Bears Part 3: Bear Snores On and Teddy Bear Day!

The last and final week we spent time reading and retelling the story Bear Snores On by Karma Wilson.  I love all the Karma Wilson bear books!

We spent time on characters, setting, problem, solution, and events. Then we pulled out the paper mache caves we made! (see bear part 2 to find out more) We used paper cut out characters that I found free here.  As soon as they had all the pieces, you could them retelling the story all by themselves!  Once everyone was ready, I read the story as they acted it out with their characters and cave. They loved this!

To end our long and fun bear unit, we had Teddy Bear day! This was definitely a favorite!!  Everyone got to bring a teddy bear to school. (I had extras on hand)  Our teddy bears spent the whole day with us!

We wrote what we liked to do with our teddy bears.

We measured our teddy bears. 

And we took our teddy bears for a ride on the parachute.

Plus, our room looked super cute with teddy bears sitting at the tables.



Thanks for reading all about our bear fun!! I hope you can use some of these ideas!  

Bear Unit Part 2- Non- Fiction Bear Research

Week two of our bear unit was all about non-fiction text. We focused on brown bears , but also read about black bears. We learned about how to to tell the two apart. These books were  great resources:

 


After learning lots of good facts about bears, we made a Bears can, bears are, and bear have chart. The can, have, are method is my favorite way to share what we have learned in kindergarten! We followed it with this fun craft and writing which is available here in our TPT store!

If I do a unit in my classroom, I like it to show up everywhere! Even centers, so I created this Word Work center for bear themed CVC games! You can find the bear CVC games here!

Finally, we started working on our paper mache caves! Every student got to make there own. We will use the caves for retelling in week 3.  Here is the cave making process. It was messy, but so fun!

We started with a balloon. We dipped strips of newspaper that I pre-cut into flour, water, and glue mixture. They placed the strips over the balloon. They didn't have to worry about it looking like a cave yet, I will cut it later. 

The drink holders were the perfect holders for the balloons while we worked. We left them to dry overnight.

When they were dry, we painted them.  We kept the balloon there so they would be sturdier while we painted. 

After everything was dry, we popped the balloon and I cut them to look like caves.

Up next, the final week of our bear unit, Bear Snores on, and Teddy Bear day!
Thanks for stopping by!

Bears Part 1- We're Going on A Bear Hunt & Teddy Bear Counters

We're Going on a Bear Hunt is such a fun book for kids and the perfect way to start our 3 week long bear unit!  All week we read, retold, wrote about, and  played with this story.

During the week, our sensory box was filled with materials to retell the story.  We had cotton for snow, blue rocks for the river, blocks to build the house, brown play-doh for the mud, a paper mache cave, a little patch of fake grass, and plastic trees for the forest.  The kids were very creative and had lots of fun retelling the story. 

I bought this great packet on TPT from Kristen Smith here.  The kids really like the real pictures, and we were working on sequencing and ordinal numbers. The packet also included some great writing prompts and really good material for positional words.

We ended the week with our own Bear Hunt!! First we made our binoculars. I just stapled 2 toilet paper rolls together and let them paint them. 

I set up the bear hunt using mostly paper.   I wish I had taken better pictures of this.  In the background of the picture above you can see the river and the mud. Below is the forest, snowstorm, and cave.

It seems simple, but the kids loved every second of it. We repeated the book as we went through it. We really got into it, shivering in the snowstorm and getting our feet stuck in the mud. I had as much fun as the kids!

During this week, we used teddy bear counters for all of our math.  We went on a "Bear Hunt" for the counters that were spread all over the room. Then we counted them by 5's and 10's. 

We used the Teddy Bear Counters to work on addition.  This is available in my Teddy Bear Counters Pack here.  This includes addition and sorting.

 

We had a fun week. Up next, Part 2 of our Bear Unit- Non-fiction research about bears and paper mache caves. 

Thanks!

Jill

The Mitten (plus a FREEBIE)

The Mitten Retelling Center

Last week, we did a lot of learning and had fun with The Mitten Books!  We focused on two versions:
  

On Monday and Tuesday, we read the Jan Brett version. We did a retell of the story on our big mitten.

On Wednesday, we read Alvin Tresselt's version of The Mitten. The kids were so surprised when I pulled out another version!  We also did a retelling of this story. 

On Thursday, of course we had to compare the two versions!  

We played Mitten themed math games! These can be found in my January Kindergarten Math games pack here!

One of our literacy centers is called Book Play. Here we do a combination of sensory materials and book retelling. Here is our Jan Brett retelling bin.  I had to search Micheal's, Walmart, and Amazon to find all the animals. I used white felt to sew a mitten together and rice for the snow. 

We also designed our own mittens and wrote all about them.  You can get this writing page in my FREEBIE Mitten pack here!

It was a wonderful, mitten filled week in Kindergarten!  

Morning Meeting in Kindergarten

Last week I shared my Kindergarten schedule. Today I wanted to share our morning routine. It is probably our most productive 30 minutes of the day.  We cover a lot of different skills and it grows and changes throughout the year.

Here is an overview
1. Morning Message
2. Alphabet chart/ blends and digraphs chart
3. Sight words, sight word exercises
4. Song
5. Calendar Math


1. Morning Message:  Here is peek at my morning message right now, it will change over time. Here is one weeks morning message ready to go on Monday. We keep the same message for the week. I use different colors for each sentence right now.

                       
Monday: The kids come up and fill in the missing letters in the sight words.  We also make the sounds in words to find missing sounds.  For example, we made all the sounds in the word 'him' to decide that short i was missing.

Tuesday: Punctuation and capitalization. Here we talk about the different types of punctuation and add them to the message. Then we circle the first letter of each sentence and talk our capitalization.

Wednesday:  I always end with a question and on Wednesday, we graph the answer to the question in a variety of ways.

Thursday: This day we may do a variety of things, including:
         -counting the words or sentences
          -picking words and counting their syllables
          -picking words and finding words that rhyme
          -finding all the words that start with a certain letter

Our Friday schedule varies a lot and morning message isn't always a part of it.

2. Charts:  In the beginning we only identify letters on the chart, then add sounds, after Christmas we add blends and digraphs.

3. Sight words: By now, it's time to get up and move. We exercise to our sight words.  We jump, kick, hop, march, etc... to each letter.  Occasionally we play a sight word game. We read sight word poems from this chart, they love these poems:




4. Song- This is just for fun, any song will do!

5. Calendar Math: Date, weather, seasons, days of the week, counting the days on 10's frames, review the rules, counting in a variety of ways, patterns, and other skills as needed!

Pattern practice goes across the bottom.

The teal chevron calendar pieces can be found in our TPT store  here and here.

Thanks for stopping by! I would love to hear about your favorite morning routines!

Jill