last year).


As Autumn is in the air, we have also been completing these fun Autumn themed activities from Education.com. Below is one example of a worksheet, but you can go check out their website for more fun activities and games!
Click here to get this worksheet and click here to get the answer sheet!


Happy Teaching!

Sunday, August 12, 2018

Math Interactive Notebooks in Kindergarten: Getting Started and Keeping it Simple


I love using math interactive notebooks in kindergarten. They are a routine that we establish early on that carries our learning throughout the school year. The first couple of weeks are slow moving, but once we get it a groove it is smooth sailing after that.

Getting Started:

To be honest, I have found two different ways to get started with interactive notebooks that have been quite effective for me. I choose between the two depending on the class that I have.

Option 1: I like to start my students doing a version of "workstations" early on in the school year. During this time, we play get familiar with our math manipulatives and I teach students about staying in one spot, voice level, and how to clean up neatly and completely before moving on to the next workstation. I also take this time to teach students about stamina and we start of at the workstations for about 5 minutes and start adding one minute a day as soon as they are ready. Once we get up to 10 minutes per station and the group is working at one spot with a level 2 voice level, I pull kids to my small group table and I guide them through cutting, gluing, and completing our pages. 

Option 2: We begin math notebooks together and I guide them through cutting, gluing, and completing the pages while using a document camera. 

But isn't it a lot of steps?

Yes, in the beginning, we take it slow. And when I say slow, I mean S-L-O-W! In my classroom, I use both community supplies and individual supplies in a pencil box. For interactive notebooks, we use pencil boxes (just a personal preference of mine- community supplies are great too). We practice getting out our pencil boxes, where we need to put them, and how we need to sit to get ready for math notebooks. In the beginning especially, I usually keep and pass out the notebooks. Later on in the school year, the kiddos can be responsible for that too. We also practice getting out our glue sponges and tidy tubs as well. If you have never heard of glue sponges, you MUST check out this post from Kindergarten Smorgasboard. Life changing...seriously! Tidy tubs are our trash collectors that are on our tables so that we don't have to get up to recycle any of the paper until we are done. Yay! 

Once we can do all of those things, we are ready to get started with the page. This is critical: I show the kids one step, stop, and then let them do it. We continue that until we have completed all of the cutting. This is often my stopping point for day one. Then on day two, we glue and do the page together the same way we did the cutting...step by step (anyone else singing New Kids in their head right now?).

A few more tips and tricks:

1. Have your highlighter and scissors ready. In the beginning of kindergarten, fine motor skills are at so many different levels. A highlighted line or a simple cut goes a long way. 

2. Glue sponges are the best for interactive notebooks! They keep the paper attached to the notebook. Glue stick glue just doesn't keep it attached for the whole year.

3. If you have multiple interactive notebooks, pick a color of duck tape for each type of notebook and put it on the spine. It is so much easier to organize that way!

4. Hot glue a piece of ribbon inside the back cover of the notebook to use as a bookmark. Then, minimal time is wasted flipping to the next empty page in the book. 

What do they look like?

1. My math notebooks are spiraled practice. Once we get in the groove, on Mondays we measure, Tuesdays we tally, Wednesdays are word problems, Thursdays are geometry, and Fridays we practice number sense. I love this because once the kids learn how to do each type of page, they can look at the page, know what to do, and get started right away. Each page has minimal steps... thats just how I roll. If it is too complicated or feels too much like an art project, I won't do it. Lol!

2. These struggling students and English Language Learners have done really well with these notebooks. They are concrete enough that they can complete even the word problems, but challenging enough to keep everyone learning and reviewing information. 

3. As the kids get in the routine, interactive notebooks take about 10 minutes. I fit them in at the end of my small group time before they go to workstations.

A week of math interactive notebooks:

Here is what a week of math notebooks look like in my classroom at the beginning of the school year. The activities grow and change throughout the school year for spiraled practice.

Monday:


Tuesday:

Wednesday:


Thursday:


Friday:




Want to try some interactive notebooks?  Click here to download a whole week for free!



Any questions? Please feel free to email me. We LOVE interactive notebooks in our classroom and I hope you will too!
Happy Teaching!


Monday, July 16, 2018

Education.com : A great resource for teachers!


As a teacher-mom I am always looking for easy resources to keep things fun in the classroom (or even at home). Education.com has everything you need including games, science experiments, worksheets, learning songs, interactive stories, and lesson plans.  This really is an easy go-to website for ideas for any subject area.

I was excited to test out one of their math worksheets and am looking forward to using it at the beginning of the year when we are focusing on getting into the routine of workstations.  We tested it out at my house and my 5 year old loved it.

Whether your child is in school or just preparing for it, this crawlies themed maze is a great way for young ones to work on their fine motor skills and spatial reasoning. This maze is a fun game, but you can find more educational math games for all ages at Education.com!

I am also super excited for my students to try out their math games. As you can see, there are a ton of games to choose from that your students will love! Check them out here.


I am also in love with their interactive stories for literacy workstations.  So many fun options!  Check them out here.



Check out Education.com for yourself and find some resources for your classroom next year! 


Tuesday, April 10, 2018

Our Space Inquiry

My students were fascinated with nocturnal animals and the moon in the fall. They have been talking about it ever since and I just knew that we had to revisit the topic. As we embarked on a journey into space, I gathered space books to share with my students and let them explore. We wrote down our questions and used them as a guide throughout the inquiry.

My students loved this book about space:



This was a great one for inquiry because it was in an ask and answer format. My students loved looking at it to get their questions answered. Below is a picture of the model one of my students made on the light table of the solar system from looking at this book.



Then, she drew and wrote about her model:



My students also really enjoyed learning from the pictures in this book:





We began our inquiry by making a solar system out of black water beads and glow in the dark planets.  My students unanimously decided that we needed black water beads for our background and of course we needed stars. Are stars yellow or white? How could we find our answer? Look in a book of course! My students were shocked to find out that stars can be white, yellow, red, and blue. It is so neat seeing even our youngest kiddos figuring out non-fiction text features through asking and answering questions. When my students learned that the sun was a star, they had so many questions! We made a chart (inspired by Darla Meyers class) to show our new learning about stars. Then, we went back to our solar system and added blue, red, yellow, and white water beads to represent stars.  



Then, we made a large solar system on black butcher paper:




Below is our space small world play that we made out of colored water beads , black water beads,  and small planets.

We were challenged to make our own constellations out of marshmallows and toothpicks.  Their STEM challenge question was: can you make a constellation from marshmallows and toothpicks?  We documented our learning by putting our final product on a piece of paper and glued confetti stars were the marshmallows were and then wrote about it.  








I made a bear in the sky!
We learned about Van Gogh and made pictures inspired by The Starry Night painting. First, we practiced making swirls on aluminum foil.

Then, we made our own pictures inspired by Van Gogh. We used chalk pastels, but if I were to do this again, I would use oil pastels.

Last, we explored the different types of planets. We made craters by dropping pebbles into white play dough to model Mercury. We made volcanos to demonstrate the surface of Venus. And, we blew up a balloon by using baking soda and vinegar to demonstrate that some planets are made of gas and not rock. (Unfortunately, I did not get a picture of these activities).

I hope you found some fun activities to incorporate into your next space unit!
Happy Teaching,


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