Retelling Stories is "Weinderful"!

This past week we worked on retelling stories and my cuties above helped me out!  (Well, not my actual pups, but rather wiener-dog inspired lessons.)

All year, we have been using my retell ribbon to retell stories that we have read.  I am sure many of you have seen this floating around pinterest.  I made it last year and my cuties from last year really learned how to retell using it.  It has been great to use it all year with this group.

Basically it's a ribbon with these wooden pieces and buttons glued to it.  The tree represents the setting.  The cat represents characters.  The three buttons represent the beginning, middle, and end.  The ribbon represents how the author tied up his message in the book.  (What did we learn from this book?)  

We made our own retell ribbons to keep  in our book boxes this week.

 Click on the picture above to print off the pieces from my website.

I will admit that in the beginning I didn't go into a lot detail about beginning, middle and end until this last week.  I basically just let them tell me three things from the story at the start of the year and then moved into telling me more big ideas toward the middle of the year.  This past week we really focused on what the beginning, middle and end meant.

I used this book:

It is so stinkin' cute and I met the author at the International Reading Association a few weeks ago and he autographed it for us!  (This book also travels with our weekend friend.)

Then we wrote what happened at the beginning, middle, and end, with my guidance on my Kim Adsit inspired chart.

(Please forgive my terrible printing and unfinished chart.  This time of year gets crazy.  I will cutesie it up for next year - I promise!)

Then I typed up what my cuties had helped me write and we made our own wiener wolves.

 How cute are it's tiny legs!

Well, I am heading to bed.  We have 5 1/2 school days left.  I am incredibly sad to leave this group.  They have touched my heart in a huge way.  I just want to make every day count and make all 5 1/2 special for them.  

Have a happy week!

Animal Research Project

We have been learning about animals for the past few weeks and really showed off our learning with an animal research project.  Here is the finished product:

We attached a rubric to the back of our projects and colored in each of the things that living things needs when we added them to our projects.

To make the project, each student chose an animal based on a set of Pebble books I checked out from the library.  We used the books and the website, Pebble Go, to learn about our animals.

Pebble Go also helped us with research skills and allowed us to integrate technology into our learning.  They LOVED using it!

It is a VERY useful sight for kinders because it meant for emergent readers.  The site is written in kid friendly language and reads the information to students.  It also has videos of the animals and allows students to listen to the sounds the animal makes.

We also wrote books about our animals that included a table of contents and information we learned about our animals.  Of course we dedicated our books, too!  (They LOVE that dedication stamp!)

We used many organizers and such to creat these projects.  You can get them in my shop as a freebie.

Happy Sunday, everyone!

I met Lucy Caulkins!

Last Sunday I was blessed to attend the International Reading Association's annual conference in San Antonio and I met Lucy Caulkins!  Sprinkles to me!

Her session was amazing and meeting her was a treat!  I have written some posts about Writer's Workshop.  You can click here to read about my managment of our writing block.

I just had to show you some recent writing from my class.  I am soooo stinkin' proud of my cuties! We have come a lllooonnnggg way and I couldn't be more proud of my class!

Happy weekend, everyone!

Oviparous Fun!

Happy Saturday!  We enjoyed learning about oviparous animals last week.  I introduced it by showing my cuties this egg I found at Ikea:

I told them that there were animals in the egg that lay eggs.  My cuties made some predictions about the type of animals in the egg, then we opened it up and checked out some of the "oviparous" animals.  (They always love learning big words.)

Then we read this book from Shuna Patterson's Let's Get Crackin' Oviparous Animals unit to learn about different animals that are oviparous.

After learning about many oviparous animals, we completed a class sort of oviparous and non-oviparous animals from Mrs. Jone's Creation Station sort.

We also labeled the classroom with labels that said "oviparous" and "not oviparous".

 

Have a happy weekend!

Teachable moment ~ thanks to a roly poly infestation!

Happy Tuesday!  So I will admit that I was dreading today.  I love teaching kinders, but today was one of our state assessments for 4th and 5th grade - which makes for a walk on egg shells, don't even think of sneezing kind of day.  But God is good, and today was oodles of fun and smiles!  

Let me start by saying our school has had an infestation on roly polies:

 

Do you see all of them?  

Well, after tip toe-ing around the school, we went out for a much needed recess and my cuties were going crazy over these little critters.  I overheard many of them stating that they were living things and then described what the roly polies needed to stay alive.  This made my heart do three cartwheels because we have been learning about the needs of living things.  So one precious cutie asked if I had a jar.  I thought about then remembered that I had some old glad ware bowls in my cabinet.  

We all rushed inside and I had exaclty enough bowls for each student to have one.  Then we made a quick plan about what the roly polies would need to live.  They remembered everything we had learned the week before, so we ventured back out and enjoyed the critters.

 

I was so excited to see their learning transfer from the classroom to real life AND we got to take home roly polies!

So everything that led up to this perfectly wonderful, unplanned, state testing, really dreading day went like this:

Last Monday, I introduced the idea of living and non-living things by comparing gummy worms to earthworms.  My cuties really came up with great comparisons and even came up with the needs of the living worms on their own (after some guidance).

The next day, we enjoyed an egg hunt.  I placed pictures of living and non-living things in eggs and my cuties hunted for them, then recorded if the picture was of a living thing or a non-living thing.

You can have this hunt by clicking the picture below.

Then we created this living things tree and anchor chart.  (The tree will help us bridge our learning about plants are living things later this month.)

On each little card on the tree, my cuties picked a living thing and then stated what it needs to live. 

By the way, I wasn't sure what roly polies ate, so when we were trying to decide what to feed them, my cuties suggested we give them some crackers and hedgehog food - ha ha ha!  So that's what we gave them.  They really enjoyed the hedgehog food - yum!

Plants!

Well, my spring break is is finishing up.  I have enjoyed the time to be with friends, loved ones, and the time to work on projects for my classroom and TPT.  

I updated my plants unit with some more activities.  It's 53 pages of science fun!  Here are some pics of what's inside:

Informational Text and Student Emergent Readers

 Sorting Activity for Plants' Needs

 2 Songs with Motions about Plants' Needs and Plant Parts

 Plant Growth Journal to Record 12 Days of Plant Growth

 Plant Parts Craftivity

Plant Life Cycle Craftivity

...and soooooo much more!

Click below to grab this unit in my shop.

Alrighty, it is 4:00 am and I have much to do at the school tomorrow (today, that is, after I sleep).  Have a superb Saturday!

Giveaway at Heather's Heart!

My sweet, fellow Texas blogging buddy, Heather,  from Heather's Heart is having a fabulous giveaway!  Click the pic below to go and visit her.

And for those of you who guessed my favorite dog - it's dachshunds!  Here are my two cuties and my friend, Mary's, pup.

 

I sent my Subtraction Stories to my peeps who guessed correctly.

Click  the pic above to grab it for $3.