The Mitten Play!

Last Thursday was our performance day for The Mitten.  It went soooo well!  My heart is full of pride and joy for my littles.  If you want to watch it, check it out here:

We performed this show as a fund raiser for Polar Bears International.  We were only accepting change so we could make a "change" for the polar bears.  After collecting all of the coins, we needed to sort the types of coins.  This is one of our state standards, so it made coin sorting meaningful for them.

We are so thankful to be able to help the polar bears!

Mitten Capacity

We started a measurement unit recently.  Today I introduced measuring capacity.  We started by reading Room for Ripley.

I just love Stuart J. Murphy's Math Start books!  Then we completed a mitten capacity exploration.  My cuties made predictions about the capacity of different mittens if they filled them with cotton balls.  Then they found the actual capacity.

Click here to print the mitten capacity exploration activity.

Text to Text Connections

This week we read The Missing Mitten Mystery and compared it to The Mitten which we read last week.  Here is a picture of our Venn diagram we used for comparing.

Click on the picture above to print off the cards.

The Mitten

This week was only a three day week for the students, but we sure did work hard and accomplish a lot.  We started learning about seasons in Science, so I planned to read one of my favorite books, The Mitten.

I absolutely love this book and introduced it by telling my kinder cuties that we had a new friend in our room.  I placed a small hedgehog puppet in a bag and asked one student to come up and describe what was in the bag.  The other children guessed based on the clues.  Then I pulled out the hedgehog and it read the story to them.  

Then we graphed our favorite character from the book.

I found the little pictures of The Mitten Characters from Swamp Frog First Graders.  Her blog is awesome!  I created the title for this graph from my collection of Lettering Delights fonts. Click on the graph above to print the title I created.

We also learned about the story elements of The Mitten.  You can click the picture for the parts of the story map.  I got this idea from Cara Carroll at First Grade Parade.

I was tickled pink when a new student said the setting was in North Carolina, where she moved from, "because there is no snow in Texas".  It made me smile!