For our last day of school, last year we had our very first Pirate Day! It really was a blast- simply the very best last day of school I have ever had in all of the years that I have been teaching! I have been waiting to blog about it so that it would be closer to the end of the school year for most of you. If you have been following my blog this year, you will notice that the pictures of the children are a bit unfamiliar. That’s because they are pictures of my students from last year! Hopefully, it will not already be too late for you to use these ideas, but if so, then maybe you can file the ones you like away for next year and go enjoy your summer!
Below are the activities that we did for our Pirate Day. We did each one during our small group rotation. I had no trouble getting lots of volunteers to come and help out on that day, given that it was a special “party type” of day. I also asked for donations of plastic gold coins so that we could give them out as prizes and rewards on that day.
1. Pirate Hat
I came up with this pattern for a pirate hat after a few tries last year when I had a student teacher. The children enjoyed putting glitter on their hats and swinging their fists with a hearty “Ar!” while they were wearing them! I am including the pattern as a free download for you this week as well. Enjoy!
2. Digging for Buried Treasure
I decided that the children should have the experience of following a map and then digging for buried treasure, so I decided to try to draw a diagram of our playground and use it as a map. Then I made a copy for each group of kids, and put a red X on the spot where their treasure would be buried. I buried their treasure in plastic ziplock baggies with their names on them all together in one spot according to the map. BUT... first I tore the map into about four or five pieces, and the children had to then reconstruct it (like a puzzle) and tape it back together. Then, once reconstructed, they had to follow the map and dig for their treasure. It was quite exciting!
Of course, the baggies all had an equal number of gold pieces, because young pirates are always happier with things like that are equal. :)
This game was definitely the highlight of our Pirate Day! It plays much the same way as many of the other Bang games that I have designed, but the children earn plastic gold coins in this game! It is lots of fun and is now for sale on my website on the same page as the other games that I have made.
For our special day, we also made little treasure chests by gluing popsicle sticks onto clean, dry milk cartons that were decorated with jewels and other plastic bling. It certainly added an element of fun and excitement to the game! There are, of course, blank cards at the end of the game so that you can add in your own words.
This is how you play:
1. Duplicate the cards. Cut apart and mix up. Put one Pirate “Ar” card on the bottom of the deck. There are blank cards at the end if you need to change the word cards.
2. The dealer gives each child a card in turn. The child attempts to read the word. If he does not know it, there is no penalty.
3. If the child gets a “special” picture card, he does the following:
* Parrot- The child says, “Polly wants a cracker!” and gets a piece of cereal or a plastic gold coin if you prefer.
* Pirate with eye patch- The child covers up one eye and tries to read a word on one of the teacher’s cards.
* Anchor- You’re sunk! The child has to sit on the floor until his or her next turn.
* Walk the plank- The child climbs up on his or her chair and jumps off, and then pretends to swim around the table. For extra fun, the child to his left can pretend to be a shark and chase him around the table!
* Peg leg- The child jumps around in a circle on one leg.
* Gold- The child gets two gold coins.
* Treasure Chest- The child gets three gold coins.
* Treasure Map- When a child receives both the left and right sides of the map, then he gets one piece of gold.
* Pirate- the child says, “Ar! Give me all your cards!” He gets all of the cards at the table except the dealer’s cards. (He does not get the other children’s gold.)
The child with the most cards at the end of the game is the first winner, and the child with the most gold coins is the second winner.
4. Little Pirates Playing Bingo
We also played bingo, such as CVC bingo and Sound Deletion Bingo and used those same gold coins as rewards. We may also throw in a round of Sounds Fun Bang , too, just for fun, since this year, my kids seem to think that this game is the equivalent of being in Vegas!. We will definitely also be singing the Pirate Ar! song from the Sounds Fun Phonics CD, too, since we LOVE that song!
At the end of the day, we had a pizza party for lunch, and then had some prize redemption tables so that the kids could trade in their gold coins for some prizes, such as candies, old books and donated used toys, etc. We also usually give them all a chance to go out and blow some bubbles outside, if there is time. They were also allowed to keep their coins, if they wished, instead of trading them in for prizes. The parent volunteers in my class are always so wonderful, that I rarely have to do much, other than plan and prepare for the day! As long as I am ready, they will take care of everything, and I just manage the group, direct traffic, and enjoy. I love my students and their parents! They are the best!
This week I have been trying to refocus and get myself back into the swing of things, because for us, Open House was just this Thursday, May 19th!! Yikes! Then comes all of the end of the year assessments and report cards to take care of, as well as placement cards for next year. AND, my class is now rehearsing for our end of the year play, which will be a performance of the Wide Mouthed Frog on June 2. Our last day of school is on June 9th. I know that this is pretty late in comparison to many of you! Spending a week in Orlando only gave me a taste, and now I am more than ready for summer. Aren’t we all? But for now, having 28 kids in the class is really weighing on me now at this time of year when assessments and report cards are coming due. And trying to catch up on teaching and testing the ones that arrive very late in the school year is of course, the most difficult part of all. My 28th student arrived at the very end of April!
1. We Have Chicks!
Our chicks hatched this week! We had seven hatch of the ten eggs, and six survived. I managed to move my incubator over so that it could be near enough to the document camera to project what was happening inside of it on the screen, so we all got to see the first chick hatch live! It must have been divine intervention, because when I arrived in the morning, one of the chicks was just beginning to make a little hole in the shell, so I put the document camera on top of the incubator. By the time the children came inside, he had a slightly bigger crack in the shell, and it was clear that he was determined to hatch!
So I invited the class next door to come in and watch, and ten minutes later, we had a newly hatched chick! The children were absolutely enthralled! Then we all sang Happy Birthday to the chicky. It was a priceless moment, and made all of the work that I had been through to make it happen worthwhile. One thing that helped a lot was the digital hygrometer that I bought to measure the humidity. I found out that the humidity makes a huge difference in the incubator when it comes to hatching, because if the air inside is not at very moist, the chicks have a very hard time making it out of their shells; it makes it harder to break through the membrane! So while they are developing, they need the humidity to be at about 58%, and then for the last three days, you have to raise it up to 65%. This is the first time I have done this. Also, I didn’t realize that it is important to have the thermometer sitting at the level of the TOP of the eggs, not laying on the bottom of the incubator. I discovered that even though you are raising the thermometer up only a couple of inches, it makes a HUGE difference in the temperature reading on the thermometer! So that meant I had to lower the temperature quite a bit to keep it at about 100 degrees.
I also learned that if you keep the temperature slightly lower, your chicks will hatch a bit later, and if you raise it up a bit higher, your chicks will hatch a bit earlier. My incubator was set at about 100.6 most of the time on my digital thermometer, and my chicks started hatching on the morning of the 21st day. However, the teacher next door to me had her incubator at about 99.5 or even a bit less, and her chicks didn’t start hatching until the evening of the 22nd day! She was convinced, at that point, that all of her chicks had for some reason died. but this was not the case. In fact, every single one of them hatched! In the five Kindergarten classrooms at our school, we all followed these instructions. One classroom had a malfunctioning incubator, and sadly, none of their eggs hatched. It was brand new, but didn’t hold a steady temperature, so we are going to return it. We gave that class a couple of chicks to have in their room, and told the children a little white lie: “The chicks hatched overnight.” They never knew the difference. :) All of the other classes had a good hatch rate: anywhere from 65 to 100%! So I think we did pretty well! Now all we have to do is find homes for all of those chickens! But even if we don’t, there is a local feed and grain store that sells chicks, and they are always glad to take them if we don’t find them a home.
It was very sad when one of the hatchlings didn’t make it, but we just had to talk about the fact that not every single chick is going to make it. Death, in fact, is a part of life. It is sad, but it is what it is. I removed the chick at lunch time and did not show the children the dead chick. On the big screen, we had been watching him sleep and try to dry off after hatching overnight with his brothers and sisters. Many of them were demanding to see him, but I refused, assuming that someone would be crying and go home incredibly upset, and then I would be dealing with the consequences of that. But other than that, the chicks that we do have are adorable, and were a great “hit” on Open House!
2. A Father’s Day Project: Super Dad!
We have come full circle now since I started blogging more regularly, and around this time last year I posted a Father’s Day card idea made from a Zero the Hero pattern that is for sale on my website! You can find the full write up here about how we did it last year, since we haven’t begun to think about Father’s Day in my classroom yet: http://heidisongs.blogspot.com/2010/06/super-hero-fathers-day-cards.html. The reason that I wanted to remind you all about this idea is because I have had several requests for a guided drawing project for a Father’s Day card to match the one I posted for Mother’s Day. And given the busy week that I’ve had with Open House this week, there was no way I was going to be able to accomplish that task at the moment, in time for people to make use of it before the school year ends. So I thought I would repost the project that I intend to do in June for Father’s Day. It came out really cute and the children really enjoyed making them, and singing the Zero the Hero song to their Dads for Father’s Day!
3. Handouts from the International Reading Association Conference
After my presentation was over at the IRA conference in Orlando last week, I spent some time online looking at all of the handouts that had been uploaded to their website (Link: http://www.aievolution.com/ira1001/index.cfm?do=cnt.page&pg=1021) from the other presenters. I have to say that I was disappointed that there just wasn’t very much that had been uploaded! But I went through the whole thing and found five handouts that I thought would be useful to you ( 12345 ). The first one was from a really great session that I went to on using e-books in the primary classroom, and their handout was FILLED with links to many other websites! I would definitely check that out if you like to let children read books electronically. Enjoy!
4. “Quotes for Teachers”
Each time I give a conference presentation, I try to put on a Power Point presentation in the room before I begin to keep people entertained as they wait for the session to start. The slides forward themselves automatically, and I play some of my music while it runs. Each slide has some of my favorite pictures of my students in action, and a little quote above it to read. The quote is usually from an educational author, a fellow presenter I respect, or a famous person in history, but often they are just quoted anonymously. I started collecting these quotes about a year ago with the intention of using them in a presentation one day, but not really knowing exactly how I would use them. I guess this is just representative of my “teacher hoarder” tendencies! When I find something on sale for a penny or a nickel each in August, I buy a class set of them, even if I don’t know what I am going to use them for! But anyway, since I have started showing this “Quotes for Teachers,” I have been asked several times to post the quotes themselves on my blog, because the slides advance too fast for people to write them down to share with others. So I am going to post a few of them for you here today and every few weeks over the summer. I won’t be posting all of them at once, because I am now up to 73! And I will surely keep collecting them. If you know of a great one that you would like to pass along to add to the collection, I would love to know about it, so leave a comment on the blog, or post it on the HeidiSongs Facebook page! Here are the first ten:
“To love what you do and feel that it matters -- how could anything be more fun?"
-Katharine Graham, American publisher
"Music is what the heart expresses when there aren't enough words."
Anonymous
“The brain relies on the body, its senses, and movement in order to learn. The brain is not a disconnected organ on legs. Movement, and the application of what we have learned should be an ever present part of the learning process.”
Author Unknown
"If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh. Otherwise, they'll kill you!"
Oscar Wilde
"Good teaching is 1/4 preparation and 3/4 theater."
Gail Goodwin
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work." Thomas Edison
"Everything You Really Need to Know About Health, You Learned in Kindergarten!
1. You can't say you don't like something until you've tried it.
2. Not hungry? Don't eat!
3. Go to bed on time.
4. Don't skip recess. Get up and move during the day!
5. Exercise like a child! (Find a physical activity you love and do it as often as possible.)”
By Amanda Litvinov, NEA Magazine
Good teachers are not born. They learn from the teacher next door!
Sheri Sutterley
"Teaching a child not to step on a caterpillar is as valuable to the child as it is to the caterpillar."
Bradley Miller
"Teach your child to care for him or herself and take care of their own needs. Excusing children from all responsibility leads to immature, spoiled, and incompetent adults.”
Author unknown
Last week, my class at school finished up our unit on Community Helpers with a trip to the local Police Station and the Fire Station. We had some fun meeting those local heroes, and even had a great pizza lunch on the way back, compliments of one of our wonderful parents who decided to treat the entire class! Meanwhile, I was thrilled to have been able to attend and present at the International Reading Association Conference in Orlando this week! It was a wonderful experience, and one I won’t soon forget! It was somehow very different for me than presenting for a group of Kindergarten teachers at a conference that had already heard of me and therefore “know” me. The result was that the presentation was definitely more stressful than usual, but in the end, I still felt that it went great! The room was full, and that in itself seemed to be a miracle to me, since there must have been at least 50 concurrent sessions going on at a time, and my own session was lost in their handbook like a needle in a haystack! No one was more surprised than myself when there were already people saving seats in the room BEFORE I even arrived to set my things up! I knew that we had many more people in the room than I was told was the capacity, because the correct number of handouts had run out, but the people had still kept coming in asking for them. I was glad that I had the opportunity of uploading the handouts to the IRA website as well. (and you can find it here, if you like).
I have also thought that the fire fighters would love to have some of these pictures as thank you notes, but it sure is hard to get the children to part with them once they are done! I think we will have to make another set so that we will have some extras to give away. Enjoy!
We finally were able to pick up the finished CD’s, and I again feel a tremendous sense of accomplishment! Every time I bring a new project from tiny little idea to completed project, I am amazed at how great it feels, and how blessed I feel to have such a wonderful support system in place that helps me achieve such things. My music arranger and co-writer for this project, Mike Cravens, worked many, many hours to make this CD special and fun for children to listen and learn to. I don’t know how many songs he had to “re-do” a second or third time because I wasn’t satisfied, because I lost track! And then there’s my wonderful husband Greg, who although he has been working tirelessly on so many projects, added the packaging and website design for this project to his already overflowing plate and did it beautifully. In any case, I have to say that I am SO very grateful for all of the help and support that I am constantly given, and I NEED to say that I would NEVER be able to accomplish any of these things by myself! I hope you enjoy this little video of my kids singing some of the new songs from this CD. :)
I find it really unbelievable how much the music really helps them remember the letters that go with each sound. This is making their writing go much faster, and is also making them better readers. The children are not relying on copying the letters off of the cards so much because they have the sounds and their letter combinations memorized. Even the children that struggle with reading and writing the most are noticing the letter combinations in print everywhere, and using the basic ones in their writing, such as the “oo” sound.
My class plays Bingo with one of my wonderful volunteer mommy helpers each week on Monday morning, and so I just had to add to our collection with a Sounds Fun Bingo game. It plays the same as all of the other bingo games that I have. In this game, the bingo caller says the sound, and the children look for the picture that represents that sound and cover it up as they hear it. There are six pictures on each card, and the object of the game is to cover up all of the pictures on the card. The first one to cover all of the pictures gets a bingo, but we always keep playing until all of the children at the table get a bingo as well. Then we exchange cards and play again! It’s a fun game, and a great addition to our collection of language arts bingo games.
4. Sounds Fun Bang!
Another game I created to go along with the new Sounds Fun CD and flash cards is Sounds Fun Bang! This plays just about like any other “Bang!” game, but has Sounds Fun characters on the cards. When the children get a card, they simply tell that character’s (or letters’) sound. There are also some “Bang!” cards thrown in there, and if a child receives one, he or she is supposed to say, “Bang!” and then gets all of the cards at the table. There are also some other cards that say, “Go again.” The child that receives one of these cards, of course, gets an extra turn. Since the children know the sounds very well at this point, the game moves at a quick pace. I think that for this reason, the kids find it incredibly exciting, and therefore it has become unfortunately pretty noisy! My kids LOVE this game! In fact, they love it so much, that it sounds a lot like a Black Jack table in a Las Vegas casino. They have been so excited that it’s hard to believe that there are no cash prizes stashed away anywhere on that side of my classroom, but so far, I haven’t found any. :)
As I move into the month of May and closer to the end of the school year, I am always interested to see how far I am able to take some of my little ones that seem ready to progress beyond the basics. So in reading this week, I decided to focus on words with an “ou” spelling pattern in the middle and see how the children could do.
Meanwhile, I am leaving on Friday for the International Reading Association Conference in Orlando, Florida, on a red-eye flight out of LAX! I am really excited to take this trip, and am even taking a couple of extra days to see some sights! Luckily, I have a wonderful retired teacher that subs for me, and I am sure that she will take good care of my class while I am gone. (My principal is also very cooperative about these conferences - thank goodness!) However, now that we are getting so close to the end of the year, my students are getting a bit rowdy, so I’ll keep my fingers crossed that I don’t have too much trouble “getting them back” when I get back into town next week. They are normally a sweet, but lively group, and quite talkative, so it might take some work! Let’s hope I don’t regret this trip completely!
1. Word Family of the Week Chart, and a Great Little Game
I have used this neat little pocket chart from Really Good Stuff each year since I got it about five years ago! I just stapled it up to the wall next to my calendar, and now we read it in the morning after our flag salute and calendar routine. On Monday after lunch this week, I also passed out dry erase boards, and played a little game with the children. I sounded out a word from the chart and asked them to think which word it might be, and write it down. I didn’t say the word; I only sounded it out slowly. That meant that the children had to think about all of the sounds that they heard and blend them together. Then they had to think about the sounds and write them down. I also gave them a hint as to what word it might be. For example, if the word was “pound,” I might say “This is the place where the dog catcher might take a stray dog.” I would still say that, because I was using the harder words from the “ou” word family, such as “found” and “count,” the bottom quarter of my class was still “guessing” at the word and what to write, but the rest of the class was following along just fine. So far, this seems like a very worthwhile activity, but I am VERY tired of the constant complaints about dry erase markers that don’t work, so I think that next time we do it, we’ll simply write our words in our journals with a pencil!
2. Another Fun Game: Count Around!
I mentioned this game already in a blog entry last August on Whole Group Games, but this is a great time of year to try it, so I thought I would give it a whirl this week. The kids LOVED it! And it really was a wonderful way to get them excited about counting past 100.
In this game, the children all stand in a big circle. Then you have one person begin the counting with number one. The person next to him or her says “two,” and the person after that says, “three,” etc. Each person that says a “Zero Hero Number” (any number that is a multiple of ten) is out and must sit down right where he or she is in the circle. The others continue counting around that child. Because I do have 28 students in my class, we made it all the way up to around 230 before our last student was out. It was interesting to watch the children struggle to continue counting those unfamiliar numbers past 100! It seems so obvious to us that if the number that comes after 78 is 80, then the number that comes after 179 would be 180. But this is beyond the experience of most of the children, so it is all brand new. All of the children but one were good sports about being “out” of the game when that happened to them, and there was a lot of cheering for the winner. All in all, I thought that it was a wonderfully worthwhile game to play, and even though it was tough to keep some of them quietly listening after they were out, most of them did really well. That’s not bad for the last fifteen minutes of the day!
3. We Love the “Says” Song! (Plus Some Tips On Using Sing and Spell More Effectively)
There’s something about this song that the kids just LOVE, so I thought I would share this little video clip with you. Even though it is shot from the perspective of the back of the children, you can just hear, see, and feel how excited they are about this song! It is from Sing and Spell Volume Five. You may want to notice that I have the word card in my hand, and I try to keep holding it so that the children can see it while I do the motions. I also try to remember to ask them what the word is both before and after the song plays. Later, we will write the word as the song plays either on paper or on dry erase boards. This helps transfer what they have learned in song to paper. It’s interesting to watch this happen, because you can see right away which children have misunderstood the lyrics or letters as they have sung them, because they will appear wrong on their boards or papers. Others will have no idea at all what to write, and will be trying to copy others’ work. In that case, I’ll work on this in small groups, singing the songs s-l-o-w-l-y with the children in these lower functioning groups, and helping them try to write the letters and see the connection between the words and the songs. This is something that usually is needed more towards the beginning of the year in Kindergarten, though.
We are just beginning our unit on zoo animals, so I will probably have them write a little book on what each animal says so that they can use their word. Using the word in a writing assignment always cements the concept in the brain and makes it stick! It really is a vitally important part of the “Sing and Spell” learning process. So I would highly suggest that you be on the lookout for “predictable book” types of patterns that include the words that you need your students to work on. That way, they could use them to write their own little books.
One of my goals has also been to create a set of worksheets that could go along with the Sounds Fun cards, so I decided to try to create a few of these to try out, and then share them with you here today. I am trying to make them a combination of the CVC book worksheets format, and the Sing and Spell Workbooks format. Maybe some of you can give me some feedback on whether or not these types of worksheets are effective or useful (or not)! And if not, what could be done better? That way, as I develop them, I can create the best possible product that will truly meet the needs of as many students as possible. In any case, I would appreciate any feedback that you care to give! Just leave a comment on the blog or on the HeidiSongs Facebook Page. Thanks!
I do plan on including some like the long vowel chick worksheet I gave away on my blog last week. I definitely want to include some more “fun” formats, (like maybe the “Secret Code” type?) so if you know of any other types that the kids really like, please let me know by posting a comment below. That way, I can try to imitate the format and then give it my own style.
5. Community Helpers!
We finished up our unit on Community Helpers just in time for Open House, which will be on May 19th. I worked hard over the last couple of weeks to get my bulletin boards up so that I could be gone this next week for the conference in Orlando, and then make it back just in time for the week of Open House. To decorate, I took some of the designs from KinderLit’s “Oh, What Can I Be?” book, which is a flip book that uses photos of the children’s faces for the heads of the people. I didn’t want to fiddle with trying to get photos scaled to exactly the right size, because I had done that last year for a similar weather book and never was happy with the results, even though I spent three hours on Photoshop tweaking those photos! So I just had them add the heads with paper, and then created my own hats to go with each one. I LOVE their designs! The only caveat I would say is that I often find that I have to fill in the gaps a bit with their instructions. For example, for the 13 Community Helpers in their book, there are just two pages of instructions. The cutting dimensions are included for the chest, pants, and boots. There are never any tracing patterns included, since they just don’t do things this way. You must figure out all of the other details yourself, the instructions being to “Add details from paper scraps, stickers, clip art, or magazine pictures.” The designs themselves are definitely top notch! It just takes time to figure out how you will do it and what sizes you will be cutting out all of those “scraps.”
Now I know that the gals at Kinderlit are really very successful (and extremely nice people!), so I know that their items must work beautifully for many people! The difficulties I have with this sort of thing probably arise more from my own need to be something of a control freak! Or maybe it was just that I really wanted to have these projects turn out well because they were to go up for Open House due to my own vanity? It’s just that I really can’t imagine handing a child a bucket of paper scraps, dumping them out on the table, and telling them to make a fireman out of them- and then expecting them to come up with anything recognizable! Let’s face it- I had trouble coming up with something recognizable, and I’m an adult! But I must confess that I really haven’t had the courage to try it. Maybe that’s just my own lack of courage and faith in my own little ones talking, though.
The fire fighter cutting directions I finally came up on my own, based on their designs, had eleven different sized pieces of paper to cut, plus the hat that I drew myself and xeroxed for the children because I couldn’t seem to make something out of rounded rectangles that resembled a fireman’s hat. Just as an example, of those eleven pieces, six of them needed to be doubled because each child had to have two, such as arms, legs, etc. In the end, there were so many pieces that I decided that I would make it a two day project, so we did the body on the first day, and the details such as stripes, etc., on the second day. Again, I really do LOVE their designs, and I own and use a lot of their things each year. But when I consider whether or not I want to try something, I always remind myself that the directions will probably take some tweaking on my part to make me, (at least,) happy.
Now for the vehicles, I started off using the patterns from the “Things That Go” book from TLC Lessons. The directions given by TLC are easier to follow, in my opinion, because they are more complete. I was able to just follow the cutting directions and make the police car in the book without much extra intervention on my part. I just simplified one part, because my aide pointed out that it would be easier to glue down one long bumper all the way across the police car and have one long piece of paper to deal with than two small ones that were easier to lose and get mixed up with the hub caps, etc. The only thing was that the car as it was designed as incredibly small compared to my existing “helpers,” so I had to double it in size so they could go together. That worked out fine! The only thing is that I wasn’t crazy about the fire engine in her book, and that was the last Community Helper vehicle in there that I needed. So I wound up making the rest myself! I’ll probably post them for sale sometime this summer when I find the time, because they were WAY too much work to give away! I love the way it all turned out, though!
