Apples!

Well, tomorrow is the last day of September and we are off for our field trip to the pumpkin patch so I HAD to get my apple unit posted!    Of course, we are incorporating all content areas in this study, that is what makes these units so much fun, year after year!  Lots of pictures, so hang in there with me...

This is where it all begins...

Every few days, we have a new apple for a snack.  One day, Granny Smith, another day, Golden Delicious and the final day, Galas. Simple...green, yellow and red.

Now, we use this cute graph from Deanna Jump's Apples Unit to graph which apples were our favorites.

The red Galas were the favorite overall! We used this opportunity to talk about More and Less-our Topic Two concept for EnVision Math.

We broke out the Math Journals to illustrate this concept.

My example.

Our apple poem from Jessica Meacham for our Poetry Journals.

We will practice identifying sight words, punctuation and rhyming words using different colors of highlighters for each.  The first time we do this will be in small group.  It will take a few times before they are able accomplish this independently but they will get it!

We will also make an Apple Book...this is the cover.

Good Job!

Art work for the Kindergarten Scrapbook.

We wrote our first sentence for this scrapbook page using mostly sight words. It was good practice for phoneme segmentation for sounding out apple.

We learned about the parts of an apple.  We put on our pretend lab coats and talked about how scientists research an object they are studying. We talked about labelling and making a diagram.

We have also learned about Johnny Appleseed, of course.

We finished a sentence about Johnny Appleseed.

Hard at work...

We sounded out the sentence together in small group.

We talked about important details to include in our illustrations.

Once we complete our Johnny Appleseed artwork, this page will go in our Famous Americans Book.

Naturally, we dressed up as Johnny Appleseed!

This photo will go on our Apple page of our Kindergarten Scrapbook.

We have read The Apple Pie Tree and will make a page for the Apple Book
about how an apple tree changes through the seasons.

We read Ten Apples Up On Top! and tied in More and Less easily!
We will also make a page for the Apple Book from this story. 
Look for that in a few days...

Apples Cover Script
Apples Diagram Labels

Apples Scrapbook Script
Apples Ten on Top Writing
Apples Parts Writing
Apples Life Cycle Writing

Apples Diagram Script

Brown Bear, Brown Bear...Eric Carle Fun!

All I know is...you can't miss with Eric Carle.  Just a hard, cold truth, people. :)  The kids always enjoy Brown Bear, Brown Bear! Due to scheduling and adjusting to a new math program and the way it fits into the schedule, I condensed my bear unit (part one, anyway) to one day.  So, last Friday was Brown Bear, Brown Bear Day, officially! Of course, we start with reading the story just for fun.  Then we read it again!

I have these picture cards from last year to use as our story map.

Check out this post from last year and the variation on the story map that we made then.

This little guy made sure we recited the story in the correct order!

They did a great job retelling and no, we didn't get loud at all...

We colored character pictures to make our own Story Bags.

We told the story together and laid out our pictures one at a time.

They were very serious about getting their pictures laid out just right...

I usually use paper bags for this project but low and behold, the cupboard was bare.  Baggies worked just fine.  The kids wrote their name on the front of their baggie with a brown sharpie.  I think that was almost their favorite part! At the end of the day, they took their bags home so they could retell the story to their family.

I brought this poster back out from last year for the kids to use as another retell activity.

These small  pieces were from the bulletin board set that I bought last year (and totally forgot to use this year!).  I attached them with velcro and numbered them on the back.  I also have word cards to be used in addition to the picture cards. 

We also used gummy bears for a sorting activity in our math journals that afternoon.

This activity was also good practice for writing color words.

One to One Correspondence.

Of course, there HAD to be an art project!

This project is from my friend, Suzan, at Krazy for Kindergarten.  She used this as a Five Senses activity.  Amazingly, no one ate their gluey Big Red gum....

Their job was to fill in their name and their partner's name into the Brown Bear script
and then illustrate their partner. This writing activity came from April Larremore at Chalk Talk.

Brown Bear Scrapbook Writing

Brown Bear Scrapbook Script

Making their bears with googly eyes, crinkled brown paper, pompoms and Big Red gum.

Here's the finished page that will be added to their Kindergarten Scrapbooks.  I added the Brown Bear caption to the page after the photo was taken.  It was a fun day and I felt we did justice to Eric Carle... for now.