More Fun in the Fall!

To continue our Friday Craftivity/Snacktivity I decided to go with the theme of candy corn. I altered a poem I had found and came up with the one pictured. It included more of our sight words, and mostly fall sweets. The students exercised their fine motor skills by tearing construction paper to make it a little more fun than coloring (and a lot less messy than painting!) They highlighted the high frequency words they knew, and practiced using our Eagle Eye skill of using the pictures to help figure out words they didn’t know.
Then for math time every student was given one candy corn and the sheet in the picture on the right. We are working on estimating for one of our science skills, and they were asked to estimate how many candy corn it would take to cover the big picture of the candy corn. I demonstrated some non examples (“I estimate 5!” and “I estimate 100!”) to show the importance of trying to get as close as possible when estimating. After writing down their estimate each kid was given a bag of about 50 candy corn. They laid them on the sheet and did a pretty good job filling it up! Then they scooped up the extras and put them in the baggie. Finally they counted how many candy corn (easy way to assess how many of your students are stills struggling with one to one correspondence, and counting above 20). When they were all finished, and I gave them a smiley face, they got to eat 10 and take the rest home!

Fall is Here!

Here in Florida, we desperately await the arrival of fall. After August and September and the insane heat and humidity, any break in the temperature and we rejoice! Well that first “cold” snap of the year came this week, and so I decided our Fun Friday activities would all be fall themed. First we did our Leaf Exploration Book
(available here for only $1: http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Leaf-Exploration-Book-378855 ). We start by going on a fall leaf hunt outside. Every student picks one leaf and brings it back to the class. We then do a few math/science activities with it, and record the findings in our book. We measured how many cubes long the leaf is, how many pennies it could hold (it turns out counters will work just as well when you forget the bag of pennies at home), how many pennies it will take to sink the leaf, and how long it takes for the leaf to hit the ground. The kids had a blast, and didn’t even realize that I was walking around assessing their measurement abilities. Happy Fall Y’all!

Our Five Senses Craftivity

On Fridays, I love to do some kind of craft with my kids. It’s so hard sometimes to squeeze in the cutesy, fun, developmentally appropriate lessons throughout the week, so I make it a priority to do it on Fridays. We are only about 6 weeks into the school year but my kids already ask me what the “craftivity” or “snacktivity” will be on Thursdays. They look forward to it at the end of every week, and it is usually my favorite lesson of the week.

This was our last week focusing on the five senses in science, so I wanted to make this craft to drive the concept home one final time. I had the students color their face, ears, and hands to match their skin color (I left mine white because otherwise I have a few friends who will copy whatever I do 🙂 ). We then labeled our drawings, and drew lines to the body part. Then the fun part, we put bells on our ears to remind us that they give us our sense of hearing. We put a smarty on our tongue to remind us that it helps us taste. We put sandpaper on one hand to remind us our hands can touch rough things, and a cotton ball in the other for when we feel soft things. I sprayed pompoms with perfume and we used that as our nose to remind us of our sense of smell. For the eyes I used googly eyes so the kids could watch them move. The kids loved it! At the end of the day quite a few of them refused to put them in their backpacks, for fear of it being squished. I wish I had remembered to take a picture of some of theirs, after they added details and colored it to make it look like them. They were a whole lot cuter than mine!

Edited to add link for free printable on my TeachersPayTeachersStore: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Five-Senses-Free-Printable-Activity-6761960?epik=dj0yJnU9SS1XWUlHaXBMcV85YjlBdmRSRXBuXzZhb0dZT0pZUk0mcD0wJm49aDJJZWpqLUpQbk40dGF6aVd3eUFwZyZ0PUFBQUFBR0J0NDVB

Forest Friends Five Senses

Ok, so I have to be the worst blogger in the history of blogging, but hey life gets busy sometimes! I recently moved to the Tampa area, and have been working my tail off trying to get acquainted with a new school district, and the ever changing demands of the Common Core. Yeah, yeah I know excuses, excuses, but better late than never.
On Friday we did our final review of the five senses. I have this adorable book called, Forest Friends Five Senses by Cristina Garelli. Each forest animal is having a problem with one of his/her senses, and has to go to the doctor to solve their dilemma. This was a great way for us to practice our skill, “LACC.K.RL.1.3: With prompting and support, identify characters, settings, and major events in a story.” We created a chart of characters, problems and solution. I am a terrible artist, particularly horrible at drawing animals. (They all tend to look like a teddy bear) So I enlisted the help of google image search for my clip art. For our reader’s response, the kids all picked one character and wrote about which sense was troubling them.