Valentine's, The Zoo, & Presidents Too!

Alright ya'll, I really think there ought to be a rule that Valentine's Day can only be on Fri, Sat, Sun..... A Party on a Tuesday is TOO MUCH!!!!
We made these cute heart bags out of bulletin board paper, paper doilies, and labels from Deanna's Unit.

The kids passed out their valentines a few at a time while their classmates sorted, counted, and graphed conversations hearts.

Then we sorted and graphed our cards.

Also from Deanna's Valentine Unit

I also put our mailbox activity into centers this week since they did so good with it last week. These sentence cards are from Deanna's Valentine Unit but I made the recording sheet to go with it. If you have her unit and would like the recording sheet to put the game into centers just shoot me an email at Rachelle.Ruark@gmail.com

By the time Wednesday rolled around I was DONE with Valentine's. We still had lots of work to do though! This week we studied George Washington in Social Studies.

this graphic organizer is from Deanna's America Unit.

By Friday we were ready to compare the two:

These are from Kim's Presidents Pack and Deanna's America pack, I used pieces from both.

Here are our President's Day books they wrote that I promised pictures of last week. I liked the All about book pages from Deanna's Penguin Unit so much I decided to use them for this too. To answer a question I received on a previous post about my kids writing.... we spent a LOT of time the first half of the year learning sight words and working on stretching out words. That has really helped them. I don't teach sentence structure that much, but we do talk and plan out what we are going to write before we write it (brainstorming) Click to see the pictures larger, their kindergarten spelling is precious.

We also started our Zoo Unit! The kids are loving it!

charting our prior knowledge

We've been doing a lot of sorting as we learn..... sorting by animal age (baby, young, adult), body covering, type of animals, how they move....

My kiddos surprised me (I love when they do that!) with how quickly they picked up adjectives. I told them it was a first grade skill so of course they were all about proving they could do it too. We'll have to hit nouns and verbs next!

We learned all about Monkeys and I swear some of them had a little too much fun acting like monkeys. All. Day. Long. (forgot to take pics! Next week I promise.....)

Here's a quick peak at our zoo centers we started (All from my zoo pack):

beginning/ending sounds

long a, silent e

rhyming words

middle sounds

write the room/syllables

Spin & Write Beginning Sounds

At The Zoo Pocket Chart Story (Available HERE)

real/nonsense words

number words 11-20

Ten frames 11-20

Number order 21-30

counting tallies

making tallies

Roll and Graph

Counting by 10s

Some Books we loved this week:

Valentine's, President's & A winner!

This week we started our Valentine's Day fun. The kids enjoyed reading the book in Deanna's unit and making up their own sentences:

They also really liked playing "Bee the Word" I put all the cards in a sentence together in a mailbox and called groups to come up and take out the cards.

Each kid in the group got a card and they worked together to get in the right order. A few groups needed hints (the period goes at the end... the capital goes at the front) but most of them did great!

I plan to put the mailboxes into a center next week along with a little recording sheet I made where they can write the sentences in order.

I also taught them how to make a heart this week and we did an interactive writing piece to go with it. I had planned on letting them keep their hearts but they really wanted me to hang them up, so we decorated around our writing with their hearts.

We read Froggy's First Kiss about halfway and then the kids made predictions on whether or not Froggy would kiss Frogilina. They graphed their classmates predictions and then we finished the story and wrote what really happened. During math they graphed their favorite character.

We also started learning about Abraham Lincoln this week (We'll do Washington next week). We of course had to start the week talking about Presidents and what they do.

We started writing President's Day books, I will post pics of those next week when they are done.

Dd was one of our letters this week so on Friday we sorted and graphed DOTS!

Here are our Centers from this week, most are in my Love Struck Packet.

sorting middle sounds

and recording them

Dollar Tree Heart boxes filled with CVC words worksheet from Cara Carroll I've added an in depth post about these boxes HERE. 

sounding out CVC Words

Digraph match up (From Deanna)

Valentine Listening Center

Valentine Pocket Chart Story

non standard measurement

Teen Number Words

numbers 1-12 match (I won this from Doodle Bugs Teaching!)

Probability (from Deanna)

Dice Roll and Color

Patterning Practice

Roll and Graph

Next week we are going to continue our Valentine's Fun, Have a Valentine's Party, Learn about George Washington, and Start our Zoo Unit (in preparation for our field trip to the zoo)! Here's a sneak peak at some of my Zoo Centers ready to go:

rhyming

counting by 10s

beginning and ending sounds

Spinners for beginning sounds and teen numbers

AND Today is my birthday!!! My husband and I went to lunch downtown and now we're off to see the Vow. But not before I announce my winner! The winner of my Birthday giveaway is.......

Have a great week everyone!!!!

Some Books We loved: