Friday, November 18, 2011

Fabulously Fun Friday!

Today we had our pow wow and Thanksgiving "feast."  A local group came and shared lots of interesting things with us.  We got to see some REAL Native Americans all dressed up.  We also got to look at cool artifacts and do a fun snake dance!  
 
This guy was really awesome!  He travels and competes doing Native American dances.  He made everything he's wearing!


Snake dance


 
We also had a feast in our classroom once the pow wow was over.  Since every child has to buy a lunch, we ate our sack lunches and made pumpkin pie and butter.

Making (or attempting to) butter
We sang this little song that I made up off the top of my head:
Shake, shake, shake
Shake, shake, shake
Shake the butter!
Shake the butter!

Making mini pumpkin pies in a cup






Thank you so much parents for joining us!  You have truly been a blessing this year!  I am so very thankful for each of you as well as your sweet children!

Happy Thanksgiving!


And a very exciting side note...I am starting grad school in the spring!  I am excited but a bit a nervous as well.  I am going to UAB (University of Alabama at Birmingham) and getting my masters in ESL (hopefully).






Thanksgiving Fun

What a great week we've had!!  We finished up our Thanksgiving Unit with fun Thanksgiving centers, a Thanksgiving fact book and a Pow Wow!  It's been a fun but crazy week...lots of assessing, a field trip to the high school to watch Little Red Riding Hood, and today we had the Pow Wow.  Check out the pictures to see all the fun things we've been doing!

Math Centers







Some of our fun literacy centers






Theme
We watched a video about how to make corn husk dolls then made them with paper bags.  The kids LOVED it!

I got this idea from overallsuccess.net

Some of the things we are thankful for:


"God"  I love it!

heart and mom

earth and ice cream :) A girl after my own heart.

"I love my family."

Happy Thanksgiving!

Friday, November 11, 2011

Thankful for FREEBIES!

I've been working super hard on jazzing up my blog.  In celebration of finishing AND a three day weekend, I thought I'd try to upload a freebie (I'm not sure how to upload it so you can see the actual page without clicking on the link)!  Thank you so much for taking the time to read my blog.  Stay tuned for more happenings in our kinder class!

Coming up:one more week of Thanksgiving, then 3 weeks of Christmas!  

Can you believe Christmas is almost here?  This is my favorite time of year...full of friends, family, and food.  It's SUCH a great time to really show kids what it means to be thankful and to teach them what it means to be a servant of others by giving...or in our kinder-words...being a REALLY BIG peacemaker!

  Keep a look out for all of our fun activities, especially our Christmas Around the World book the second week of December (so cute and the kids love it!)

Click here for a FREEBIE! Pilgrim Patterns

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

November Intervention

I've finally come around to sprucing up my intervention and my kids LOVE it!  I can finally see those light bulbs start to flicker in some of my little friends' heads and I am so excited about it! 

 We've really been hitting initial sound fluency HARD!  I have a few who still aren't QUITE there, but they're getting there!  It's so hard to remember what each picture is AND each initial sound!

This is a fun game created by my friend Mrs. Holcomb, check her out!  
 This is a game I made that involves counting as well as number and number word recognition.  We call it Eat at My Table.  Each kid gets a plate of beans.  I spread out the number forks and number word spoons. Then, we count the beans on the plate.  They have to find the correct number and number word.  If they don't know, we use the number line to count and find the number and our initial sounds to find the word!  Once they find the match, they use the fork and spoon to gobble up all their beans!

 This is another game my kids LOVE!  We call it SET the Table.  First, I lay out all the bowls and we match the upper and lowercase letters.  We make sure the say the name and sound too!  Each kid gets at least 1 table.  The tables have a picture on them.  One at a time, we decide what the initial sound is and then find the letter bowls to match.  They LOVE setting their tables!

 Some of my students still have a bit of trouble with color recognition.  I say or show a color and the students have to find it on their ring.
 Letter naming practice.  I got the idea from Julie Lee (She's AWESOME!).
 Here we are "picking" sight word corn.  I write or say a word and the kids have to find it, read it, spell it, and read it one more time.

 These are two different letter recognition games.  Students match uppercase and lowercase letters and say sounds.
 This is a fun game where we practice number identification, then counting and comparing.

Proud of my Pilgrims!


These are our math and literacy centers this week.  We are still sticking with the Thanksgiving theme, but this week, we are learning all about pilgrims!  I am so proud of my hard working pilgrims!

Math Centers



 
Literacy Centers




Great work!  Easy way to check work: have students write the words in the same color as the pilgrim.


Write the sight words.  Color the object the correct color.


A/I sort
I'd be more than happy to share any of these center activities.  
Feel free to visit my donorschoose site!