So Many Things to do with Buttons!

I don't know about you, but this time of year I always begin reflecting on the year- what went well, what needs modifying for next year.  As I do that, I look forward to next year and begin informal planning of things to do at the beginning of next year.  My BFT (best friend teacher) and I were talking at lunch today about buttons.  She had ordered some Lakeshore Learning stuff and one of the things she had was a button sorting game.  She was telling me that I needed to make something similar to it or to extend the game into some other button related activities.  I was telling her that I did have some button clip art, but really needed to find some more.  Well, as I am blog hopping this evening after a long day of teaching followed by an even longer baseball practice for my son, I run across the blog of one of my new favorite clip artist, Ink n Little Things.  She has a button clip art set as a flash freebie until the 11th. Go check it out and then head to her TpT store.  She has some great products. I especially love her phonics clip art!  Now, I am off to think about how I can use these cute buttons in some beginning of the year activities!

High Frequency Word Fluency

I really think high frequency words will be the death of me this year!  This particular group seems to be having a very difficult time learning the 75 words that they need for mastery by the end of Kindergarten.  I think part of it is that they came in so low- not knowing many letters and sounds- so we had to really focus on that at first and push sight words to the back burner until they mastered letters and sounds.  Another part is parental involvement- my kinders that have parents who will practice the words at home have mastered those 75 words weeks ago.  Unfortunately, many do not practice at home and we can only do so much at school.  Anyway, I made this recording sheet.  I know it's a little late for this year, but I will definitely use this with next year's group.  Get the freebie here

A great give-away

Happy Saturday!  I am participating in a great give-away over at Mrs. Rios Teaches Second Grade.  She has 1,000 followers on her TpT store!  Congratulations! Stop over there and check it out!  It's her first give-away so let's make it a great one for her!  There are fabulous prizes for K-4th grade!

More Motion Fun!

Here are some pictures from this week's motion activities.  We talked about push and pull and tried to push this tub across the floor empty, with some books and with my little friend here.  We talked about why I was able to move it a greater distance when it was empty even though I gave it the same amount of push! He was pretty excited to be a part of my experiment!

 

 

Then we made roller coasters out of toilet paper and paper towel rolls!  They loved this! Check out some of their creations below.  I am not sure that they could articulate the things that they learned from these activities this week, but it gave them a first exposure to the ideas of motion and forces.  And maybe they learned a little something.  One of my kinders told me that she was in the car yesterday with her mom.  Her mom was "speeding".  She told her mom that they were "in motion" and she was using "too much force on the gas pedal."  Love my kinders!



Numbers in Base 10

I am reading a book called Common Core Mathematics in a PLC at Work Grades K-2.  It is written by Matthew R. Larson and a whole group of other authors.  Here's the Amazon link.  It's a great book that leads you through what a math PLC would look like and how to read the standards and use them effectively.  I am not very far into it, but I was sharing some of it at our last PLC.  One of the things it mentioned was the idea of creating anchor lessons for the standards.  These are lessons that everyone teaches during the course of teaching a standards. I don't know about your school, but at my school we follow the district curriculum map for what should be taught in each quarter, but then every classroom is different.  If you went into my classroom and then someone else's on the team, you might not see the exact same standards being taught that week, and you certainly would not see the same lessons!  I don't love this- I think there should be more sharing of great lessons and activities, but we haven't gotten there yet as a team.  So, long story short- we decided to create a series of assessments for the NBT1 standard and then create an anchor lesson for that standard that we all can teach to introduce the standard.  Eventually, the assessments will be part of a product on TpT to go along with my other math assessments, but I wanted to share some of our work with you.  The three things all go together.  We decided to help students understand base 10 better we needed to connect those tools with other math tools we've used before- specifically ten frames, tally marks and linking cubes.  So, we came up with this lesson. NBT1 Anchor Lesson It uses a "bridge map" as the foundation, so if you are not familiar with that the lesson might not make sense.  But the basic premise is that students are matching the base 10 representation of teen numbers to the ten-frame, tally mark, linking cube and word representations. The Bridge Map Freebie has the cards needed for the activity as well as a little explanation.  The NBT1 Practice Worksheet is just that- practice of what they need matching the base 10 model with something else.  Here are some pictures of the students working on their bridge maps.  At the end, there is a picture of one page of the worksheet.

Students cut and paste these and place them on the worksheet above.

Motion Fun

I don't know about you, but teaching force and motion to Kindergarteners is hard!!!  The standard says "Investigate how applied forces can make things move (push and pull)." There are so many great motion experiments, but making them kinder friendly is difficult.  Well, that's not really true- you can still do the experiments, but explaining it in kinder friendly language is difficult.  So, we've been doing some basic things with motion.  On Monday, we discovered that markers can't roll by themselves- we need to give them a push or put them on a ramp and slide them.  Then we also saw how different objects can move down a ramp (slide, roll, spin etc...) Yesterday we explored with different sized forces.  I put tracks (green painter tape) of different lengths on the tables.  I gave each table cars and the job was to try to give the car enough force (a push) to make the car stop exactly at the track's finish line.

Then I brought them back to the carpet and we talked about what they noticed.  We wrote our "scientific observations" on chart paper.  The kinders noticed that if the track was long they had to give a bigger push.  If that track was shorter they had to give a smaller push.

Then, I told them that scientists sometimes do an experiment and then something else pops up that they wonder about.  I told them that while they were doing this experiment, I was wondering if the push they gave would be different on a different surface.  So, we moved one piece of tape at each table to a different surface- the classroom carpet, the meeting area carpet, the library carpet and the tile floor.  This time their job was to try the push on both surfaces and compare how big/small a push they needed to give the car on the different surfaces.

Then we came back together and talked about our scientific observations.  They decided that the carpet was rough, so they needed to give a bigger push than on the table.  They also decided that the tile was  more slippery ("slippery-er" in Kinder language) than the table, so they could give a smaller push.
Wow!  Lots of science going on and some fairly deep topics that they've just begun to brush the surface of, but it's a good start.
By the way, I found a great resource from TpT where some of these ideas came from.  I adapted a bit, but it's a great unit (and motion units for kinder are hard to find).  It's from Kindergarten Squared.  Click  here for a link to the product at their store.

 

 

39 School Days Left

So, the countdown has begun... maybe not with the kinders yet, but I am definitely counting the days.  It's hard to believe that the school year only has 39 days left.  Wow!  There's so much to do and so very little time, but yet these days will just drag and drag.  We have no days off left AND we're basically on lock-down all day during testing week with no specials and no recess!  So, we have to make it standards-packed and fun all at the same time. 
We've been enjoying our fairy tale unit.  Each week we read a different fairy tale.  I find different versions of it to read each day and we compare and contrast as well as focus on beginning, middle, end and characters, setting, problem and solution. 
We just finished our plant mini-unit and now we're focusing on magnets and motion.  I have some fun activities planned for that so hopefully I can share some pictures of that in action.
Well, I am off to school year this morning.  I have to change centers and make sure everything is ready for a unscheduled observation from my principal sometime this week! Gotta love our new evaluation system!!!
Happy Monday!