Letter A

This week our theme letter is A. We been learning about apples and continued that theme this week. But we also did some other things.
We brainstormed all the things we could think of that start with Aa.

We sorted Aa words from the Mm words we learned last week.

We also learned about alligators this week since our zoo phonics character for Aa is Ally Alligator.
We learned this cute poem "alligator pie" which I saw from Jessica over at Room 36 and then we made alligator pie. The kids loved this yummy treeat! Get my Alligator Pie pages HERE and HERE.

We read about alligators and then recalled what we learned and  made a can/have/are chart. The kids followed along and  filled theirs out on the carpet as I filled in our big chart.I had to laugh when one of my kids answered that alligators are "blood pressure medicine" LOL. He meant cold-blooded.

Here's our completed charts:

You can get a free copy of the kids chart HERE.
We compared and contrasted two alligator books. "There's an alligator under my bed" and "alligators." One is a fiction book, the other non fiction. We added them to our fiction/non fiction chart. The kids are getting good at telling the difference on their own and identifying the books correctly.

Here are some of our show and tells from this week:

Some books we loved this week:


There is also a great youtube video to go with this book HERE.

My first blog award!

I was floored today when I opened my email and saw that Heather at Kindergarten Days listed me as one of her top ten blogs!! Heather is a kindergarten teacher here in Florida too. I have loved discovering so many kindergarten blogs since this summer and I know my teaching is better this year because of it. There so many fantastic ideas and it was hard to narrow down my top ten, but here they are:


Megan and Kim at KinderGals


Mrs. Wills


Mrs. Coe


Mrs. Jump


Katie at Little Warriors


Miss Kindergarten


Fran at Kindergarten Crayons


Pam at Can Do Kinders


Mrs. Lee


Mrs. Larremore

But there are so many more!!! It was so hard to choose!

1) Pass on the award to the Top 10 blogs that have inspired your teaching.
2) Contact them, and let them know of their award.
3) Copy & paste the award onto your own blog, giving a shout out to the person who nominated you.

Letter M

This week our theme letter is M! I say theme because we don't actually do a letter a week, we do them all. But we make one or two letters our theme and focus on them a little deeper. This week was our first letter theme week and we tackled Mm.

We sorted words that start with Mm.

We made our own Mm book after reading it on a pocket chart.

 

We brainstormed all the words we could think of that start with M.

We read Little Mouse and the Big Cupcake and I brought out the mouse hat! The kids who were working quietly like little mice got a turn to wear the mouse hat!

We read "If You Give a Moose a Muffin" and if we'd had more time I might have made muffins with them. 

We sorted 

Counted

and graphed M&Ms!

and ate them too of course! 

Apples! Part 1

This week, in preparation for Johnny Appleseed's Birthday we've been learning all about apples. We started out by reading about the life cycle of an apple and made our own cycle charts.

Then we talked about Johnny and read some books about his life. We made a character map all together and then the kids picked a few favorite characteristics and made their own.

We used apples to reinforce some of our other skills as well, like color words, and sorting.

We talked about the parts of an apple, and made our own diagram. This was a great listen-and-follow-the-directions activity. There were no outlines on their papers... they had to watch me to see how to cut each piece.

We learned apple songs and poems.

We made sun catcher apples to spruce up our windows. To make these I gave the kids a paper with an apple outline and a piece of parchment paper to put over it. They picked what color they wanted their apple to be and sat at the table that had that color tissue paper in the middle of it. They glued the tissue paper onto the parchment paper to fill the apple and when it was dry we cut them out.

We used our five senses to explore a red apple.

Here are some books we loved this week:

 

 

We listened to the author read this one on DiscoveryEducation

Next week we are going to continue our apple unit, celebrate Johnny's birthday with an apple tasting, and bake an apple pie! We're also going to throw scarecrows into the mix - I just love fall!