Friday, March 30, 2012

Community Helpers

Sorry it has taken me so long to get pictures of these up, but here they are in all of their fabulousness!! 
 












Here are some of the thinking maps we created to go along with community helpers.  We also made a map of our community.  Sorry the pictures turned out a little blurry.
 




Wild Things Part 2

Check out the bulletin board that Mrs. Guerrant, Pierson's mom, put together for us!!!  We are still in awe!  What better way to show off some of the students' awesome work from Where The Wild Things Are.  The Max patterns are from Deanna Jump's Wild Things unit on TpT.  We had the kids write about their favorite part (in his hands). 


 


 

Friday, March 23, 2012

Wild Things

Room 201 is where the wild things were this week!  I found a unit by Deanna Jump on one my favorite stories, Where The Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak and knew we had to use it.  Luckily, Ms. Herron is also a huge fan of  the book and was super excited to do it this week.  She did an outstanding job with the unit!  We were all able to make connections to feeling a little wild at times.  We made a list of what we do when we feel wild. 
We described the Wild Things and talked about how they would act.  We used them to help us review verbs.  Ms. Herron created a list of words and we had to decide if it was a verb.  We also talked about what it means to add -ing to the end of a verb (action is happening now). 
We acted out a few "wild" verbs to the beat of a drum (video to come) .  
We used a variety of art materials to create our own wild things.  We wrote a sentence to tell what our Wild Thing was doing. 










 

We took our Things on a "wild rumpus" outside.  :-)


We kept with the Wild Thing theme in Math.  We talked about probability after the kids used a spinner to help them design a wild thing.  We sorted and counted the Wild Things based on their nose color and body pattern.  We determined that the dots and stripes had the most because it had the biggest section on the spinner. 

Next, we focused on Max.  We used a bubble map to describe him.  We had to infer quite a bit.  We talked about how Maurice Sendak (the author) liked to have his readers help tell part of the story using their own ideas and imagination.  He purposefully left things out to allow the reader to do that.  We had some incredible adjectives to describe Max and we were able to cite examples from the text to back up our words. 

We wrote about our favorite part of the story and had Max hold it. 
 

I found this ADORABLE idea on Pinterest (yes I am still an addict)... I so wanted to make them, but forgot to ask for cardboard rolls.  Huge "thank you" to Mrs. Nicholas for letting me borrow some to do these.  The kids loved making them.  Didn't they turn out cute??



 
Here is a link to a YouTube version of Where The Wild Things Are.  Enjoy!!


Have a wonderfully wild weekend!! I will post pictures from our Community Helpers next week. I cannot wait to show all of the fabulous projects!!!






Friday, March 16, 2012

St. Patrick's Day Fun

Well we must be some pretty persuasive Kindergarteners because look what Mr. Leprechaun left on the carpet for us. 
 

 The pot was full of gold coins, but unfortunately we were not convincing enough to get the real stuff.  We got something much better...CHOCOLATE!!   He also gave us a green good luck coin and left us a nice little note.  We have had so much fun with St. Patrick's Day this week!  Here is just a sample:
 


From D. Jump's St. Patrick's Day unit

 


Old Lady Who Swallowed a Clover
leprechaun punch

 


 

I saved the best for last.   We had a visit from Thing 1 and Thing 2 for reaching our Read Across America goal.  They stopped by and gave us pencils!!  Thanks to Mrs. Hamilton and Mrs. Suggs for being such great sports!  The kids loved it!!!