Snowflakes

I read "Snowflake Bentley" then the children made snowflakes out of coffee filters and wrote what they would do if they were a snowflake. We also looked at Mr. Bentley's snowflake pictures at http://snowflakebentley.com/WBsnowflakes.htm.

Spacers

I was so excited to find these plastic craft sticks at Target, I know silly but every teacher knows how excited we get about teacher supplies. I have always used large wood craft sticks as spacers when the the children are writing but they eventually end up broken, but these are plastic and I believe they will last so much longer.

Snowman

Free slideshow design made with Smilebox

I used many different resources for my snowman unit, some were free and some I had to pay for at teachers pay teachers.

Thanks to Deanna Jump, Kathleen Pedersen and Kim Adsit for their great snowman units. I somehow can't seem to get a link to post but if you look at my blog roll you can see their blogs and how to purchase their units at teachers pay teachers. Other blogs that have great free snowman or winter activities are Chalk Talk a Kindergarten Blog, Musings of Me and The Alphabet Garden.

Calendar

Before school had started I had found apples with numbers on them from another teachers blog that you put in a pocket chart and have the children count the numbers then they cover their eyes and I hide a worm behind one of the numbers. I then call on a student to come up point and tell me the number where they think the worm may be, oh my I had no idea how big a hit this would be for my kids. They started saying sorry every time someone couldn't find the worm and very excited and clapping when someone would find it, and they didn't realize they were recognizing the numbers which was great for me. When they started recognizing all the numbers I would mix the numbers up then to make it even harder I changed the numbers so they could count by fives and tens. Every season or theme I would also change the cards, I have used pumpkins, cornucopia, reindeer, and snowman. For the snowman I changed the worm to a sun, thought it was cuter that a worm for snowman. I do this everyday during our calendar time.


Here is the blog where I had gotten the apples from.
www.kindergartenkindergarten.com/printables.html

We played a rhyming game and word wall game this week. The children had to pull a picture card out of the bag and tell everyone a word that rhymed with it, if they couldn't come up with a word they could phone a friend for help which they loved. To play the word wall game I spread out the cards all over the rug and put the children into to groups and gave them a word they then had to race to see who could swat with the sun the word first. These were both a big hit with my class, below is the link to where I bought them.

Wind

We have been studying weather and this week we worked on wind. We used different objects to investigate the effects of wind.

Making Words

We used the word snowman and the children had to find words inside of it. We did this whole group on the board for two days then I let the children work in groups to find as many words as they could. I also let them take it home to see if they could find any more words with the help of their parents.




I bought the words from http://growingkinders.blogspot.com/.