Lent & Easter

We have been busy, busy, busy observing the season of Lent and preparing for Holy Week and Easter! Since we get out of school for vacation before Easter Sunday, I decided to focus on Holy Week early and begin our celebration of Jesus' resurrection this week. Here are a few activities that we did & I'll do my best to attach links so you can do them yourself if you would like!

Holy Week
We put together these mini books and read them together before discussing what happened on each day of Holy Week in more detail.

Stations of the cross
In the past I have taken my class to Stations of the Cross with the rest of the school and I have always felt like the kids were either bored or confused by all of the kneeling and standing and reciting and kneeling and standing and so on. This year, I decided to change things up and we have been doing our own stations of the cross in the classroom using the Multimedia Stations for Children from Loyola Press. I highly recommend this for little ones! The descriptions of the stations are short and my students really seemed to be interested and to understand what was going on (one of my little tough guys even cried the first time we did them together!)

Palm Sunday
I had the kids trace their handprint (palms...get it?) on green paper six times and cut them out. Then they glued three together to look like a palm branch and taped a popsicle stick onto the back.

After we read the story of Palm Sunday in our Children's Bible and learned the first part of the song Shout Hosanna we reenacted the scene. They waved their palm branches and sang while our volunteer Jesus walked through pretending to ride his donkey. It was very cute and they really had fun with it.

Holy Thursday
To explain Holy Thursday I read the story from our Children's bible of the washing of the feet, the last supper, and Jesus' arrest after praying in the garden. I was planning on having the kids do a Last Supper coloring page afterwards, but all of our printers AND copiers went down and my personal printer ran out of ink so I had to improvise. We did some directed drawing instead - I walked them through step by step but told them to get creative and that their's didn't have to look exactly like mine. Here's what mine ended up looking like:

And here are some of their masterpieces.

As you can see, some of them got very creative!


Good Friday
I found this art project on Do Small Things With Love and loved it but wasn't sure if we could handle watercolors. Instead, we ripped up some construction paper and glued to make a mosaic/stained glass window looking thing and it turned out to be pretty great!

Easter

This year I made my own Easter packs for Math and Literacy that you can grab for yourself from my TPT store if you are interested! Here are a few of the activities that are included:

Letter Hunt:
I hid the letter eggs around the room and showed them how to look for one at a time & to be sneaky about it and then let them go on a hunt. Each time they found one they gave them to me and then looked for more. Once I had all 26 we met on the carpet, put them in the pocket chart after taking turns making the sounds, and then put them in alphabetical order.

Story Elements: Before reading, I showed the kids the story elements graphic organizer that we would complete after the story and we reviewed the parts of a story with our favorite song by Dr. Jean:

Then we read Old Hippo's Easter Egg and stopped along the way to discuss the characters, setting, problem, and solution. After going over the worksheet one last time, I sent them to their tables and they got right to work. Of course my early finishers asked if they could color in the "peep, egg, chick, and other egg" and I said sure, why not...it is Easter after all :)

You can grab these and more Easter activities from my TPT store!

OR buy both together for a discounted price :)

Long Time, No Blog

Hello strangers,

I apologize for the long break that I took from posting - it has been a very busy month!! Since it has been so busy I have a lot to share with you, so buckle up.

We have been working on informational/informative/report writing for the past few weeks. Because the common core standards require us to "explore a variety of digital tools to produce and publish writing", I have started a whole new method of teaching writing. Here's what our weekly routine looks like now:

Monday: Write a report about your weekend (this gives me time to get Monday stuff taken care of like copies, emails, checking homework, etc...)

Tuesday: Review the writing process (using the song/chant in the video below) and complete step 1 -Brainstorm. We use a planning page from Writing A-Z to jot down ideas and notes for a beginning sentence, three details, and a closing sentence).

Wednesday: Use planning page to write a journal. I model using my planning page first to write nice, detailed sentences that make sense and then give them about 20 minutes to work on doing their own while I walk around the room and give them feedback/suggestions. 

Thursday: Revise. First I model checking my work and fixing mistakes, then I walk them through checking their own work for spelling, grammar, punctuation, handwriting, etc..., and finally they get to help a friend (of my choosing) edit their work and vice versa. 

Friday: Type, print, illustrate, and publish. I created a class account on Google Drive with a folder for each student. It took a lot of practice, but they are all able to log in and create documents in their folders now. On Fridays I have them bring the journal that they wrote to the computer lab and work on typing it up. When they are finished I print and allow them to draw a picture before we "publish" their work by hanging it up in the classroom. 

We went through this whole process for St. Patrick's Day except instead of drawing a picture we attached their reports to this I Caught a Leprechaun craft.

Since my last post we finished our second trimester and began Trimester 3. In the third trimester I always like to make some changes to get the kids extra ready for First Grade. I send home more difficult homework, assign a book report every Monday, and we take spelling tests once a week.

Book Reports

The reports are super simple - they write the author, illustrator, genre, and draw a picture of the beginning, middle, and end of the story. I assign them on Monday and they are due the following Monday. You can pick up a copy of the template that I use at my TPT store for just $1.00.

Spelling Tests

Now you may be thinking - why give spelling tests in Kindergarten when that is not part of the curriculum?!? Well, I started doing this last year and found that:
a) The students love it! They feel very grown up when they get their first set of spelling words and I make sure they know that this is First Grade level stuff.
b) It helps to improve their writing so much!!! When they have these words memorized, they no longer need to look at the word wall and are able to focus on making the content of their writing better!
c) It helps them (AND their parents) to get into the habit of practicing spelling words which they will have to do for the next few years.

The way that I make it work is by starting verrrrryyyy sllllooowwwwlllllyyyy. I give them super easy words at the beginning and gradually increase the difficulty as we go. This year I have created five practice pages per week that I send home as homework & you can grab a copy of them for your class if you are interested. (These words are taken from my Kindergarten Rainbow Sight Words & can be used as sight word practice sheets instead if you prefer!)

The first packet is a freebie so you can try it out & the rest are only $1 each.

Enjoy!

Ash Wednesday

Today we spent some time talking about why and how we observe the 40 days of Lent. We focused on three main vocabulary words: Pray, Fast, and Give. We talked about how we can make a resolution (just like new year's!) to pray more often, give alms, and fast or give up something that we don't really need.
We're going to be collecting money for Catholic Relief Services using the rice bowls this year, so a lot of kids said that they would make the resolution to give all of their money to the poor (I told them that it would be OK to give some money to the poor and keep some for themselves - didn't want any parents getting upset).
After brainstorming a long list of things that we can work on during lent, I had each of them write down their lenten resolutions on this paper: (grab it for free on TPT!)

Then, they cut out purple crosses to glue their writing paper onto:

Here are some of their finished products!

"For Lent I will give the toys I don't play and give clothes what do not fit me and pray every day and night."

 "For Lent I will give my toys to the people who don't have toys and the people that are poor. Also pray for the people that are poor."

"For Lent I will pray for people. I will try to be good. I will give ip taking baths (?!?!?!) when I am clean. I am going to pray for Jesus."

February

Wow, I know I am beginning to sound a little bit repetitive but where is the time going?! Seriously. We are halfway through February and I haven't had any time to sit down and post anything that we've been doing because it's been so busy! Well, here you go - I'll do my best to recap an entire month today.

Groundhog Day

I'm guessing most people don't really celebrate Groundhog day since it is such an odd "holiday", however, I have a special place in my heart for this day since the groundhog is the "unofficial mascot" of my college. I actually managed to squeeze in a quick trip to Dallas to celebrate with my friends and family and made it back in time to celebrate with my class on Monday! 

First we read this book:

Then they all made predictions about whether the groundhog would see his shadow or not:

Then we made these cute little groundhogs from A Cupcake For the Teacher:

Valentine's Day

I let my room mom take the lead for our class Valentine's day party and craft this year. She did a fantastic job and came up with a really cute gift for the kids to make for their parents, provided me with the instructions and all of the materials, and helped out with gluing, taking pictures, etc...she's awesome. We did a few other valentine activities throughout the week that you can see below :)

The kids had a free dress day and this was by far the best outfit in my class:

Here's a little rhyming worksheet that we got (for free!) here.

We did a little letter sound matchup game that we also got for free from Mrs. Ricca's Kindergarten here.

I loved this writing activity from Crazy for First Grade:

I'll save President's day/Ash Wednesday/Lent/etc... for another day!

Back to School, Back to School...

I'm finding it a little bit hard to believe that we are already almost done with our second week back to school. We really hit the ground running (literally - I landed at LAX at about 10:00 p.m. and was up and on my way to school by 5:30 a.m. the next morning...clearly I like to live on the edge). We have been busy in Kindergarten since 2015 started! I don't have time to catch you up on everything, but I did want to share just a little bit.

PENGUINS

Even though it is just starting to get a little chilly here in L.A., I figured we could at least pretend it's winter and learn about cold weather through our unit on penguins. Plus penguins are pretty cute and the little ones loved learning about them!

I don't have many penguin books in my library, so I used one of my favorite sites, www.wegivebooks.com, to read See How They Grow: Penguins, Baby Penguins Everywhere, and DK Readers: Emperor Penguins.

*www.wegivebooks.com is an awesome non-profit social enterprise that provides free books for low-income communities, schools, and homes. You can help out just by signing up (for free) and reading children's books on their site! Learn more here.

After reading these two informational texts and a lit text for fun about penguins, we discussed all of the new information that we had learned. Then we put it down in writing and made little penguins to crafts and booklets to decorate the room.

I got the template for the "All About Penguins" booklet from Miss Kindergarten here. I hope all of these amazing Kindergarten teachers who put up free resources for all of us know how much we appreciate them! I would be lost without their last minute lifesavers.

Reindeer Games

I am running out of Christmas ideas and we still have 4 days of school left! :/ As I mentioned before, this week has been NUTS. Every day we have had to drop what we were working on multiple time to go jump on stage and practice our Christmas program song or go get our vision tested or take pictures with Santa. Last night we finally had our Christmas performance and, as usual, everything came together perfectly at the last minute and it was adorable and the parents loved it.

Amidst all of the madness, we were able to do a mini unit on Reindeer that I wanted to share. We started off the day by reading Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and singing his song together. (If you don't have your own copy of the book you can read it online for free on wegivebooks.com).
Then, I asked the kids to tell me what they already knew about Reindeer and we made a little chart of information.

(One of them said, "they smell better than people!!??", and, while I appreciated the Frozen reference, I told her that that was just a joke from the movie and that it is most likely not true - Sorry!)

After that we watched a video, looked at pictures, and read the information on the San Diego Zoo Kids page about Reindeer.

Then we talked about the new information that we learned about Reindeer and I passed out these All About Reindeer writing pages and told them to write me a report including everything that they knew about the animal. Some of them did a really awesome job!!

After they finished writing we did this cute little Reindeer craft to frame our writing before hanging it up for everyone to see.

The writing pages and craft template came from the Reindeer Games packet made by A Cupcake for the Teacher.

Gingerbread Day

Today in Kindergarten we celebrated Gingerbread Day. No, it's not an actual holiday (as far as I know), but I figured since we have been doing so much about Jesus and the Nativity story and Santa Clause and Winter that we should do something a little bit different today. Plus, I found some great freebies to use along with several of the gingerbread books that I already have in my classroom library. (Win, Win!) Of course, our plans for the day were interrupted by vision testing and practice for our Christmas program, but we still managed to squeeze in a good amount of gingerbread fun.

In the morning, I explained that we would be talking about Gingerbread people all day today and we talked a bit about what gingerbread is, what it tastes like, who has had it before, who hasn't had it but thinks that their mom or sister has, etc... Then, I reminded them that we have been learning to retell stories in three parts: beginning, middle, and end. I told them that we were going to read a story called Gingerbread Baby and that they needed to pay close attention so that they would be able to draw me a picture of each part of the story.

After reading the book, they completed this free worksheet from Rowdy in Room 300.

(There is a free pack of worksheets to go along with this book at homeschoolcreations.com.)

Later we read The Gingerbread Kid Goes to School and Gingerbread Pirates. Afterwards we talked about what kind of gingerbread we would want to make and they drew their own gingerbread men and women using this free template from Simply Kinder.

Then we used this cute paper from the Creative Classroom to write a Missing poster for the Gingerbread men and women that they created.

For more great Gingerbread ideas and activities check out the 2014 Gingerbread Exchange post on Simply Kinder's blog!