Thursday, March 29, 2012

The Great State of Texas!

Since we live in Texas, we like to teach a long unit about our state, some time around Texas Independence Day, which is March 2. Throughout this unit, we have learned many facts about Texas, as well as studied many tall tales that take place in Texas. The kids really enjoy reading tall tales, like Pecos Bill, because some really crazy things happen in the story that they think are very silly. They have fun re-telling these exaggerated moments. 

To conclude our Texas study, we have written stories about Texas today.

The first thing that I did when I introduced that we were going to write a story was draw out the story elements. 
The students came up with the characters, the problem and the solution of the story. Of course, we discussed that the setting would be Texas. :)
After this, we drew out a story map, using the 4-square model that I discussed in this earlier blog post.
 The students came up with each sentence. We practice reading our story, to make sure that it had a problem and a solution. 

After all this, I sent the students back to their seats. We have spoken many times in my class about how to make a "good illustration" for their writing, so we discussed this again before they started. The kids know that I like their drawings to be very colorful and fill up the whole page. 

They were able to copy the story that we created together, or... if they were really "thinking", they could come up with their own story, as long as it had characters, a problem and a solution. 





Here are some final "stories" about Texas that the students wrote!





What a great way to end our Texas unit!

Friday, March 23, 2012

Spring Has Sprung... And A Personal Note

Spring has sprung in our classroom (literally)! Every once in a while I like to turn my "kitchen" center into something new. I usually gear it towards some sort of theme that we are learning about or a holiday that is coming up. This center is really important, because it is not only play time, but also builds social development, and vocabulary about the world and the community. 

Previously, this year, I have turned the kitchen center into Santa's Workshop at Christmas and Cupid's Post Office at Valentine's Day.

Now our center has turned into a garden! Students can sort flowers and seeds here. They can also act out planting a garden, watering it and raking dirt. Some students in my class have also taken it upon themselves to play "flower shop". 




On a more personal note, my son turned 1 recently! I went a little crazy with his party which was "sock-monkey" themed. Here are the pics from his birthday:






Tuesday, March 6, 2012

2 Presidents That Made a Difference... In Our Classroom!

We just got finished with a 2 week long unit on presidents in my class. It's amazing how interested these kids get over people who lived hundreds of years ago. I've been doing foldables throughout the year, but decided to do one on a bigger scale for this unit. For more on foldables, click here.

We learned about Abraham Lincoln for the first week and George Washington the second week. We did many compare and contrast activities, such as a Venn diagram to gain more understanding about each president. We made "pretend" money with the presidents faces on them. We even practiced drawing their faces, in a teacher-led, step-by-step, directed art project. We used these pictures for the outside covers on our foldable "books". 

Here is an example of what one looked like:
In the inside of each cover, I had students draw or label a fact about each president.

The middle section took us the longest to accomplish. I really worked hard on reminding them of the High Five Chart and the editing process. Yes, even kinders can edit their work! In fact, it really helped them to gain some ownership of the writing that they were doing. For more on the High Five process that I created, read my earlier post here.

I was so proud of how they came out. They wrote a lot about each president and really developed an interest in them with the more that each of them wrote!
Here are a few examples of a few writing pieces that we placed in the middle section of our foldable:

Although there are still misspellings after the editing process was complete, I knew that each student had given me their best work. Can you believe that kinder kids are capable of writing so many coherent sentences?! We had a great time with this unit and I will continue to do it in years to come.