Free President's Day Poem!

OK, so I was inspired to make a mini book for the poem that I wrote for President's Day.  I know!  We will study this poem as a class for sight words, rhyming words and punctuation and then add it to our Poetry Journals. Anyway, I will try to make a reader for the kids to go with the poem but for now, here goes... President's Day Poem

Star Spangled Sight Word Match Up Game!

A new game to play for President's Day and our study of America to help with that sight word reading!  These are all of the sight words used in Scott Foresman for Units 1-5 plus color words.  I can't enough of all of these fun graphics and I NEED as many Go-To Activities as I can get my hands on!

Star Spangled Sight Word Match Up Game

Our America Unit!

This is my second year to use Deanna Jump's America unit and I love it!! 

We make a book out of the activities (of course!) and so I wanted some writing pages for the book this year. So, here they are!!

America Unit Writing Pages

Our America-Statue of Liberty

Our hall display-a work in progress...

We have been working a little each week on the Our America unit that I got from Deanna Jump.  I am loving it and so are the kids.  We learned about the American Bald Eagle a few weeks ago and this is the only picture I took.  Shucks!

This week we learned about the Statue of Liberty.  We read The Story of the Statue of Liberty suggested by Deanna in her list of books to use with the unit. This is the directed drawing we used from her unit. 

We worked step by step-they loved this!

So intent...

The finished products.  Aren't they great?  All of this artwork will go in an American Symbols book along with the fact sheets they are making for each symbol. 

You can see their eagles made from their foot and hand tracings.

Next we wanted to know how come the Statue of Liberty is green so we started with our own pennies.

They documented what their pennies looked like before the experiment and chose a sentence to describe their penny in their science journals.

Next we added a few drops of vinegar to the pennies to simulate the salty water that the Statue of Liberty is subjected to in the New York Harbor.

This was another opportunity to use the Scientific Method and work through it step by step.  Deanna Jump has printouts for this for free on tPt.  These are the hypotheses the children came up with!  I was impressed.

A day later, take a look!

The shinier pennies turned the greenest!

They documented what their pennies looked like after the experiment on their own. 

The last step was to come up with our own conclusion.  They are getting very good at coming up with thoughtful ideas linking A to B in these experiments.  I can't wait to begin my liquids, gas and solids unit! 

Christmas Around the World

Our first visit is to France so, of course, we read a Madeline book!

We chart some facts that we learn about Christmas traditions in France.  Forgive my spelling of Claus (Clause), I must have just watched the movie!



I use a world map that I got from the dollar spot at Target and we place stickers on the countries that we are studying.







We make our own Yule Logs for our book and have
Swiss Rolls for our own Yule Log cakes!



We watch this video while we eat our Yule Log cakes!



The children need a photo on their passport so they make their own! 

  

They get a stamp in their passport for each country we visit.  I used a Santa stamp for Papa Noel.  The children tell me something they learned about Christmas in France while I stamp their passport.



We had a mini-lesson on the five parts of a friendly letter as we wrote our class letter to Santa.  Notice the spelling-we sounded out each word that was not a sight word that we have learned.  The children were able to read the letter back to me fluently.  This will help as they sound out words for their letter to Santa.



Now it is time to write our own letters to Santa. 
This child is from Ms. Potts' class- what a sweet letter.




She sounded out and illustrated each item on her list!

I will post more about our Christmas around the World unit as we work on it the rest of this week.  I have tried it many different ways and this year, I felt the need to simplify this unit in order to incorporate the Grinch unit from Chalk Talk.  We are also in the midst of DIBELS testing, completing report card assessments and making tons of Christmas ornaments as I am certain most of you are, as well.  There are only so many hours in the day!!  Hang in there!



50’s Day!

 Yesterday was our 50th day of school so …

we had 50’s Day!

It was so much fun! We practiced counting to 50, of course! We played with toys boys and girls played with in the 50’s-slinkies, Tinkertoys, Lincoln Logs, Playdoh, Etch a Sketch, Jacks and Mr. Potato Head!

We used Silly Putty to transfer Peanut comics strips, watched a slideshow showing what people wore, how they watched movies, listened to music, what cars they drove, how they shopped, etc. We compared and contrasted life in the 50’s to our lives now.

We dressed they way boys and girls dressed during this time and visited our own “Soda Shop” where we listened to music on the “jukebox”, ate Jell-O and drank Cokes out of glass bottles! We even watched an episode of “I Love Lucy”-the famous candy episode! 

People used to listen to records or as one student noticed, "big CD's"!



We had fun at our Soda Shop!





We write about how life was different in the 1950's
and include this in our Kindergarten Scrapbook.



We used this Compare/Contrast chart to recognize many of
the differences and similarities between the 1950's and today.

Boys and girls met at the Soda Shop on the way home from school
instead of going to Chuck E. Cheese on the weekend.  Wow!

TV shows were in black and white!  There were only three channels
and you had to GET UP to change the channel! 
Holy Smoke, times were tough!

We learned that Mr. Potato Heads were real potatoes!



We even read Dick and Jane!

Such a fun way to meet an ALCOS for Social Studies!