The Animal's Advent

My son let me borrow his Playmobil Animal Advent Calendar (from a couple of years ago) to use in conjunction with the story "The Animal's Advent". The story is all about farm/woodland animals in the winter. Most of which are native to our state.  This is the first year I've done this activity so I'll see how it goes! 

Thanksgiving/Native Americans/Pilgrims PART 2

Real or Nonsense word work. Good  NWF practice when we DIBEL.

1 of 2 'shopping' cut/glue activities I do. My neighbor teachers save their Thanksgiving and Christmas ads for me from the Sunday paper.

Foam beads from Oriental Trading. We did sorting and patterning with them. I also did some fine motor work with stringing on a pipe cleaner and we made a simple yarn necklace.

Pick a turkey, write the popcorn word, spell with a friend, use in a sentence, read at home.

Ending Sound work.

Roll the dice, write the number, draw the feather. I saw a similar idea on Mrs. Lee's blog.

This is not my idea. It come from Growing Kinders inspiration. I made something similar for Christmas.

After reading "Pilgrim Children Had Many Chores" and "Sarah Morton " and "Samuel Eaton" over a period of a few days we came up with a list of chores and things we do vs. Pilgrims. I typed them up and we did a whole group lesson with this.

Beginning and ending sound cornucopia labeling. This took much work and effort!!

Thanksgiving goodies graph. Whole group math lesson.

Something I did on the fly. We were at Cracker Barrel for the thousandth time and I saw these cute Dover sticker books for 1.50. I bought a few, put some of the stickers on then laminated some of the stickers and added velcro for a quick storytelling activity. The kids loved this. I bought a couple others as well.

Roll the dice, write the number. Good number writing  and numeral recognition practice.

Sound out the word, write the word, draw the picture.

Some of the pictures I used ( I wanted 3 letter words for this one) bug, mom (kangaroo w/ joey in pouch), web, pig, pet (hamster sticker in a fish tank).

Match the deer with the Native American by color, sound out the word, write the missing vowel. We do Zoo Phonics so I titled this center "Dee Dee Deer's Super Sounds".

The kids loved this. I'm going to do something similar with Santa's sleigh and Christmas ads. When I checked over some of them after centers a couple of kids cut out wine bottles and Tampax! Oops.

Thankful ~ Blog Style

1.  What are you thankful for in your classroom? Probably the size of my classroom. Our school did major renovations about 5 years ago and the Kindergarten wing was a brand new add on and our rooms are close to 1200 square feet. I also have a great class this year. Last year I had several intensive needs and it just wore me out. 
2. What person are you most thankful for? My husband. He is always supportive of whatever I do. I recently spent a year working on Master Teacher credential through my district and it was a.lot.of.work. I am constantly bringing home stuff from school to work on at home and running to school to pick up something or laminate (I live 1.3 miles from my school). I also have a great group of teaches I work with and sometimes I'll call him while he is on his way home and say, "hon, the teachers are getting together tonight for dinner so when you get home I'm going to leave". 
3. What 3 blogs are you most thankful for? Mrs. Lee She provides so much inspiration and ideas that are wonderful. Growing Kinders is another blog I frequent. Also Kindergarten Hoppenings she is constantly posting freebies! However I frequent a lot of blogs and they all give me great ideas and inspiration!!
4. What guilty pleasure are you most thankful for? Internet, tv, shopping, reading
5. What are you most thankful for? My health and the health and happiness of my family. I am also thankful for my job, my car and my friends. I am thankful that I have the freedom to be creative in my classroom and have a supportive principal.

My Favorite Thanksgiving Read Aloud

Of course I love sooo many books for this time of year but this one is my favorite.

Thanksgiving/Native Americans/Pilgrims PART 1

Indian Corn Colors at Centers

Stamp, trace, color

I gave the kids a dice with six letters written on it (z, x, g, u, q, s). I had them roll and write to  get the turkey to the corn.

Picking turkey number cards from the corn then bingo dotting the number they picked.

Egg carton shake and write activity.

I had a mom volunteer decorate the egg cartons, aren't they cute!

Indian corn painting with q tips then we wrote the next day.

"Bunches of Spelling" with haystack medial vowels. The kids just had to supply the beginning and ending sound.

Working with the words "I, See, The" and seasonal vocabulary words. I love the colorful scrapbooking paper I used to mount the pictures on.

Kids rolled a numeral dice then drew the correct number of dots (corn kernels) to feed the turkey.

Writing number words to match the numeral.