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Monday, November 8, 2010

Going Batty!

I decided at the last minute (last Sunday night) to add a short unit on bats and compare/contrast them with birds. I haven't finished all of our activities yet-most of which I got from www.kinderbykim.com but I wanted to share what we have done so far! 
We started by reading Stellaluna,
one of my favorites!


Then we made our own cave for both our bats AND our bear who was getting ready to hibernate.  Our Scott Foresman story for the week was A Bed for the Winter and we had already read Bear Snores On so the timing was just right.


Everyone tore a piece of brown paper and a piece of gray to cover the box with "rocks" to make it look like a cave.




Everyone helped and some got pretty enthusiastic with tearing the paper and with gluing! 



The next morning we made our own fruit bats and each child told me a Bat Fact as they came up to tape their bat inside the cave.  They love their new scientific word, echolocation!



Our colony of fruit bats!



Stellaluna follow-up sheets






After we read our non-fiction books about bats and birds we started to talk about their differences and similarities.


We made our first Venn Diagram.



Next we wrote in our Science Journals.




Of course, we also had to watch The Magic School Bus video, Going Batty!  We will still make Batty "at" families and write more about Stellaluna but that was my very brief Bats unit!

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Sight Words


I have been trying to find a more durable way to make word rings for my class so that they have sight words on hand.  At our Habitat for Humanity (my reason for being there could be a whole other blog site for me-you should check out my sister at http://sheendeavors.blogspot.com/ and see what all she does and why she makes HFH a regular stop for her!) I found a sample box for laminate countertops (odd, right?).  They are strong and have a hole already punched in them-perfect for our Word Rings!  I write our sight words on each card, attach to a metal ring and we are rolling!  I can't tell you how excited the kids were to get these rings and they truly use them to help in their writing.




We play Sight Word Search at small groups.  I say a sight word and they race to find it first-they are fierce!

We used this poem for our pumpkin unit, of course. Everyone has their own Poetry Journal.  We add a poem to our journal every few weeks.  Mrs. Meacham's Classroom Snapshots  http://www.jmeacham.com/ has a detailed description of her Poetry Journals on her site along with a long list of poems and graphics for you to use.  Some people are just incredible! She shares this and many, many other ideas that I can't stop myself from swiping! 





We use yellow to highlight sight words that we have learned so far, orange to highlight punctuation marks and green to circle rhyming pairs.  I teach them how to master this skill in small group but soon they will be able to complete this job independently at a literacy center.





We highlighted sight words in our Brown Bear, Brown Bear book. It is amazing to see how much confidence utilizing this skill gives a child. 




A few practice sheets that we use in our literacy centers.

They can be found on
 http://www.scsk12.org/SCS/subject-areas/Kindergarten-Kove


If your district has adopted the Scott Foresman reading series,
this website will be your best friend! Also check out


 http://web.mac.com/donna.glynn/Kinderglynn
 and of course, http://classroom.jc-schools.net/waltkek/.