Glue, Giggles and Grace: October 2011

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Pumpkin! Pumpkin!

A Kindergarten Pumpkin Patch

October always brings with it the fun of pumpkins! And we loved creating our own little pumpkin patch here in our classroom.

This unit provided us with so many opportunities to learn about plant life cycles. We loved the Jeanne Titherington story, Pumpkin Pumpkin, for its simple yet fun illustration of this cycle.

We used our pocket chart to retell the Pumpkin Story (plus we made a mini version of this story to practice our reading skills).

We also practiced our writing skills by making our own version of the Pumpkin Story. The munchkins did an amazing job remembering proper spelling of our sight words & proper punctuation. They also did a fantastic job using what they know about phonics to attempt writing unfamiliar words. It was wonderful to see how many munchkins used a " secret agent 'e' " when spelling the word "vine". Wow!

See the seed.

See the vine.

See the (fowre) flower.

See the (pumpken) pumpkin.

We also used a pocket chart poem called Pumpkins Everywhere (which came with a little emergent reader to focus on more fluency and sight word vocabulary).

After playing several games to match the sentence strips to the correct pictures and practice choral reading, the munchkins created a class book with the same title.

Everyone received a picture of a 3-letter C-V-C word. The munchkins were to write the sentence:

Pumpkins by the ______.

They filled in the blank by isolating the three sounds of the word in their picture. They did a great job hearing all the sounds and writing those simple words conventionally!

They did an equally great job segmenting the syllables of the word "pumpkin" in order to attempt that spelling! It's not such a big word when it's spelled as two little words!

The munchkins took what they learned to create this book page and made a great poster paper for our bulletin board using the same format. This time, however, after their terrific sentence was written, they cut it apart and glued it back together in the correct order & of course, illustrated it.

They looked wonderful...

and they made a great bulletin board!

Then the munchkins created their own pocket chart strips...cutting and ordering the story while matching the pictures to the text.

Our other fun pumpkin poem was probably everyone's favorite...

Five Little Pumpkins.

We had a blast with this one using the poem, an interactive book and (the most fun) our puppet mitten.

Then we created a mini book with little interactive pumpkins and a great little accordion book (from Oriental Trading).

We also made a take home booklet of the poem, complete with little movable mini pumpkins.

And who can resist making "Five Little Pumpkins" snack?

YUM!

All in all, we had a great time in the pumpkin patch!

Until next time...

Giggles,

Mrs. D.

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Happy Birthday Munchkin!

Happy Birthday to You!

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Mrs. Wishy Washy

In the Tub You Go!

The munchkins always love the crazy antics of Mrs. Wishy Washy and her mud-loving farm animals, plus this story is an excellent way to learn about story components. We spend so much time discussing and recreating the characters, setting and the beginning, middle & end of the story.

The most memorable experience in recreating characters and story sequence is most definitely dramatization of the story.

After making stick puppets of all the characters, the munchkins loved taking turns as different characters to retell the story!

"Oh, lovely mud" said the cow. And she jumped in it!

"Oh, lovely mud", said the pig. And he rolled in it!

"Oh, lovely mud" said the duck. And she paddled in it!

Along came Mrs. Wishy Washy.

"Just LOOK at you!" she screamed.

Another fun tool for retelling and story sequencing was our mini storyboard. The munchkins made a setting board with Mrs. Wishy-Washy, her tub and the mud puddle. Then they made little stick puppets that could "jump" in the mud and then be "washed" in the tub.

Adding a sentence strip at the top also gave the munchkins the opportunity to practice some of their newly emerging writing skills. They are doing a great job readily using sight words correctly in their writing, plus, they are fantastic at using conventions (such as upper case letters and punctuation) as well!

We reinforced those same writing skills in another fun activity...

We made a Mrs. Wishy Washy cartoon character, complete with speech bubble. She was quite a challenge to color, cut and glue together. It almost made the sentence seem like the easy part!

"In the tub you go!"

But Mrs. Wishy Washy's animals were not the only things that ended up in that tub! We made several class books that had all sorts of things getting
wishy-washy washed!

We started with the cow, the pig and the duck, focusing on recognizing each of those words in the text so that we could illustrate the picture correctly.

But then we added something new...

ourselves!

Don't you just love it?!

After that, we decided to work on some rhyming words. We studied and created a list of "at" family words: cat, bat, fat, sat, rat, hat, mat, pat.

We used a pre-printed booklet that had several of these items "in the tub". The munchkins had to decode each word to know what to draw.

A cat is in the tub.

A bat is in the tub.

A hat is in the tub.

A rat is in the tub.

Then came probably the most fun of all! We put ourselves in the tub!

Wishy-washy! Wishy-washy!

All the munchkins had their pictures taken "scrubbing". The pictures were cut out and pasted in the "tub". Everyone loves reading this one at the reading center!

After all the talk of mud, we decided to see how many of the munchkins liked mud. We chose to create a classroom graph that would give us the answer.

Almost all the munchkins said that they would jump in the mud if they had the chance!

So, we decided to write in our journals about how much we like the mud. What a great way to practice some more writing...especially counting sounds and writing an unknown: m-u-d.