Well, spring is finally popping out all over in my classroom, even though it really doesn’t feel like it too much outside! We spent the week learning about the life cycle of the frog, and then kicked off our unit on community helpers by learning about fire fighters and having a big school wide earthquake drill on Thursday. Ah, Kindergartners just don’t understand very much about these things, do they? Even after we went though the whole “duck and cover” routine and accompanying explanation, and then exited the building, there were still questions such as “When will the earthquake start?” floating around the grassy area where we were all assembled for the drill.
Meanwhile, with illness at home, even though I have finished up the rest of the Butterfly Addition and Subtraction worksheets and also the Jellybean Addition and Subtraction Worksheets, they did not get posted in time for this blog entry. But look for them on the website in the coming week!
1. A Frog and Tadpole Art Project
We started our unit on the life cycle of the frog with a tadpole project on Monday and a frog project on Tuesday. I am sharing the patterns for these projects with you today, just for fun. The frog in particular is one of the simplest art projects that we make, and definitely one that the children can do on their own. As you can probably tell by the picture, the spots on the frog are made with Q-tips and paint. When the frogs were completed, I took the leprechauns down from the bulletin board that we made and replaced them with frogs, though not the tadpoles, since I really didn’t have a good spot for them. I left the flowers and insects up that we made last week, since they go well together.
2. Some Great Books to Read
We read a couple of books on the life cycle of the frog, and also a wonderful pop up book by Keith Faulkner called The Wide Mouthed Frog. The children always love this story, and the fact that it has pop up pictures is always a plus!
Another nonfiction book that I always rely on is The Tale of a Tadpole. This weekend, I am going to set up my classroom aquarium and go to the local pet shop to buy a couple of bullfrog tadpoles. We’ll watch them develop over the next couple of months. The kids are always so funny; last year, on the first day I introduced them, one child asked, will they turn into frogs TODAY?? I just hope that we get one that actually turns into a frog before the school year is over! Last year we were still waiting for that to happen on the last day of school.
3. Froggy Songs
Later this year, we’ll be putting on my newest play, which is actually the same story as the one in the book above: The Wide Mouthed Frog! And it turns out that the overture for this play is a song that teaches the kids about the life cycle of the frog. I taught it to the kids on Monday. (It’s funny how it all works out, isn’t it? You would think that somebody actually PLANNED it that way!) So on Monday morning, they were all swimming around, pretending to be tadpoles with wiggly tails, and then growing legs, losing their tails, and becoming frogs with great big mouths that hopped all over the place. It was too cute! The second and third songs in the play are also frogs song, too: “Brr-ump Went the Little Green Frog” and “Hopping Along”. So we are going to learn those songs now, and then we’ll already have them down when it is time to get ready to do our play in May.
Of course, we also had to sing the “Have” song from Sing and Spell Vol. 2, because it says, “Have you got a froggy singing in a pond? H-A-V-E, have! H-A-V-E, have!” Luckily, we already know that one.
4. Froggy Guided Drawing
There never seems to be enough hours in the day to get everything done that I would like to do with the class, but on Monday I guess God was smiling on us, because we actually had enough time to do a little bit of guided drawing! Of course, the only reason why I was able to fit it all in was because they didn’t get to go outside for recess due to the rain. Now THAT was a big bummer, but let’s not go there!
I decided to have them draw on white boards this time, since that way I they would be able to change the expression on the frog’s face without starting over completely. That way it would be much easier to just change the eyes, etc., rather than begin again with an entirely new drawing. I was also trying to teach them to think about including some emotions in their little story books they have been writing other than just “happy” and “sad.”
I am super proud of my children and how well they are writing these days! I love that they are off and running with inventive spelling, and that their stories are (usually) fun and creative. We have been making some graphic organizers to help us brainstorm and organize our thoughts about the different topics that we are learning about, and I think that this does help the children get include more information in their writing, particularly in regards to non-fiction topics. I also really love the way the pictures that they learn to draw in our guided drawing lessons show up in their writing.
I think that this really helps free some of them up to better illustrate their little books and stories with confidence. So enjoy the pictures I am posting today of their recent writing samples!
Spring is just around the corner, and my room is all decorated with flowers and leprechauns now. The conference in Illinois last week was great, and I met lots of really neat people! I had a chance to chat with Donna Whyte (http://thesmartiezone.com/) and hear her speak, and hear Kim Jordano (http://www.kinderbykim.com/) speak on “Math Walls,” which was something new to me. Once I get it all figured out and try some of it, I’ll share it with you, too! I also had a chance to hear Michael Heggerty speak on his Phonemic Awareness Program that I use. It is an excellent program. If you are not familiar with it, I highly recommend it! I had some fun shopping in the exhibit hall, too! And then my husband and I finally got a chance to get out for a day and check out some of the sights and sounds of Chicago! We went to the Field Museum of Natural History, the Shedd Aquarium, and the Art Institute of Chicago, which was definitely the highlight for me! The annual St. Patrick’s Day parade was going on at the same time. I have never seen so many “Pat-Happy” people in one place in all my life! It was quite an experience! But the thing that stands out most of all for me is the mind-numbing COLD!!!! This little California girl was freezing cold all the time, and very happy to get back to the nice, mild, 60-75 degree weather here at home. :)
As for my class, they are still in the midst of book making fever, and now they are writing “chapter books.” This means that at random places in the middle of the book, they are inserting the words, “The end” and then continuing on the next page! One of my little sweeties kept referring to his work as “Tractor One” and “Tractor Two” rather than “Chapter One” and “Chapter Two.” I love it- too cute!
1. A Behavior Contract- (How I Solved the Most Difficult Behavior Problem I Have Ever Encountered!)
A couple of years ago, there was a mom that requested me to be her child’s teacher because she had heard that I was a very firm and no-nonsense kind of teacher. And lucky me- I wound up with a child in my class with the most difficult behavior problems that I had ever encountered after about 23 years of teaching. Even two months into the school year, this little girl was still refusing to join the group, rolling around on the carpet at the back of the room, yelling and screaming at random times, pushing and hitting other children, etc. She was even expelled from the school Day Care after two weeks because she pushed a child off the monkey bars and broke the child’s arm. She always claimed that someone was being mean to her or refusing to play with her, but when I watched her carefully throughout the day, none of those things ever occurred except in her imagination. She had a host of professionally diagnosed problems, including ADHD, ODD, (Oppositional Defiance Disorder), and Bipolarism. The poor little girl was just about as angry and messed up as you can possibly imagine, and nothing I tried worked at all with her. When she did sit in her spot on the carpet, she was usually rolled up tight in the fetal position. Other times she just rolled around in the fetal position from her spot to wherever she could roll during lessons. I called for help from the office as much as I could, but they were about as powerless to help her as I was, and of course eventually had to return her to my room. Her mother did want to help, but had few skills or resources and lots of excuses. The child was medicated for her issues, and had been for some time, and occasionally she came in looking like a zombie and just fell asleep in a corner. The first time this happened, I sent her to the nurse and the nurse asked her mom to pick her up because she must be ill. The mother’s response? “WHAT? You don’t get paid if she’s asleep?” After that, (unless she was running a fever,) I just put her in my loft with a pillow and a blanket, and let her sleep until lunch time.
After more than two months of struggling with her in all of my usual ways to get her to comply, I had just about had it. I set out to “prove” that she couldn’t even behave for five minutes, so I set a timer. I said, “Let’s see if you can behave for just five minutes.” Every time she misbehaved (unless she was hurting somebody,) I ignored it other than saying, “That’s not what I am looking for; I want you to do this....” and I described what I wanted or pointed to a child that was modeling the desired behavior and simply reset the timer for five minutes. It took us until after lunch time when she finally made it through a full five minutes. When the timer finally went off, the whole class broke into cheers! I never told them to do this; I think they were just as tired of it as I was, because she was making it so that I simply couldn’t make it through a single lesson. Even the child herself stood there with her mouth agape, amazed at the fact that she had made it and was receiving some positive reinforcement from her peers and her teacher! I congratulated her on her success, (even though I suspected she was just plain exhausted and enjoying the story I was reading,) and invited her to come up and put a rubber stamp on an index card that I happened to have handy. She loved that, and of course the other children wanted one, too. I was more than happy to oblige! I gave everyone as many rubber stamps on their hands and on index cards as they liked until they got tired of receiving them. I reset the timer and asked if she could do it again. Sometimes she hit the mark and sometimes she did not. But that day, she went home having earned a little bit of genuine praise and approval from her peers, and she was clearly much happier.
After a couple of days of the timer going off every five minutes and putting stamps on index cards with more and more success, I decided that I would make a formal behavior contract for her that would show which times of day she was earning the stamps and when she was still having trouble, etc. We continued with the timer going off every five minutes for at LEAST a month! Yes, it was very disruptive, but not nearly as disruptive as having her constantly misbehaving and having to deal with THAT as an interruption to my lesson instead! Incredibly, the children, (bless their little hearts,) continued to cheer for her success, even after a month of the same. I eventually got a chance to talk to the class while she was visiting the school counselor, and explained to them that I knew that the system was unfair, but she clearly needed the stamps and they really did not. I gave them stamps and stickers and rewards as much as I could, but they seemed to understand that their classmate had a problem that made her situation different, and they accepted it as really only children can. If only adults could be that understanding and accepting of differences!
After about a month, I started to see if perhaps the child could go a bit longer than five minutes. I started to ask her, “Can you go six minutes today?” “How about seven?” Eventually, we made it up to ten and then twenty minutes! I was careful to ask her how she was doing, and if she said she couldn’t make it more than five minutes, I accepted that and set the timer for five minutes. She seemed to understand that I was trying to help her be successful, and we were working together to make that happen. But still, there were many, many, times when I had to restart her timer. It was a much better consequence for her than attempting to put her in time out, which wasn’t helping change her behavior anyway. And the school counselor still helped her a lot. By the time Easter rolled around, she almost never needed the timer anymore! We just put stamps on the contract for each instructional period of the day when she had behaved well. I am sharing a more “generic” version of that contract with you here today that I am hoping might be useful to some of you.
This child’s story ends well! She rose out of the low group and learned to read and write fairly well by the end of her Kindergarten year. When I think back on what we went through during the first trimester, her academic and social progress is nearly unbelievable. She started Kindergarten with no letters, sounds, numbers, or social skills to speak of. She went on to become a successful first and second grader with (mostly) normal behavior patterns, having made more than a year’s progress in reading and math over the course of the two trimesters that her behavior was finally under control. A situation that seemed like a curse to me became a mother’s answered prayer! And I myself learned some valuable lessons on helping a child reach her potential both socially and academically.
2. A Social Story Book (When All Else Fails, Distract and Redirect!)
There were times when I could see that something bad had happened with this particular child before school or the night before, and that she appeared to be headed down a very self destructive path. I could only wonder what had caused this, but it appeared that the stamps and the timer were not going to help. So rather than let her spiral down into a situation where she might wind up hurting somebody, I decided that it would be better to invite her to do something else. Fortunately for me, she was very artistic and enjoyed coloring. I decided to make her a little book to read and illustrate in situations such as these. The words to this book form a “Social Story,” in which she would read be reminded of what her strengths were and what the class rules were. Then it reminded her of the rewards that she would gain if she were to follow them. At the end of the book, I even added a bunch of pages that said, “_____ is smart!” “____ is good!” “Mrs. Butkus loves ____!” “Hooray for ____!” Anyway, the procedure was that she would sit with someone (usually my aide or if available,) read the book aloud to the best of her ability, and then illustrate herself being good on one of the pages. If no one was available, she read it alone and then proceeded to color. In any case, it was a sufficient enough of a distraction for her to redirect her out of the unwanted behavior pattern until we could get her into our small group rotation, which was generally a very successful time for her. I am including a “generic version” of her Social Story for you as a download today, though I would say it is likely that if you wanted to use it, you would have to retype it to include the specifics of your own situation.
I think that it is important to mention that I am not the one that came up with the idea of having her read aloud the “Social Story.” A few years previous to having this little girl in my class, I had a little boy who had ADHD, and he had a therapist that visited him weekly. She gave him one of these little stories to read aloud to my aide when he needed redirecting and reminding. But I figured that he would like it better if I made it into a book that he could illustrate, so I retyped it and bound it into a little book for him. But this little boy actually hated his book! My aide called it “____’s Credo,” and he was so smart that he actually had it fully memorized and inserted things such as “I have to raise my STUPID hand” rather than “raise my hand,” as it was written. :) At the time, I had no idea that this sort of thing was referred to as a Social Story and is a rather commonly used technique for special needs children. I learned this last year at a conference somewhere. Oh, wouldn’t it be nice if they could cram all of the information that we need into our heads when we learn to be teachers, right from the start! But alas, that seems to be just about impossible. We learn as we go along, through trial and error and from the teacher next door. And now too, we learn from the occasional web page or blog or two!
3. An Ant Art Project
Today, I am giving you the pattern and instructions for the ant that was shown marching around the bulletin board with last week’s leprechauns We do this ant every year, and as art projects go, this one is pretty simple and doesn’t take much time at all. Of course, every time I teach about an insect, I read about it in both fiction and non-fiction books. And later this year, when it gets closer to Open House, we will get out my ant farm and order a refill of little ants and watch them go! I also have a Ladybug Habitat and a Butterfly Habitat from Insect Lore (http://www.insectlore.com/) that we use and enjoy each year. Last year, my timing was off on when the insects would hatch and mature, and they were all dead by the time Open House came along. The only thing still alive were our chicks! (YES, we have an incubator, and I intend to hatch some chicken eggs again this year, just in time for Open House!) The children get incredibly excited about the whole thing, and although sometimes it creates problems, I do think it is worth it. Last year, I collected five dollars per family as an optional donation to help pay for insect larva and tadpoles. I got bullfrog tadpoles at a local pet store, because I have had terrible luck with Insect Lore’s tadpoles, unfortunately. They tend to die quickly. Plus, they are also so small that they are hard to see. We even had a praying mantis egg sac, but they didn’t live for more than a few days, because apparently I couldn’t keep up with their voracious little appetites. The problem was that there were approximately 75-100 baby praying mantises! I should have let most of them go, but I was reluctant to do that when I knew that other classrooms might enjoy them. So I sent out an email asking the other staff members who wanted them. I gave away most of them, but all of them died within a week, no matter whose classroom they were in and who was feeding them. Boo hoo! I’m not sure if I want to try THAT one again. If anybody knows the secret to keeping these little critters alive, (even just a few of them) I would love to know about it! In the past, I have also had meal worms, but found these to be a somewhat uninteresting type of critter to keep in the classroom. We had a worm kit from Insect Lore as well, but the worms were rarely visible, and it just wasn’t worth the trouble. The butterflies, ladybugs, and ants are always fun, though.
4. Five Minutes of What?
Our school recently adopted a new system of discipline created by Accountability Concepts. In this program, the children are held accountable for their behavior and are expected to find ways to make up for things that they have done wrong. Their behavior is represented in a “Pyramid” that each child has on the wall. Kindergartners have two pyramid pieces: one for self control, and one for responsibility. A child that is not following the rules of the school loses a “Pyramid Piece” and therefore does not get to participate in anything fun that the class does until he or she finds a way to make amends for the poor behavior. This can be hard to do in Kindergarten, since the only thing that most children can think of to do when they have wronged another is apologize. (And let’s face it; often, they don’t seem particularly sorry, other than sorry to find themselves in trouble.) I sometimes have them write letters of apology, draw pictures of themselves being good, or help that person clean up toys, etc.
An important feature of this program is called “Five Minutes of Fun.” Each teacher is expected to stop everything and do something fun with their class for a few minutes each day. The children who have a piece of their pyramid down do not get to participate; they have to just sit and watch. It has of become a sort of tortuous time out, since they have to watch the other children doing something really fun while they just sit and watch. The hard part, of course, is thinking of something really fun and quick that you can do on the fly without losing control of the class.
As for me, I tend to rely on music for my classroom fun, and I wasn’t keen on the idea of keeping children out of this time, since this is how we learn! However, I figured that at least the others would be watching and listening, and this would have to be better than nothing. When we did my first round of “Five Minutes of Fun,” I knew I had to do it, but had no idea what exactly do to! So I did a few rounds of “make a funny face at a friend, and stand on one foot!” but that got us no where quickly. So I just said, “Okay, we’re going to sing a song, and this time, you can stand where ever you want!!!!!” Oh, my gosh- you would have thought they died and went to heaven! “You mean I can sing with my best friends????? OH, BOY!!!!!!!!” They were delighted! So I put on the “Come” song, which involves playing patty cake with a partner, and then the “Some” song, which does the same. Then we learned the “All” song, which is actually “Ring Around the Rosie” a la rock and roll. We also did the “Now” song, which has them forming a train and chugging around the room while tooting their horns, etc. We also did the “Friend” song, and they got to hold hands and swing their arms back and forth. I decided to ignore just about any infraction as far as nutty behavior was concerned, since this was, after all, supposed to be “Five Minutes of Fun.” Unfortunately, when you watch the movie, it may look like five minutes of chaos to you! But the kids just love this time of day now! And it really has turned out to be a powerful motivator. Often, the kids sitting at the tables who are watching look pretty miserable. Some are even teary- not that I want them to be crying! But I DO like it when I can use this as a reminder the next day and say, “Hey, don’t you remember yesterday how you lost your pyramid piece and then lost Five Minutes of Fun? You don’t want that to happen again, do you????” It really does work- MOST of the time. Nothing works ALL of the time, unfortunately. But then you knew that already, right? :)
This week I was only at school on Monday and Tuesday, and then flew out to Illinois for ASCD’s Kinder and Pre-K conference. I met a lot of wonderful people, and even had a chance to visit Mrs. McNamara’s PreK class in Schaumburg! Her students were absolutely delightful, and they were super excited to see me, which was incredibly fun for me. There’s nothing like being a celebrity to a preschooler! I guess I know now how Barney feels! Anyway, they wanted to sing some songs with me, so we started with the song for number one on Jumpin’ Numbers and Shakin’ Shapes, and kept singing until we got to number 26! The only reason why we stopped was because they had not yet been introduced to the number 27. And thank goodness, because I was certainly exhausted! It really was a delightful visit, and I was so happy that I was able to do it.
1. Bookmaking Fever!
A couple of weeks ago in my own classroom, something I like to call “Bookmaking Fever” broke out, and has been spreading like a virus ever since! I give all of the credit for this to one of my wonderful little students who decided to make a book at home and then brought it in to show me. He did a wonderful job of using inventive spelling to write his little story, and of course he illustrated the pictures as well. He titled his book, “How the Bear Got Into the Balloon.” (I believe he must have seen a teddy bear inside a balloon that someone gave as a gift for Valentine’s Day.) I was so excited about it that I asked him to read it to the class. It was such a cute story, and the kids loved it! He told us that he wanted to be a “story writer” when he grows up. Naturally, I saw my opportunity and grabbed it:
During their playtime, I quickly put out as many book making materials as I could find (such as scrap paper and staplers, etc.) and let them go. Voila! I suddenly had ten kids all excited about writing their own story books, and begging for a turn to read them to the class as well! The worst thing about it was getting them to stop when playtime was over, since many of them were still in the middle of their creations when it was time to stop. In years past when this type of thing has happened, I learned to give them a five minute warning that it would be time to stop, and I had to pull that technique back out of my pocket to make the transition a little easier.
Here are a few other things that I have been doing to make this time a little easier to manage for me in the classroom.
1. Give them lots pieces of paper pre-cut into small sizes (like 6” x 3”) rather than a bunch of full sheets of paper. Full sheets mean very large books, and the consumption of LOTS of classroom supplies. That’s bad news if you have to stick to a budget.
2. Have volunteers (if you have any!) pre-staple some little books together for children to write in if you don’t have time for (or can’t handle) a big mess on a certain day. Then the book making can go on, minus the mess. It’s not as motivational without the cutting and gluing for decorations, but it will suffice.
3. Consider giving the kids some little blank books to make during a small group rotation time to get those who are not choosing this at playtime involved in the process.
One thing I have to say that has made a great deal of difference in my students’ ability to write phonetically is the Sounds Fun flash cards. If you are not familiar with it, check it out here. This is a system for teaching kids to read and write sound “chunks” using picture cues and movement. For example, there is a card for the /oo/ sound with a monkey on it. Of course, the monkey goes “/oo/ /oo/!” So I teach the children to make a monkey motion and go /oo/ /oo/ when they see that card. There is also a king with an “ing” on his chest; the children bow to the king and say “ing” when they see this card. There is a pirate that swings his arm and says “ar,” a dog that howls and says “ou!” and a piggy that says “oy, oy!” Etc, etc., etc.! (Attention! We are all sold out of the printed Sounds Fun Flash Cards at the moment, but you can still buy the download and print the cards yourself if you want them immediately. We just had the artwork redrawn by a professional artist, and the new printed cards should be available in a couple of weeks.)
I have also been working on making up songs for this set of flash cards, and we are just about finished recording them! I should have that CD out by the summer time. I just need to give it a test drive in my classroom first to make sure that everything in there teaches what I want it to teach without any problems. So far, the kids are LOVING the songs! And those letter combinations are popping up all over their writing, and lots of the kids are recognizing those sounds in their writing as well. So it’s all good!
2. Leprechauns!
Of course, March is leprechaun month, considering Saint Patrick’s Day is coming on the 17th. We started reading books about leprechauns last week. One of my students asked, “Are leprechauns real?” I never quite know how to answer questions like these in regards to Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and so on. But my standard response is usually, “Well, some people believe in them and some people don’t. So it’s really up to you if you choose to believe!” One of my little ones cried out, “Well, not in MY world!” That really gave me a chuckle. So cute! I wanted to say, “Not in my world either!” but just I bit my tongue and just smiled.
Today I am giving you a free download of the patterns for the leprechaun that we make each year to decorate our classroom in March. This is a two day project for us, because it is too time consuming for the kids to do all in one day, at least in my opinion.
I’ll warn you that this leprechaun is suspiciously similar to the Christmas elf that I gave you in December! I’ll also go ahead and tell you that it took SUCH a long time to write up the directions and create the patterns for it (about four hours) that I would have preferred to sell it on the website rather than give it away, but the reality of the situation is that we may pull together the best free downloads from the blog and post them for sale when we have time. So you may want to peruse the blog as soon as you get a chance and download anything that looks interesting to you now, while it is still free! :)
3. Flowers and Leaves!
I always make these flowers every year to decorate my classroom, and put them around the insects that I gave you last week. When my class makes these flowers, I provide a whole bunch of tracers cut out of old file folders and let them choose which type of flower they would like to make. Today I am giving you the four different types of flower tracers in large and small sizes, plus a leaf pattern that I regularly use.
We usually do this as a joint project with our book buddies, and encourage them to be as creative as they would like to be. These are the rules: there are no rules! I put out hole punchers, crazy scissors, and lots of paper scraps in bright colors. I also give them some paper cut to the correct sizes for the different flower patterns, and some green paper for stems and leaves. I do give them some leaf tracers, but I also show them how to cut the corners off of a green rectangle to make a leaf with rounded edges.
Having some very creative finished samples for them to look at really helps! So consider asking a fifth grade class to make some samples for you that include paper that is curled or accordion folded, etc. Layered flowers with three dimensional elements look wonderful, too! Sometimes, we even put stickers on them, but I prefer to just give them lots of different colored paper and plenty of time.
We often do this project more than once in the spring time so that our class may be filled with flowers. I consider this to be a good use of time, since I am encouraging creativity here. Plus, the added bonus is that it really helps develop their fine motor skills. We also look at each one when we are finished and admire the elements of each one that we really like. Sometimes, having the children write about what their flower looks like is a good way to encourage descriptive writing as well. For example, they might write, “My flower is pink and blue. It has yellow dots and some curls.” Consider mounting the flower over their description and posting these papers in your classroom.
4. More Addition Ideas
Since my class loved the Shark Teeth Addition activity so much, I decided to do the same thing with an insect/springtime theme. I have included for you today a couple of worksheets in which the kids draw the spots on a butterfly or ladybug. A team mate of mine at my school also shared with me one of her ideas for teaching addition, and I have a picture of it here for you, though not the master. She drew it freehand. The children roll a die to get the correct number of petals on each flower, and then glue them on. Then they create a flower that has the total number of petals at the end, and write the corresponding equation. It came out really cute!
5. Shamrock Sight word Surprise
Well, last week I promised that I would give you another one of these water color resist activities with a St. Patty’s Day theme, and here it is! For those of you that are unfamiliar with this activity, what you do is simply take a white crayon and write a sight word in the spaces at the top. Then have the kids water color paint the paper any way they like, and the word magically appears! I always then drill my class on the words when the papers are dry. My kids love to paint these papers and lots of them choose to do them at playtime as well, so I always copy off enough for everyone to make two. In case you are new to my blog, you can find more of these papers by searching my blog for the following: Insect Sight Word Surprise, Sweet Sight Word Surprise, and Secret Sight Word Surprise. Enjoy!
Well, it is not spring quite yet, but we certainly have spring fever in my classroom! We have taken down the snowy white bulletin boards and replaced them with some flowery boards with insects on them. It’s wonderful to have some color back in the room! We are now beginning to study the life cycles of animals that hatch from eggs. Thanks to a wonderful volunteer dad, we planted some carrots and sweet peas this week, too, and that was exciting for the children. Since it takes less than a minute for each child to actually put the seeds in the ground and cover them up, I had him let the children ride the tricycles or draw outside with chalk on the pavement after they were finished planting. Usually, we have good luck with these plants and they grow nicely in our classroom garden, giving us a nice little harvest in late May.
I will, of course, be ordering insect larva from InsectLore.com soon, but I want the insects to be alive during our Open House in the month of May, so I am going to try to time it just right to make that happen. Last year, they all died just in time for the big day! We also have an incubator and a nice lady in town that gives us chicken eggs, so we’ll soon be having an adventure in hatching chicken eggs, too!
As for me, it seems that no sooner have I come back from the SDE conference in Oklahoma, I am off next week on Wednesday for ASCD’s PreK and K Conference in Schaumburg, Illinois! I’m thankful that my district administrators are so supportive and let me attend these conferences, and I must say that about this time of year, I am equally thankful that “conference season” is coming to a close! I have no more speaking engagements scheduled again until May, when I present at the International Reading Association Conference in Orlando, FL, and then that’s it until summer. For more info on conferences that I will be presenting at, please check my website for dates.
Spring Bulletin Boards
I love putting up spring bulletin boards! It is so refreshing to take down the stark white snowy backgrounds we have been staring at since the beginning of December and replace them with some nice, bright colors. The flowery background that I use for all of my bulletin boards (except the winter ones, of course) are made by dipping some toy cars into green paint and then rolling them on the paper! If you do that a bunch of times, you’ll have some wispy, grassy stems, especially if you can find some toy cars with some interesting tread patterns and different sizes of tires. Then, we added flowers painted with Q-tips and small paint brushes.
I saw this idea at an art display at a Kindergarten conference many years ago, and tried it in my classroom the following year. The children loved it! It was a lot of fun, but we did not wind up with enough paper painted to cover my large bulletin boards. So about ten or eleven years ago, I decided to take home the supplies needed to paint a LOT of butcher paper myself, laminate it, and then use it yearly as a background for most of my boards. My three daughters were about in the fourth or fifth grade, so they helped me paint. We even had a painting party and let them invite some friends over to help paint lots of grass and flowers! It was great fun. Then I cut the paper to exactly the right size that I would need for each bulletin board, and then labeled the back of each piece so that I would always remember which piece fit where. This has worked like a charm, and I used it each year! The paper you see in the photos here is the butcher paper we painted together so many years ago. Laminating it is the key to keeping it nice! True, the kindergartners did not help me create it, but that is the only part of the boards that they don’t help with, and I do let them make the grassy flowers using the toy cards to paint with sometime during the year.
In addition to the grassy flowers, I am including a free download of my patterns for the bee and the ladybug this week. The directions for each are included. I am thinking that maybe next year I will reduce the ladybug in size so that it matches the bee a little bit better, because it seems a little bit too large. Also, since I now have TWENTY-SEVEN students (insert heavy sigh here...), we are running out of room to display everyone’s work, so smaller projects will fit better in the available space.
Insect Sight Word Surprise
Back by popular demand, (or at least by request on my HeidiSongs Facebook page!) is another “Sight Word Surprise” water color resist project. I managed to create this little insect themed paper while sitting on the airplane to the conference in Oklahoma! I also made another one with shamrocks that I will be sharing with you next week. To do this, all you have to do is get a very cheap white crayon, such as the Roseart brand, and write a sight word in the circled spaces as shown. I run the copies on white cardstock, FYI. Then let the children water color the paper as they wish to make the secret sight word appear. When they are dry, you can drill the children on the words that they have painted. I always write a variety of sight words in the spaces so that there are several to read.
It was so much fun to be creative again, even if the only place I could squeak out a little time to do it was on a plane! Of course, what I SHOULD have been doing was the comments for my report cards, which turned out to be due YESTERDAY- surprise! (Ahem... I guess I missed that rather important email.... I found out that I had until midnight at lunchtime! I thought I had another week until parent conferences begin on the seventh.) So after a long day at work yesterday, I had to sit down and get all of my scores into the computer and write comments for 27 children, and get them all uploaded before midnight. It took me five hours, and by hour number four, I would have given just about anything to put the rest off til morning, but alas, that was not possible! Can you hear me whining???? It’s really no one’s fault but my own. :(
Ladybug Color By Nonsense Words Worksheet
One really neat thing about having a HeidiSongs Facebook page is the feedback I am getting regarding the projects that I am posting on my blog! I really like it when people tell me what is working for them and what is not. It also helps me to know what you would want more of! That is precisely why I made more of the Shark Teeth Addition Worksheets that we posted for sale last week. And that is also exactly why I made another Color By Nonsense word worksheet to share with you today! My class did this on Wednesday, and they really liked it. Of course, the students in the lower functioning groups had a bit more trouble with it and needed more guidance, but that is true of anything.
Unfortunately, Wednesday was our Spring Picture Day, and consequently we were so pushed for time that I didn’t get a chance to give a good introductory lesson for this worksheet, so when they got to the language arts table to complete it, a bunch of them were still a little unsure of what to do. It didn’t help that getting their pictures taken always seems to make them hyper! I suppose it is the change in routine that causes it. This was a problem because I was attempting to finish up the last few little bits of testing that remained, and I knew that it just HAD to get done, and time was running out. So I left my group with a volunteer that was also attempting to give Accelerated Reader tests at the same time, and she had to stop and answer questions whenever she could. It wasn’t perfect, but I still feel quite blessed to have such wonderful volunteers. FYI, at my school, we are working towards getting all Kindergartners to take an Accelerated Reader test every single week.
I have somehow managed to do this with only my students that I consider to be “really reading” and keep everyone else out of it, but I don’t know how much longer I will be able to get away with this! It is incredibly time consuming because each child needs individual help in taking the tests. I think it is a fabulous program for those children that can really read, and that’s sixteen of my 27 students. I just don’t want to bother giving children these tests when all they are doing is listening to stories read aloud; it just doesn’t seem worth the time and effort, but that’s just my humble opinion.
Number Pattern Blocks
Do you remember those Alphabet Pattern Blocks that I have told you about in previous blogs? Well, now we have NUMBER pattern blocks- and they go all the way from zero to thirty! My husband, being so good with printers and graphics and such, managed to get them all printed up on beautiful glossy white cardstock. They are printed in color on the front and black and white on the back. The printed cards just came in, and I used them on Thursday to review the numbers twelve and twenty-one. I made copies of the twelve and twenty-one pages in black and white, and then glued them down on a large sheet of construction paper Then I had the children rebuild these numbers with paper pattern blocks and glue them down. After that, they took rubber stamps and stamped the correct number of stamps above their number, circling groups of ten. I was even lucky enough to borrow some insect stamps from the teacher next door, too! If the children made too many stamps, then they had to cross those out. Tomorrow I am going to drill the children on the numbers by holding up their finished projects. Fun!
FYI, I think it works much better to have an adult place one little drop of glue on each pattern block space and then have the children just lay down the paper pattern blocks. If they handle their own glue, it takes MUCH longer to complete this project! They can certainly do it themselves, but just plan on giving them more time to get it done. In this case, I would probably just do the gluing on day one, and then the stamping on day two. It would also work fine if they laid down stickers rather than stamped pictures with a rubber stamp.
