Working in a Winter Wonderland & Friday Freebies

Happy Friday everyone!  Wow, these last two weeks have gone by so fast!  I have been working most of the time, but I was able to get lots more done than usual due to my smaller class size.  Read on for ideas and fabulous Friday Freebies!


As January comes we are moving into Transportation, but I know many of my friends will be doing Winter and Winter Animals and so on.  (Yes, you read right... a whole MONTH on transportation.  One week for Holidays Around the World, but a whole month for Transportation.  I don't understand our curriculum!)  Here's some of the highlights of our winter weeks (with some New Year's stuff mixed in):

Our New Year's Resolutions (special learning wishes) and party hats.  :)

Art:

New Year's Fireworks

Perhaps it goes without saying, but we did lots of art projects these past few weeks!  I loved their New Year's fireworks.  First they used different colored crayons to draw fireworks on black paper.  Then they traced glue over the fireworks and sprinkled with glitter.  I am SO proud of how well they can handle glue now!  They've grown so much!  *sniff*

Puffy Paint Snowmen

What fun!  We made these snowmen after reading Snowballs by Lois Ehlert.  The kids had a blast using puffy paint and various fun objects, including yarn, buttons and puff balls.

Shape Snowmen

Yes, we made lots of snowmen this week!  We made them in our snow sensory table, with play-dough, with shapes... We were trapped inside quite a bit due to low temperatures, so we had to something.  :)  The kiddos cut out shapes I had traced onto different colors of construction paper, identified the shapes, and then assembled them together to make a snowman.  I have to admit they ended up looking like duck snowmen!

Math:

3-D Shape Sort

Many thanks to Nicole at Mrs. Ricca's Kindergarten!  She provided this free 3-D shape sort last January on her blog, which you can grab by clicking here.  She also includes Rectangular Prisms.

3-D Shape Memory

We adapted the shape sort cards shown above and played 3-D Shape Memory!  This was a fabulous game and really helped reinforce 3-D Shape recognition.

Literacy:

Poetry

My kiddos LOVED reading this cute poem I found from Jennifer at Simply Kinder.  They thought it was hilarious!  (Or maybe it was just my illustrations...)  They also illustrated a copy of the poem in their writing journals.  Some groups went on a hunt through the poem to find the letter S, others focused on identifying the rhyming words and generating more.

Handwriting

Speaking of the letter S, we spent some time this week talking about the letter S, what it sounds like, how to write it, so on and so forth.  We used letter racers from my Racing in a Winter Wonderland packet.  Grab a free letter S Snowman Racer Freebie by clicking on the picture below!  The freebie is in the preview for the packet.

Writer's Workshop

First of all, many thanks to DeeDee at Mrs.Wills Kindergarten for turning me onto ISSUU!  Check out her blog post here about it.  I can already tell I'm going to love using this to showcase student writing!

I just loved the books my kiddos wrote these last few weeks during writer's workshop.  No one's really taken up the invitation to write using rhyming words (but then my strongest writers are out of town).  Still, I love how everyone's stories had a clear beginning, middle and end!  Their illustrations were also absolutely AMAZING.  And I was super excited to see some random letters popping up.  In some cases, the letters even made phonological sense for the meaning they were trying to convey!

Here are some of my favorites below (will add more as soon as I get the hang of this ISSUU thing!):

Phonemic Awareness

You have to check out this awesome song from Harry Kindergarten!  "Snowball Fight" is a great song for reinforcing letter sounds, and it's fun to boot!  :)

Here's a look at some of the great books we read or had available in the Library and Listening Center these past few weeks:

And now for my last Friday Freebie!  I realized I forgot to post this cute song about hibernation/migration during Signs of Winter, so here it is now.  Enjoy!