Monsters, No David, and Frankenstein!

Goodness, I am not really sure how monsters, David, and Frankenstein go together, but here I go!

We read "Go Away, Big Green Monster!" by Ed Emberley. Of course, my students absolutely LOVED the story! Some of them had heard it in preschool, but they still love how the monster is created by the pages in the book and then how he disappears. We made the monster reappear by starting at the back of the book and that was fun, too! I put the book and CD in the listening center and in a literacy tub, they had the opportunity to create a monster of their choice. They could choose the shape of their monster's face, its color, and the decorations on their monsters face. They had to write a color word at the bottom of their paper.

Here are a few examples of our monsters:




These next pictures are from an idea I got from Kim Jordano's blog. You can find her HERE.
These are our "F is for Frankenstein" literacy tub.
 And finally, every couple of weeks, I do a Peaceable Kids lesson with my kinders. I feel that this is THE most important thing that I teach! Learning to get along is SOOOOO important - a lesson that is often forgotten as our students grow older. This week we discussed rules and respect. I based the lesson on David Shannon's book "No David!". Despite the fact that David misbehaves in this book, the story really drives home the lesson that rules are for following AND that even when we make mistakes, we are forgiven by those who love and care about us. The story gave me the opportunity to talk to my kinders about why we have a behavior chart and why I move them from Green to Yellow or Red. It is not because I do NOT care, but because I DO care about them. I told them if they were allowed to make wrong choices like David made in the book, then they would not know that it was inappropriate to interrupt or break things. They would grow up thinking that it was okay to misbehave. That is NOT what anyone wants to happen. I could see their little brains working and that they were REALLY trying to understand this BIG concept.

After our discussion, we then followed step by step directions to make David. Here are some examples of their creations:


 Whew! We have been busy! If you would like the step by step directions for creating David, click HERE.

Peace and blessings,

Squirrel Fun


This is going to be a very quick post because it is very late and I need to get some sleep before meeting my kinders in the morning! I thought I would share a few of the squirrel pictures that my kids did last week. I actually put this in a literacy tub with step by step directions for how to create the squirrel from paper. They then had to write a word or a sentence about their squirrel. Most just wrote the word "squirrel", but that was okay. As the year progresses, their writing will gain momentum! And as we all know, picture drawing comes before writing!

Here are a few of their pictures:
You can find my squirrel pack Here. It is FREE!
For more Fall Fun, I am linking up with Shuna at Pocketful of Kinders. You can find her linky party by clicking on this cute picture!
And Brian at Hopkins' Hoppin' Happenings is also having a fall linky party which you can find by clicking on the beautiful fall Picture.


The cute border art is from Melanie at www.frompond.blogspot.com
Peace and blessings,

Nocturnal Animal Posters

For the past two weeks, we have been discussing diurnal and nocturnal animals. This is one of my favorite science units because there are so many fun things to do! Since we made large painted murals for our apple tree seasons unit, I decided that for this unit, the kids would create individual murals. This was their Nocturnal Animal assessment!

The children divided their paper into two parts - day and night. They labeled the day side DIURNAL and the night side NOCTURNAL.  I asked them to make a tree on both sides. We discussed how a tree would look the same in the day as in the night. I introduced the word symmetrical and told them to make both trees look the same. Their assignment was to create 2 diurnal and 2 nocturnal animals from paper. We have been talking A LOT about both kinds of animals AND there were pictures of these animals hanging in the room, so they had plenty of references to use. They also could use their Nocturnal Animal book as a reference as well. It was a bit chaotic when they were creating their animals because this was a pretty open ended assignment, so there was much walking around the room getting paper and looking for animal pictures! They turned out great, though, and I was happy that they had learned the differences between animals of the day and animals of the night!

Here are some examples of pages from my Nocturnal Animal book. You can find it HERE.
Peace and blessings,

Our Cute Halloween Hall!

I thought I would post a few pictures of our cute Halloween hall. We are still creating fun things and I will share them as they are finished, but I just had to share these cute projects!



We have our students do a Family project each month. This is not our original idea. We found the idea on a wonderful teacher blog a number of years ago. The teacher's name is Mrs. Shehan and even though she is no longer teaching kindergarten, her website continues to be active. Here is her link if you want to look around. She does not update it anymore, but her links are still active. The October Family project is to decorate a paper pumpkin. After decorating the pumpkin, the family is asked to write a few sentences about their experience. Aren't they just incredibly cute?

We read the story of "Miss Spider" and then my students created a Miss Spider and put a cute color pattern on her legs. This took a LONG time to do, but they turned out really cute.


The flying bats were made from paper towel rolls and Styrofoam balls. If you would like to know how to make the bats, you can find the link here.

The really cute border around the pictures is from Ann Marie Smith from Innovative Connections and you can find her link to the borders here.

Peace and blessings!

Dad's Day in October? and Halloween Tens Frames

   Oh my goodness, it has been SOOO long since I have written a post! Let's see......... I woke up at 4:00 a.m. on Tuesday morning with a severe case of stomach flu - yuck! Of course, I was not at all prepared for a sick day! I had taken home my sub folder to update it a few weeks ago and of course, it remained at the bottom of my "to do" list and when I needed it, it wasn't there! But my students and my sub got through the day with limited plans and all ended well! But that set me back for most of the week and it seemed that I was playing catch up all week! My Sub Tub has been moved to the top of my "To Do" list and when I get it completed, I am going to post the contents here!
   I thought I would share with you a Father's Day present that my students did this week. Father's Day, you ask? In October? Well, yes....... At our school, we celebrate Father's Day in October. The Dads attend Mass with their kids and then are invited to an All School reception in the gymnasium. It is a pretty low key celebration, but it IS nice to have a special day when our students can give their Dads a special gift.
   I took each child's picture holding my son's Wii guitar. If I were to do it over, I think I would change the background of the picture, but it worked for this year! The children decorated a craft stick picture frame with rocks using Tacky glue. I found the rocks in the floral department at Michaels.  The next day, I attached their picture to the back of the frame and added the words "Dad, You Rock!" Voila! Fun, easy, and memorable!


    I also thought I would share something cool that I found at the Dollar Tree. I found Halloween ice cube trays earlier in the Fall and used them for a color mixing activity. As I was thinking about what stations my students would be doing for math this week, I remembered the ice cube trays. They would make perfect ten frames! So, I put a handful of black Pom poms in a storage box along with dot stickers and pencils. I found these Halloween ten frames on Pinterest and printed and laminated them. HERE is the link to the frames. The kids were to pick a Halloween ten frame card and make their ice cube tray look like the Halloween card. They then were to record a few of their answers on a recording sheet using dotted stickers.  If you would like to try this out in your own classroom, click the picture for the recording sheet.
   
    I will be posting again soon! Until then, Peace and blessings!

Firefighters and Bulletin Boards

This week was one of those weeks that you just are glad that you got through it! We had no school on Monday because of our Columbus Day holiday. Then on Tuesday morning, we returned to school and were prepared to have a normal Tuesday when our principal noticed quite a bit of water on the playground in the back. Come to find out, we had a broken water main and had to dismiss school at 11:00 a.m.! Then on Wednesday, we had a special assembly to listen to one of our local heroes who was on the US Men's Olympic gold medal swim team. His message was wonderful by the way! On Thursday, we had a fire drill with the Fire Department present and  on Friday (today), we had an all school assembly to cheer our Cross Country team on to State! Whew! We got through the schedule changes, but it was a little hard on my kinders who crave structure! Next week (fingers crossed), shooooould be normal...... !!!

Our theme this week was Fire Safety. We spent a lot of time discussing how to be safe in a fire - a pretty typical unit for kindergarten. In the course of the week, my kinders made the cutest firefighters! The orange thing is the hose... it ended up looking like an elephant's trunk, but cute nonetheless! I love the firefighter lips on some of the firefighters!
I needed a quick fix on my door bulletin board and decided to keep the Apple theme that I started in August. I used the CUTEST clip art to make the leaves and then superimposed my student's faces on the leaves. This has to be the easiest door decoration that I have had ever done! The clip art is FREE from The 3 AM teacher found HERE AND being from Illinois, I just HAD to write "Happy Fall You ALL" I just couldn't bring myself to put "Happy Fall Y'All!" :)
Here is my October religion bulletin board. It's hard to see the candy corn cutouts that I used because I had to block out the kid's faces. Again, though, a SUPER, EASY bulletin board to create! I used candy corn clip art, but you could use cut-outs instead if you did not want to use your printer ink!
You can find the link to my Fire Safety packet HERE or click on the image.

Peace and blessings,