Weekly Round-Up: March 24

Hi friends! I'm back to share with you some of the things we have been up to in our classroom this week!

1. CARD MAKING CENTRE

So my kids are still OBSESSED with card making ever since we introduced it before Valentine's Day.  Our mailbox is full daily of cards to their friends and family!

I decided to give the card centre a little Easter revamp on Friday night to keep the engagement going.

I added some pastel cards, Easter card covers (2 options), Easter card writing helper, Easter stamps, Easter stickers, Crayola Super Tips in Easter colours and 2 Easter Smencils!

The Easter samps and stickers are from Dollarama.

My librarian sells Smencils in our school library as a fundraiser so I grabbed these Easter ones a while ago.  The kids have been asking about them so I'm sure they will be a big hit!

They are regular pencils but the packaging is scented.  They smell sooo good!

If you are interested in the card writing helper and the covers, they are in my new "Card Writing Expansion Pack".  You can click here or on the image below if you are interested in checking it out!

2. EASTER DO-A-DOT

My kids still love bingo daubers, so I made some Easter themed ones for them! These are in my Easter pack if you are interested in grabbing them!

3. EASTER SENTENCE PRINTING

For our Easter dry erase sheets, I made up these Easter sentence ones where the kids can trace the sentence and then write the sentence by themselves underneath!  My kids like dry erase activities so this has been a hit and good practice for all of my kiddos.

You can also find this in my Easter pack here.

4. WORDLESS STORIES

I introduced wordless stories to my kids this week and they are obsessed with making their own now! I showed them "Chalk" by Bill Thomson and "A Ball for Daisy" by Chris Raschka.  We talked about how the author added facial expressions and lots of detail to each page so we are able to infer what is happening in the story easily.

Then they set to work making their own!  Here is one of my favourites from the week.  I'll write down what she said when she read me her story under each photo.

"One day Duck was going to a birthday party and wanted to bring a bunny shaped balloon to it.  So she walked to Rabbit and asked her if she was selling any bunny shaped balloons but Rabbit said "no."

"Duck was so sad she ran away crying.  She dropped her hat."

"Rabbit had an idea.  She went to the store and bough 3 animal shaped balloons.  Duck came back because she dropped her hat.  She saw that Rabbit had new balloons.  She asked "Do you have any bunny shaped balloons?"  "Yes I do!" said Rabbit.  Duck was so happy.  She bought the bunny shaped balloon and went to the birthday party.  The end."

Amazing right? I let the kids share these after morning centres or at the end of the day before dismissal.

If you want the template for the wordless stories (and the lesson that goes with it) you can grab it in my "Step by Step 2: Kindergarten Writing Plans".  Click here if you are interested in checking it out! 

5. THANK YOU GIFT {FREE TEMPLATE}

Friday was our last day with our CYW student.  She was in our classroom almost every day for the last 7 weeks and she was fantastic so I wanted to do something for her.  So we made a book for her and we read it to her on the last day!

I had one of my kids draw her on the cover and each kid write one word to describe her and the reason they chose that word.

Here are some pages from the inside:

Ms. Pinsent is so nice because she helps me make the bees.

Ms. Pinsent is cool because she has a nice smile.

Ms. Pinsent is sweet because she helps me write hard words.

I added my own thank you card and a Tim Horton's gift card as my little way of saying thanks for all of the help she has given me the last month and a half! She did so much prep work for me, I miss her!!

If you want to grab the template to make this book for a parent volunteer, a practicum student or any other person you want to thank as a class, you can get the editable PowerPoint file by clicking here or on the image below:

That's it from me for this week!

Have a great weekend!

- Yukari

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Earth Day in Kindergarten

Hi friends, today I wanted to share how I teach about Earth Day and how to take care of the Earth in April!

Here are the curriculum expectations I cover and the learning goal/success criteria I introduce as we learn about Earth Day:

We start these lesson at the beginning of April, so that students have ample time to learn about why we celebrate Earth day.  During lesson 1, I introduce what Earth Day, read "The Earth Book" by Todd Parr and we complete the chart "Why Do We Need To Take Care of The Earth?" together.

We also do lessons on why we should protect nature, how we can protect nature, why we should save energy, how we can reduce energy, the 3R's (reduce/reuse/recycle) and identifying items that can be recycled.

If you want to grab all 8 of my Earth Day lessons, they are included in my "Kindergarten Earth Day Activities" pack.  You can click here or on the image below to check it out if you are interested!

The book I used in the lesson are:

"The Earth Book" by Todd Parr

"Why Should I Protect Nature?" by Jen Green

"Why Should I Save Energy?" by Jen Green

"I Can Save the Earth" by Alison Inches

"The Magic School Bus Gets Recycled" by Anne Capeci 

(I can't seem to find a link for Chapters or Amazon for this one.. I got mine from Scholastic!)

And here are some of the centres I set out!

1. REUSE MARKERS & NEWSPAPER FOR PAINTING

We collect our dried up markers in a bin and I show them how we can put the tips in a bit of water to make watercolour paint, instead of throwing them out right away! Then, we use newspaper instead of  regular paper to show how we can reuse it instead of putting it in the recycling right away!

I also cut some circles out of the newspaper and invite the students to make their own earth paintings!

2. BALLOON EARTH PAINTING

Here students are invited to use the balloon to mix and stamp an Earth on the newspaper!

3. EARTH PLAY DOUGH

To practice spelling the word "Earth" I put out these Earth play dough mats for students to create the Earth and spell the word with green and blue play dough!

4. CAN YOU MAKE THE EARTH WITH MARBLES?

Here students are invited to create a representation of the Earth with blue, green and clear flat marbles.  They have the option to record their work and trace the sentence describing their work.

 5. CAN YOU SORT THE RECYCLING?

I put out some recyclable items and some labelled pan and the students practice sorting the recycling based on what the items is made of.  We do this after we read "The Magic School Bus Gets Recycled" and we discuss as a whole class examples of each material.  The kids love this as it is so hands on!

6. BOTTLE CAP COUNTING MATS

For this centre, we reuse plastic water bottle caps as our manipulatives.  Students pick a number and then find the corresponding picture and number word representation.  Then they show the number on the ten frame with the water bottle caps.

7. ROLL & COVER RECYCLABLES!

Again we use water bottle caps as out manipulatives!  Students are invited to roll and cover the number they roll.  I made the dice out of a foam cube I bought at Dollarama and just wrote numbers on it with a flair pen.  You can also draw dots or tally marks, whatever you want your kids to practice for number sense!  The students can also play this as a partner game (you can provide 2 game mats or 2 different coloured bottle caps).

8. GARBAGE TRUCK NUMBER ORDER

There are always still a few kids who need practice with ordering numbers, so I made this little number order puzzle for the students to try! The number strip at the top provides extra support for the kids who need it.

BULLETIN BOARD:

Last year, we displayed our learning on our inquiry bulletin board!  We also planted flowers as part of our "How Can We Protect Nature?" lesson (bottom right).  We also had some Earth Day writing paper out during this unit at the writing centre, so I put some of their work up that they did there (top middle and right: "What can you do to take care of the Earth?" and "We can help the Earth by reducing the use of energy.  How can you help reduce the use of energy?"

All of the printables, writing papers and centre activities you see in this post are in my "Kindergarten Earth Day Activities" pack.  You can click here to read more about what's included.

I hope that gives you some ideas for teaching your Kindergarten friends all about Earth day and what we can do to help the Earth!

- Yukari

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Inquiry: Bees

Hi guys! I'm here to share all about our bee inquiry that we just wrapped up in our classroom.

It all started when we were learning about where bees go in the winter during our animals in winter inquiry.  You can read the blog posts for that inquiry here (part 1) and here (part 2).

When we were learning about what animals do in the winter, the question I had was "where do bees go in the winter?"  We read a website and found out that the bees stay in their hives and they huddle around the queen bee.  The worker bees work together and rotate being on the outside of the huddle and near the middle so they don't freeze but the queen bee always stays in the middle.

After we learned this one of my students asked "Why doesn't the queen bee have to move? Why is she so important?"  I thought that was a great question and since we were just finishing up our animals in winter inquiry, I thought it was a great time to move on to the next one!

So first, we started with a K-W-L chart.  First we recorded what we already knew about bees.  Then the students shared what they were wondering about bees.  I recorded the information on sticky notes and put them on the K-W-L chart.

Then I took those questions, grouped them in categories and started researching and lesson planning! I reserved books at my local library and also asked my librarian at our school to pull some books about bees for us.  I also hopped on Pinterest for some art and centre ideas.  After I gathered my books, I read the books and started to plan my lessons.

Here is what I came up with.  You can download my bee inquiry plans to use a reference if you need ideas for planning your own inquiry!  Click here or on the image below:

For the first lesson, we read "Give Bees a Chance" by Bethany Barton (which I highly recommend, lots of cool facts and it's written with lots of humour, great for Kindergarten!).  We talked about why bees sting us (self-defense) and then I invited any student who wanted to to come to the guided table and write a sentence about something new they learned about bees from the book.

Here are just a few examples: 

"I learned that bees have 5 eyes."

"I learned that bees have 2 stomachs."

You can find these inquiry writing sheets in my "Inquiry Writing Templates for Kindergarten" pack.  You can click here if you are interested in checking it out!

The next day we read a page from "Buzz About Bees" by Kari-Lynn Winters to learn about what makes the queen bee important.  Then we wrote what we learned on the easel.  During centres, I had the girl who originally asked the question about queen bees come and record the information on paper and add a picture so that we could display our new learning on our inquiry board.

The next day we read the book "Bee Dance" (which was suppose to be lesson #4 but I switched lesson #3 and #4 from my original plans because I wanted to introduce the centres that go with lesson #4 earlier) and learned why bees fly and how they communicate with other bees.

Then I introduced these three centres:

1. NECTAR TRANSPORT CENTRE

Students were asked to pretend that the eye droppers were bees, suck the nectar up from the flower (the "nectar" is just water with yellow food colouring!) and transport it to the hive.  I have these hollow hexagon pattern blocks that were perfect for this activity!  The kids absolutely LOVED this centre and it's great as a small world play/fine motor centre too!

2. POLLEN TRANSPORT CENTRE

We also learned that bees carry pollen back to the hive so we pretended that the yellow tweezers were bees and we practiced flying the "pollen" (yellow pom poms) to the hive.

3. BEE SMALL WORLD PLAY

We used regular wooden pattern blocks, some bee figurines, a grass mat and fake flowers for the students to create their own bee story or to retell "Bee Dance".

The bee figurines are from Michaels and the grass mat and fake flowers are from Dollarama!

There was lots of amazing stories being created here and I was happy to hear some of them using the vocabulary that we had talked (e.g. nectar, hive) about during our inquiry lessons!

We also jumped ahead the next day to lesson #8 since I wanted to put this craft out asap during centre time!  We that bees have three body parts, the head, the abdomen and the thorax.  Then the students were invited to show the three body parts and look closely at the book/example to create a realistic bee! I provided tracers for the head, abdomen and thorax and some punched out circles for the small eyes (I used our hole puncher).  Everything else they had to cut out themselves!  It was a bit of a challenge for some of them but they did a great job! And they all came out so unique!

Here is a picture of the set-up for the centre.  I had the students use laminating film scraps for the wings.  You can see the students' paper bees on the bulletin boards at the end of this post!

I also put out this invitation to draw and label a bee as one of our centres!  My kids love to draw so this was a perfect way to have them practice drawing realistic bees and identifying their body parts.

I drew and made the directed drawing cards myself (I also made a more cutesy bee, not pictured here).  I've had some requests to share these so I made them both available as a free download.  You can click here or on the image below to grab them!

Next we moved on to lesson #3 and #5.  We read "The Bee Book" by Charlotte Milner and investigated why bees come out when it's summer and why bees make honey.  We then recorded our new learning and added the writing to our bulletin board.

The next day I set out this invitation to create a hive for the bees with paint!

Students were asked to stamp the hexagons with yellow paint on the first day to make the hive and let it dry.  The next day they were invited to add paint to the bee stamp and stamp on some bees!

The bee stamps didn't show up well if there was too much paint on them, so I made sure to model to them how to use a paint brush and brush paint thinly on the bee stamp.  I also had them practice stamping on GOOS paper first before stamping on their hives.

I got the bee stamp from Michaels.

Lastly, we read about how wasps and bees are different from "Buzz About Bees" (we used this book a lot during this inquiry!) and created a t-chart as a class.  Then we had the students who had this wonder originally come and record some of the information we learned to display on our bulletin board.

Here is a look at our bookshelf during our bee inquiry!  Some books we read together and some were for independent reading during centre time.

Finally we transferred our work from our inside bulletin board to our outside bulletin board to make space for new inquiry documentation and to share our work with the rest of the school!

I printed some pictures I took while students were playing at centres and had some students come and write about what they were doing.  We talk about the purpose behind this (so when other teachers and kids from other classes are looking at our bulletin board, they will know what we were doing) and the kids get really good at explaining what they were doing!

The kids also made these egg carton bees with our CYW placement student (who is FANTASTIC.  I have her for one more week and I will sure miss having her in our room!!).  They LOVED making these and it was also a hands-on way to review the parts of a bee (e.g. it has 2 antennas, it has 3 eyes, it has 3 body parts etc.)  The students used yellow acrylic paint to paint the head, abdomen and thorax on the first day, black paint to paint the eyes and stripes on the second day, and added the legs, antenna and wings on the third day.

I had my CYW placement student hot glue the egg cartons, and cut small slits in the egg cartons to thread the antennas, wings and legs into.

And that's it for this inquiry! Now we have some wonders about the sky (particularly about clouds and thunder) so I'll be doing some planning over spring break to bring those wonders to life!  It also looks like it might lead into a space inquiry! Looking forward to sharing that with you in a month or so!

- Yukari

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