Not Your Typical Friendship Fruit Salad

As a former Kindergarten teacher I have always enjoyed doing the Friendship Fruit Salad activity- you know the one where your students bring in different kinds of fruit and you talk about how the different fruits represent the different children in the classroom.  It's a great community building activity that shows that everyone is special and different but we can all make something amazing when you put us together.  Then, you bring in a very old, mushy banana.  You start to put it in the fruit salad and hopefully someone tells you not to because it's old, disgusting and will make it all taste really bad.  That's when you tell them that the rotten banana represents the times when students misbehave or are mean to each other.  You tell them that you don't want the rotten banana in the fruit salad, just like the students in the classroom don't want someone in the classroom who is always mean or misbehaving.  You decide as the teacher not to put the rotten banana in the fruit salad and you ask students to promise to try not to be rotten bananas in the classroom.

Well, as a 3rd grade teacher this activity is do-able, but kind of babyish.  BUT, I decided to put a 3rd grade spin on it.  I decided to make it into a close reading activity.  One of the first standards we focus on is RL3.1- the one about asking and answering questions and referring explicitly to the text for the answer.  I wrote a close reading story and some 5W questions.  I am going to teach my students a color-coding system at the beginning of the year when they are just beginning to refer explicitly to the text for their answers. They will highlight the answer to each of the 5W questions with a different color of crayon/colored pencil.  This gets them used to highlighting the text, and it provides them with practice finding the answers in the text.

I am also including a proficiency scale I made for RL3.1 skills for first quarter- we will add more rigor to the scale as we go throughout the school year- this is just the beginning skills for this standard.  Here are some pictures of the activity and grab the freebie at my TpT store Friendship Fruit Salad: A Close Reading Activity

Meet the Teacher Night

Our Meet the Teacher Night is July 31st and I am busy, busy, busy getting things ready for the parents and students.  In Kindergarten, Meet the Teacher can be kind of daunting because you never know what you will get- you never know if the students are going to be running rampant through your classroom pulling out legos, puzzles and anything else they can kind find or staying close to Mom and Dad.  I generally stay away from a Station approach in Kindergarten because there are so many Kindergarten parents that are so needy at Meet the Teacher.  It never seems to work the way I want it to.  But, since I will be teaching 3rd grade next year, I decided to go ahead and try a station approach.  I don't have it all set up yet, but here are my station cards.  I am going to have the students and parents go around to six different stations.

 In the folders, I have PTO information and some other forms like one for email addresses, a get to know you form for parents and a "fridge facts" sheet with school information and a QR code that takes them to my school webpage.

 Parents always bring lots of supplies to Meet the Teacher.  I will have bins, tubs and boxes labeled for those community supplies.

 I want them to choose where they want to sit the first day, but will explain to them that I will most likely move them after the first few days.

 I will have a tub for books at the middle of the table for students that first week.  Once we've explored the library and taken the STAR test then students will have book bins that are individualized.

 The students will write their names on a small white board and I will take their pictures.  This is so I can learn their names more quickly, but also it's nice to have a beginning of the year picture. In Kindergarten I used this to see if they could write their names- not so much in 3rd grade, but it does give a quick assessment of handwriting legibility.

These next two ideas are floating around Pinterest, so they are not my original ideas.  I just changed them a bit to fit my needs (and school colors).  Both parents and students will take a little treat.

 You can get the Parent freebie here.

You can get the student freebie here.

I have a couple of more things that I will share with you in another post.  Hope you are excited for the new school year.  And, I hope your Meet the Teacher Night runs smoothly. :)

Karla

Happy School Year!

http://www.amazon.com/Happy-School-Year-Susan-Milord/dp/043988280X/ref=lh_ni_t 

One of my favorite back to school books is a book called Happy School Year!  It's about the first day of school- the whole school celebrates with cupcakes and sings "Happy School Year to You!"  I created this page for my students to do that first day of school.  We talk about what we want to learn and do in Kindergarten and then I let them color the cupcake and candle, draw a picture of what it is they wish, and try to write what their wish is.  It's a great writing & drawing sample for the beginning of the school year. And, most of the time, I need to go back through with the students and have them tell me what they wrote and I will write it down underneath their attempt. It's also something that I can keep in a writing portfolio to show parents.Here's the link to my document.  Kindergarten Wish