Thanksgiving Already!?I

I cannot believe that it is already time for thanksgiving! Where has the year gone? Trust me, I'm not complaining. The faster the year flies by, the better. I do love Thanksgiving time though. Stuffing my face full of turkey and cranberries is what makes this holiday so great! I am sad to see that it is overlooked because of Christmas. Thanksgiving is still a week away, and I'm already hearing Christmas music in the stores. My neighbors even have their Christmas lights up!!

Needless to say, Thanksgiving is here and it's time to talk about the Pilgrim's and Indians. I have to say, my kiddos thoroughly enjoyed this unit we did. I can't blame them. We did a lot of fun things!! :) 

Math:

Turkey Bingo:

My students LOVE bingo. I try to incorporate it into several of my themes and they are VERY easy to make. For this bingo, I have pictures with turkeys and numbers on them. For the markers, I had them use popcorn :) Our room smelled very yummy! To make it easier, I have them fill up the whole sheet to win Bingo.

Patterns:
 During small groups I had my students work on shape patterns. I had them glue the shapes on sentence strips after they made the patterns. Depending on group difficulty, they made AB, ABBA and ABC.

  

We also made patterns with Indians and Pilgrams.

Graphing:

I had my students graph what they would rather eat on Thanksgiving day, turkey or ham. You can tell which one they liked better!

 Estimation:

We estimated how many students could fit in our pretend Mayflower :) We were able to fit 15!

  

Language and Literacy:

Turkey Chant:

My students ended up memorizing this chant and have actually been making up other places where the turkeys are. Each student got a turn using a pointer to follow along with the words.

Turkey's Week:

I read the book Cookies Week to the students and then we made our on book called Turkey's Week. The kiddos had fun coming up with "bad" things that the Turkey would do. I wrote the book in front of them, and illustrated it on my own. (Unfortunately, I don't have pictures now but will upload them soon)

Phonological Awareness:

Turkey Rhyme:

We have been working on rhyming words A LOT in my classroom. For this activity, we used a different color everyday. (ex. words that rhyme with cat, we colored red. Words that rhymed with pat, we colored green etc...) At the end of they week, the turkey was nice and colorful!

Art:

This is alot like the spider web that we made during spider week. I had the students draw an Indian symbol using glue and they sprinkled color sand on it. Make sure you use a box so that sand doesn't go everywhere! To have the different colors, the students only drew a little bit of the Indian symbol at a time. I had them make a border around their plate using crayons before using the glue and sand.

Indian Drums:
I cut out strips of orange paper and had the students draw Indian symbols on it. (I did this as an independent small group activity) Then we used coffee cans and glued the paper around it. We played these during music and movement and created patterns with beats. We also had an Indian rain dance and played our drums. The kiddos loved that!

 Indian Hats:

I had to paper bags filled with different words. Bag 1 had different types of animals and bag 2 had adjectives. The students had to draw a word from each bag to create their Indian name (Examples: White Tiger and Swift Fish) I wrote the names on a sentence strip and had the students draw Indian Symbols on their hats and added feathers! They wore them during the Indian Rain Dance too.

 Extras:

We made our very own butter! All you need is heavy whipping cream, a marble, a jar (We used a peanut butter jar) and shake for about 20 minutes!

Our very on Teepee!! We got 4 1X2 at Home Depot and tied them up at the top with rope. Next, we draped some old white sheets over them, paint some Indian Symbols and VOILA, you have a teepee!!

Thanksgiving Countdown:

Super easy to make and the students enjoyed counting down till Thanksgiving!

Yummy Snacks!
After learning about Squanto and how he helped the Pilgrams grow corn, we made our own tasty treat!
All you need is: Oreos, goldfish crackers and candy corn.
Put the Oreos in a plastic bag and have the students crush them and then pour them in a cup. Add the candy corn and sprinkle some goldfish on top and you have yourself a tasty treat!

On of my students parents made these and I thought I would share it with you. They are turkey's made out of pretzels, candycorn, Hershey kisses and an M&Ms! They were very delicious!

Well that's it! Hope you enjoyed my Thanksgiving Unit and got a couple of ideas for your classroom!

Spider Week!

That's right! I was brave enough to have a theme on spiders this week :) and BOY have we talked about spiders! I even had my students bring in spiders from home, YUCK!

MATH:

I had the students graph if they liked spiders or not. I used the "thumbs up" as they do like spiders and the "thumbs down" for they do not like spiders. MOST of the class liked spiders!!

We talked about the different characteristics of a spider and then I had the students graph pictures of a "Spider" or "Not a Spider"

I printed out pictures of spiders and put numbers 1-10 on each spider and had the students put the numbers in order. We also talked about 1st and last.

  

Each student got their own spider web and five spiders (I bought a huge pack of spider rings at the dollar store) I held up a number and the students had to put that many spiders on their web.

LITERACY:

We read the poem "Little Miss Muffet" The first day I had the students practice pointing as we all read along. On the second day, the students acted it out.

We read the book The Very Busy Spider (I'm a BIG Eric Carle fan) the first day and on the second day, I made a pocket chart book. This allowed the students to not only see the words but to follow along with a pointer while we read.

One of our small group activities was a spider puzzle! I did this by first calling out a letter. Then they had to point to the letter, find the matching letter puzzle piece, and then place it on their puzzle. When the puzzle was finished, it was a picture of a spider!

SCIENCE:

After reading Little Miss Muffet, we all wanted to know what curds and whey were so we did a little experiment: Mix 1/4 cup of milk and 2 tablespoons of vinegar and see what happens! YUCK! Don't drink.

Ever wonder how a spider doesn't get stuck to it's web!? It's because they have oily feet. I had two sheets of contact paper. The Students first touched the contact paper showing them how they stick to it. Next, I had them dip their fingers in cooking oil and then touch the contact paper again. THEY DIDN'T STICK! My students LOVED doing this :)

After talking about the characteristic of a spiderweb, we decided to make our own :)

ART:

We made spiders out of toilet paper roles, their hands and googly eyes

First, I had the student paint the toilet roles with black paint. Then I traced their hands on black construction paper. Once the paint dried, I hot glued on their hands (I cut off the thumbs so there would be eight legs) and the googly eyes.

Then my assistant and I made a web out of string and placed the spiders in the web!

The students made their own webs. They used glue to draw their webs, then placed their paper into a box lid.  (This helped keep the mess to a minimum) Then they sprinkled different colored sand on their web and shook the paper around making sure the sand completely covered the glue.(You could also use glitter)

 EXTRAS:

For a small group activity, I had the students draw webs in sand (I put it in small lids so that the students wouldn't get sand EVERYWHERE)

I had the students work on a spider project at home. They could choose from a list of activities such as: Bring in a REAL spider, draw a spider, take a picture of a spider, print off a picture of a spider, use art materials to create a spider..etc. 

These are a few of what my students brought in :)

 We had a wonderful week learning about spiders! I hope you got some great ideas that you can also do in your class!

Apples GALORE!!

Red, green, yellow, round, bumpy and yummy are just a few words that my students used this week to describe an apple. I don't think I have ever eaten so many of them in one week! If you haven't guessed by now, our theme this week was Apples. Here are just a few of the fun things we did this week:

We made a KWL chart. We started on Monday and did the first two columns and finished the last column on Friday. The one thing that I would recommend when doing a KWL chart is to give them examples. If not, they will not understand what to do and you will have a massive headache within seconds. Model, Model...MODEL!

 I had the students brainstorm a list of foods that we can make from apples. Unfortunately, I do not have the picture of the finished product, but they did come up with some pretty interesting things, one being "applebananas". For the most part, they came up with some good ideas like: applejuice, apple jelly, candy apples, applecake, apple muffins, applebutter, applesauce and caramel apples.

 I made this apple game out of a file folder. I cut five strips and labeled each one with a number (1-5) You could also do this with higher numbers. I used these during small groups. I called out a number and had the students point to that number. Then they opened the flap and put that many number of apples inside (See picture below) Then have them close the flap and repeat. I lamenated a envelope on the back to keep the apples in.

  
Another small group activity I had them do, was apple stamping. I cut the apples in half (through the middle) making sure I made a star. Then the students took the apple, dipped it in paint, and VOILA. I used yellow, red and green paint only.

We made applesauce!! Here's how in the crock pot:
1 bag of apples

1/2 cup water

cinnamon

sugar

Peel apples and cut. Put cut apples in the crock pot and add water. Let it cook on high for 3-4 hours. Mash apples until liking, add cinnamon and sugar and you are ready to eat!

Working together to cut the apple :)

She loved our homemade Applesauce

I hope I gave you a couple of good ideas! :)

Cows, Pigs, and Sheep... OH MY!!

Today was a day FULL of adventure for my sweet four and five year olds. We took a trip to Cagle's Dairy Farm. My students have been talking all week about going to the farm and seeing the cows, pigs and sheep! I could hardly keep the little wiggle worms still this morning for morning large group because they were so excited! Field trips are so much fun but very exhausting at the same time. My mind was going a million miles a minute making sure all my students were safe and with their assigned parent. All in all, the students, parents and myself had a wonderful time :)

The students really enjoyed the hayride!

They were a bit nervous about feeding these goats.

We got to feel what a cow feels when they get milked... OUCH!

We got to picked out our very own pumpkins :)

My Sweet Class (minus one)