Mitten Activities

This week we had so many fun activities that correlated with The Mitten by Jan Brett.  Each of our center activities were mitten themed which reviewed skills.  The kids LOVED this story so much!  And, I have to admit, it is too cute.  My kids know that I'm a book fanatic...sometimes they'll say, "Let me guess, this is one of your favorite books too?"  They know me too well!  Here are some pictures of us in action!  We also have a student teacher in our room who is helping us plan and carry out our activities.

 Learning about odd and even numbers.  If our kittens lost a mitten, we found out that number was odd.  If no kittens lost a mitten, the number was even. (idea from mailbox)

 We counted snowflakes in the mitten

We went on a bear hunt (idea from Suzan)

 This was our sequencing "map" for The Mitten before we completed it.

Here are the kids completing their own snowman maps for The Mitten.

I forgot to take a picture of one completed...they turned out so cute.  Try to post later.

We read sight words to see where the animal was hiding. (I saw a game similar to this one on the growing kinder's blog...I just adapted it to my theme for the week)

We made props for retelling The Mitten.  A white paper sack became the mitten

and it held all of our props.

 Here we are retelling the story using the props

Aaaaaaaaaa-Choo!!  

Our student teacher read us Three Little Kittens.  

After the story, she gave us all a mitten and we had to

find who had the rhyming mitten.

 This was one of our fun math centers.  We matched sweaters with jeans...after we counted the dots and the matching number.

 Last week I posted 2 pages of our winter fact book.

These are the other two pages we added to complete the book.
I got this idea of the winter fact book from my good friend Suzan at KrazyforKindergarten.

A Little bit of This, A little bit of That...

Since we were out an entire week for SNOW, I had a lot of catching up to do...and I had to let go of some things I normally do because of time.  (the OCD inside me hated this)  Anyway, we finished some snowman and winter things as well as started our "Animals in Winter" fact book to teach hibernation, migration, and adjustment.

adding snowballs to winter clothing

measuring snowmen

counting pattern block in snowflakes

making towers on our snowmen

using our new wand on our promethean board for winter activities

making our hibernation fact book page

we hibernated then woke up when we heard rhyming words

we created a map of things that remind us of winter...

then added to it as the week continued

rhyming snowmen with stamps

finishing our painted snowmen so we could measure them 

snowman soup we created at the writing center

 our adjustment fact book page

Penguin Blends

So, I'm trying my first google docs post....not quite sure how it will work out. We are beginning blends in a 
couple of weeks in our reading program so I made a cute penguin blend sort to go along with our theme unit.I plan on taking it to Staples and getting it printed since it is so much color then laminating it. Maybe I will make a recording sheet....maybe not. We'll see!

It's a New Year!

So, today was my first day back with kids.  Hopefully almost over my sickness.  It was a great day with my kinders and we did some fun things.  Just a little funny for ya...today, we read All you Need to Build a Snowman, and one of the snowmen had on suspenders so I asked the kids if they had ever seen anyone wear suspenders or know what they were.  No one knew.  I told them that not a lot of people wear them today, but maybe a long time ago they did.  Quickly, B. says, "Yeah, back in the 90's."  I wanted to laugh my head off, but just smiled at her and said, "Yes, darling."  Don't you just love kids?!?  Here are a few pics of what we did.

placing the pipe (which we didn't know what it was...little miss B. said, "the hammer the judge uses"...what a hoot!)

This is what we found in our mystery bag and we had to figure out what is might be.  (it's hard to see on the rug, but it made a snowman)

We made giant snowman heads and put a pattern using snowflakes on their scarves.  The kids did so GREAT with their very own patterns.  We even had an ABCD pattern (which we have not discussed).  So smart!

Of course, they have to write, so they named their pattern.

I found this cute idea on littlegiraffes.com a few years ago and have done it ever since.  It's a great beginning to a new year.  Each student wrote about something they wanted to accomplish this year.  We had some great goals: learn to ride a bike, learn to swim. to beat ALL levels on Mario Kart, and to win a race.  They were all so good!

We made snowman soup (which we plan to label next week)

Idea from kidscount1234.com

Each child cut (on their own, no patterns) an ingredient for our soup.

Happy New Year!