Trains!




After reading The Polar Express and seeing April Larremore's unit on The Polar Express at Chalk Talk http://larremoreteachertips.blogspot.com/search/label/Polar%20Express
I just had to add a mini-unit on trains. 

 



I LOVE this story...I read it to my girls when they were small.  This book loosely ties in with the train theme but I mainly use it to teach Christmas traditions in Appalachia. (I'll have more on that later with another post on Christmas Around the World.)

 

We charted what we already know about trains first. 
It was surprising what they already knew.

I liked April Larremore's sentence train so we made our
own using our color coded noun, adjective and verb format.



Sight words are written in black, adjectives are in red, nouns are blue and verbs are green. We brainstormed various adjectives and verbs and everyone chose their own from our list.



Of course, it was time for a fresh hall display! They had to read their sentence to me before we posted their work on our wall.

  


The red train is moving.

I plan on using this format at least once a month using our

seasonal theme.  So next month, snowmen or snowflakes...

I'll be honest, literacy, social studies and science come fairly

easily to me...math is another story. I did find some great train

math activities from http://www.makinglearningfun.com/themepages/TrainPrintables.  I downloaded the train number book that can actually be used as

a literacy center since it requires the children to stamp out the

number words.  My team has gotten so many ideas from my friend, Suzan, at krazyforkindergarten.blogspot.com/ for seasonal math

activities that we are very excited about.  Thanks, Suzan!

 

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!