Butter, Pilgrims and Turkey Time Freebies!!

    Butter! Butter!! Butter!!!  Yes, that's right...butter!  We've been doing some fun things in Kindergarten the last couple of weeks and butter was one of those things!  We've been talking about the Pilgrims and charting present and past (I forgot a pic of our chart :(  .  However, making butter is a great science project to do at this time of the year.  You need 3 things: 1. a small container of heaving whipping cream  2.  a mason jar  3.  excited students.   We read The First Thanksgiving and charted past and present.  It always amazes little ones that they just didn't go to the store.  So, to illustrate this we make homemade butter in our room.  I do explain that this is not exactly how the Pilgrims did it but it's a good illustration.  Pour your heavy whipping cream into the mason jar.  Let students note how the cream is a thick liquid.  Seal the jar and let each student shake the jar 20 times..at the end of this your cream will be butter and a soft solid.  I salt it and bring in homemade bread for a snack...let me tell you there was not one crumb left!!  Oh...Grab some great freebies at the bottom of the page!!

They were shaking their little hearts out!!!

Sorry no pics of our snack! We were to busy eating!!!

We made these cute Pilgrims and wrote what we were thankful for!!  Give credit where credit is due I got this great Pilgrim pattern from First Grade Parade!!!

 I made it large so you could see how great our writing is getting!!


Now onto some Freebies!!!  I made a rhyming match game with a recording sheet and a math measuring sheet for Thanksgiving!!  Grab it below and enjoy it for your short work week next week!!!
Turkey Time Rhyming Cards
Turkey Time Recording Sheet
Thanksgiving Friends Measuring Sheet

Don't Be A Turkey,,and a freebie!!

My favorite time of the year!!!  Our Kindergarten classes did a Tom the Turkey Project for Thanksgiving and it turned out sooo cute!!  We focused on the book: Turk and Runt- two turkeys who don't want to be Thanksgiving Dinner!  We've also been focusing on the Pilgrims and Indians.  This has been a great time to work on our writing skills and they are really improving.  At the bottom I've posted a Thanksgiving Bingo Freebie!!  I love Bingo for all things and so do my kids!!




My name is Tom Turkey and I'm as scared as I can be!! I'm wearing a disguise so you won't catch me!!

  Some close ups of the turkeys...they were so good!!!

Our Mayflower Voyage Chart and Writing Project!!  I  tweaked this idea from Deanna Jump!!

 We wrote:  The pilgrims are on the ship.

 A shot of my K kids on our Pumpkin Patch Field Trip!!

Hope your having a great November!!  Click on the link below for a free Thanksgiving Bingo Card.  I left it blank so you could add your words or numbers!!! If you laminate it first you can use it over and over:
Thanksgiving Bingo!!!

Pumpkin, Pumpkin what do you see??

     Pumpkin, pumpkin what do you see??  How about an exhausted teacher!!  Wow!! It's been a busy week.. Why is it so hard to get back into the swing of things after a break??  Needless to say my little kids were in full swing this week and very excited about our unit on Pumpkins.
     We started off the week with a mystery bag (which had a pumpkin in it).  I gave clues and they had to guess...deductive reasoning at its best!!  I had it in my old lunch tote..one student guessed meatloaf..it was so funny!!  We read some great books: Sixteen Runaway Pumpkins, I Like Pumpkins, The Smallest Pumpkin, and Halloween Pie.   We really focused on writing words and sentences this week.  My students are getting much better at this..practice makes perfect!!

We painted and glittered paper plates and wrote. . I  like pumpkins.

We sequenced the life cycle of  a pumpkin!!  They just love  showing off their work!!

Hard at it!!

Our finished products!!

She did so great on her sentence writing.  We really focused on handwriting and making sentences!!

                        

Science Time!!  Our would it sink or float experiment!!

Scooping out the guts!!!

Comparing Pumpkins..inside and out!!!

Our Art Project...painting baby pumpkins!!  Thanks Donna and Missy...and Mr. Shehane for taking pics and sharing the pumpkins!!!

By the end of the week I had some tired little kids!!!

Terrific Ten Frames

     Ten Frames are terrific!!!  I do love them but my little ones are having a bit of a hard time with them! So, I made some ten frames to help my kids quickly identify the sets.  Pretty much just like flash cards!!  The goal is to be able to look at the set and quickly tell how many without counting!  We are going to keep working this week and next!!  They are going to model with ten frame mats the card I show.  Next,  they will create their own ten frame model!  Go ahead and grab these fall ten frame models and sheet to go with it. I hope they open- I had quite a bit of trouble..maybe Santa should bring me a new computer!! LOL!!

  I used the same clip art for all ten frames!!  Works well for Halloween or Thanksgiving!!

Pumpkins Ten Frames


Ten Frames With Pumpkin Cut and Paste

Freebies For You!!

     Hello, blogger friends!!  Last week was Fall Break for us and it was great!!  I really wanted to put some freebies up...but I was to busy enjoying my family time!  Sorry!!  However, back to the grind this week.  Here are a few monster items for you..just in time for Halloween.  I've never done a link and I'm pretty sure Google Docs hates me..so I hope this works!!

This is a monster patterns page...for the life of me I can't get the picture of the doc to download!!  Oh well baby steps.  The next two are a for monsters also..a sight word game piece and graphing sheet to go with it..ENJOY!!

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U6m_sI-AXWRGbLqGgYG2rRLmY6DXz8eu6tpL0YiDibU/edit?hl=en_US


Sight Word Game Piece for Monsters!


Sight Word Graphing For Monsters


Have A Great Week!!  I'll be posting some pumpkin items and freebies at the end of the week.  Maybe by then I will have the picture sorted out!

Name:___________________________________________

Make An ABC Monster Pattern

 

 

 

 

 

Bats, Monsters, and Falloween Fun, Oh, My!!!

     Well, if you're still following this little old blog...thanks!!!  I'm so sorry!!  Between my husband getting home from an overseas trip, remolding our hardwood floors, parent-teacher conferences and getting sick...I've been a busy little teacher!!!  I don't have great pics from the last 2 weeks but you will have some fun bat and monster freebies next week!! Yeah!!!
     Last week we studied bats!! We read Stellaluna, Bat Jamboree, Bats Inside and Out, and Amazing Bat Facts.  We compared bats and birds, did a great Reading Rainbow Series over Bats, actually labeled the parts of bats, and the kids brought in posters at the end of the week!! They all did a great job.
     This week we did monsters!!  If you haven't read Even Monsters Need Haircuts -  do it is so cute!! Also, some other great monster reads: Go Away Monster, I Need My Monster, and Monster Math.  We did some color word fun with monsters, patterns, sorted our M's (which I got from Julie Lee), made a book, measured, and graphed.  I wish I had better pics!!
     Today we are doing Falloween at our school!!  Pre-K- 1st is doing a whole day of  fall and Halloween ( get it Falloween) fun!! We are rotating  classes and lots of parents are coming in to help!!  Should be great!!
Onto pics from the last 2 weeks!
     Just a Special Shout Of Thanks to all parents who helped work the Falloween Program today!! It was a great day of fun and learning!!!

 Our Venn Diagram comparing bats and birds.

Labeling our Bats!!!

I painted each had of my students and made bat hand prints!!  They turned out cute!!  The  kids loved it!!

Our Bat Projects!!  Each student had to do 1/2 sheet of construction paper and write Bats and cut and paste.  They had to tell about their projects for show and tell!!

This is the cutest book!  We did it today for our Falloween projects and for our Monster Unit this week.

Matching monsters to the correct sentence!!

ABC patterns.  I downloaded Julie Lee's Monster for my manipulative but I made this sheet myself. 

Dice Roll graph for sight words: am, see, like, you.

Number dot roll from Julie Lee.  We also did this later in the week with #'s 11-16!!

Sight word books we made!!

I made these for my Falloween Activities today!!  We painted them.. such fun!! Out of 160 kids only 1 spilled the water!!  I was impressed!!

Fall Fun With Patterns and Color Words

  This week has been a full Fall theme with books, patterns, and color words.  I'm so proud of my kids ( almost everyone can now read the color words) !!  It's so exciting.  We read some great fall and color word books this week: Apple Harvest Countdown, Seasons, When Autumn Comes, Warthog Colors, and White Rabbit's Color Book.   We have also been wearing out Dr. Jean's Color Word Song and Jack Hartman's Season Song.  I did find a new site (Have fun Teaching) and my kids really loved the season song off of that site..thanks Ms. Julie for the tip!!!  They also have letter songs and lots of other great stuff..it does sound a bit disco sometimes but my kids just love music in general!!
     I was really hoping to upload some free stuff for you guys but once again Google Docs has defeated me!!!  Between school and my own little monkeys...I just can't find the time to master it!!  If anyone wants to give me a free lesson...I'd love one!! LOL!!  Maybe on fall break I'll get it figured out!!  Onto great pics from this week:)

Making our leaf patterns.  After gluing the students labeled them ABAB!!!

 Another project we did this week was finger painting!!!  I traced each student's hand and arm (up to their elbow) and they colored it brown for the tree.  Then they finger painted the leaves with red, orange, and yellow. Such fun.  We also did leaf rubbings..but I forgot to take pics!!

Hard at work!!

 Finished projects!!

 We wrote our color words this week.  Then each student could read the sentence. They were so proud!! Each reads.. "I see a ________ leaf ( they colored the pic of the leaf the same as the color word).

Our Harvest of Good Work!!

 Our Rainbow Hair for Color Words!!  They learned the poem.  Circled the color words in the poem and then on their page wrote four color words and decorated the boy/girl with the correct color hair!!