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

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/.

 



Brown Bear, Brown Bear

I love Eric Carle and the kids do, too!  We have a Bear unit that we teach-typically about the third week of school.   We start with Brown Bear, Brown Bear for color word recognition and story sequencing. 

Our team has taught this unit for several years but I did get some fresh, new ideas from my friend, Suzan at http://krazyforkindergarten.blogspot.com/. 

Like this one!  We color story cards and usually glue them onto a sentence strip in story order.  Suzan uses a Story Bag so that's what my class tried this year.  You place the story cards in a brown paper bag decorated with a Brown Bear picture.  The children then use their story cards to tell the story. They loved this-we had story cards all over the carpet but they all made sure they had every picture to put back in their bag.  They were serious about it!

We learned the poem, Brown Bear Happy.   Each child gets a copy of this poem to include in their Poetry Journal.  We circle punctuation in orange, rhyming pairs in green and sight words in blue.  I got this idea from http://www.jmeacham.com/ who has printable poems all ready to copy.  Jessica has so many wonderful ideas.  I also made Homework Bags for children to check out on a weekly basis based on Jessica's system.  My class loved the homework bags last year and I will begin allowing students to check them out soon for this class.

I bought the Bulletin Board set for Brown Bear, Brown Bear and knew I could use the mini pictures from the package somehow!  I laminated them and velcroed them to a chart.  The kids can practice story sequencing using this chart as a Go-To Activity when they finish their literacy job.  I also printed and laminated word labels for each animal for the kids to practice matching the words to the character. 

I also got this idea from Suzan at http://krazyforkindergarten.blogspot.com/.  We painted our own Story Map working in teams to paint each color in the order of the story.  We then placed the story characters on the map to match their color.

Ms. Larremore at http://larremoreteachertips.blogspot.com/ 

used this writing activity to help reinforce the story but also to practice name recognition of friends in class.  These writings will go in their Kindergarten Scrapbooks with Bear Art.