City Dog Country Frog Activities and Mentor Text lesson ideas are here! Find reading comprehension and writing ideas to use with this amazing book by Mo Willems. City Dog, Country Frog Mentor Text I don't remember the exact moment I fell in love with City Dog, Country Frog by Mo Willems. I think it was actually a love at first sight sort of thing. I love the theme that two individuals who are so different can still find a true ...
Animals
What if You Had Animal Parts Lesson Plans.. Looking at text details
What if you had animal parts lesson plans for kindergarten and first grade! My students have always loved these books and we are really excited to that we are creating a new Engaging Reader series for these an awesome read aloud! What if you had animal parts books! If you are not familiar with these books, here is a peek! These are the four books (affiliate links) we wrote lesson plans for: What If You Had Animal Feet? What If ...
Dinosaur Week is HERE!
Kindergarten dinosaur week activity ideas for the classroom are here! Nothing made my students more excited that a dinosaur themed week! Here are some ideas you can use! Dinosaur Read Aloud Books We love Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs by MoWilliems. This book is hilarious! For this book we focused on the following reading skills/strategies: Making Predictions Retelling with Details Making ...
Zoo Lesson Plans
Zoo Lesson Plans for the book A Sick Day for Amos McGee! This is one of my favorite books, so when Deanna Jump and I were putting our reading comprehension units together, I KNEW we needed this sweet story. A Sick Day for Amos McGee is the story of one zookeeper who takes fantastic care of the animals in the zoo. He is so gentle and loving to the zoo animals. Then one day, Amos gets sick and the animals go to his ...
Otis Lesson Plans ~ Farm week
Otis by Loren Long is one of my favorite stories. So naturally, we included Otis lesson plans in our Guiding Readers series! Deanna has worked hard and added the Otis craft to the units. Close Reading Otis is such a sweet character. I sincerely cry when I read this book because he is so precious. If feels like the message of kindness and selflessness in our world has never been more important. So spending a week on this book is worth ...
Little Red Hen Lesson Plans (FREE Resource)
The Little Red Hen is one of our favorite traditional stories. Here are lesson plans for your Little Red Hen week (or weeks). Reading, writing, math, crafts, and science lessons make this easy for teachers and fun for your students. I even whipped up a little FREE file for you too! The books! So many Little Red Hen Books! Here are the three that are featured in our Little Red Hen Unit! The Little Red Hen by Paul ...
Ocean Week Lesson Plans (AKA Shark Week)
Do you love ocean week as much as me? Here is a little ocean week AKA Shark WEEK flashback. This might be my favorite theme to teach all YEAR! I can't get enough! Perhaps it is because I lived the majority of my life in San Diego or I first considered a career as a marine biologist or maybe because ocean week is a signal that the end of the year is right around the corner. Regardless, I seriously love talking about the ...
What a PIGSTY of a week!
This week we read Pigsty by Mark Teague and we had quite a week! As you may know, we take one book and dive deep into it for an interactive read aloud. This enables us to teach with deep comprehension. Close Reading During these lessons, I do the reading work and the students do the thinking work. Most of the thinking is done with student-partner conversations, but we also respond with writing too. Why do you think ...
Oviparous Animals Lesson Plans ~ Peek at my Week
We have always loved learning about oviparous and viviparous animals! Here are some oviparous animals lesson plans for your kindergarten class. Last year we loved learning about oviparous animals during our April's Guiding Readers . We spent the week digging deep in the book, Chickens Aren't the Only Ones by Ruth Heller. We wrote about our Schema. And documented our new ...
Retelling with Tacky the Penguin
Here are some kindergarten penguin lesson plans! We have always loved learning about these funny little creatures! Tacky the Penguin We are able to pair informational text with narrative text perfectly with this favorite book! We sure love this book! Tacky the Penguin: Making Predictions During the reading of the book, we paused to make a few predictions. Sometimes our writing is just creating illustrations. ...
Owl Lesson Plans ~ Peek at my Week
Owls are fascinating and this informational text, White Owl, Barn Owl by Nicola Davies, is spectacular. Just like her other texts, she has both a narrative and informational text in one! We have also used resources from Deanna's Owl Unit... love it! Her informational book was FILLED with great photos and facts. Here are some photos of this unit from a few years back.While we constructed sentences we were able to sneak in some ...
Bat Lesson Plans ~ Peek at my Week
Bat week is always one of my favorite weeks! Here are some kindergarten bat lesson plans, including a few books, a video, and printables! This is my ALL TIME favorite read aloud. I love just about everything Nicola Davies has ever written. This video has some great information about bats. After reading and learning about bats, we put our new knowledge to print in our content area study. Deanna's Bat unit ...
Peek at my Week – Kindergarten Farm Activities
Here is a peek at my week filled with kindergarten farm activities! Farm Themed Sentence Work Each morning we start our day with these Read, Trace, Glue, and Draw pages. There are two levels so you can differentiate the work. Some students write the sentence... and some students trace the sentence. I always love to see their illustrations.! Farm themed math and literacy activities Stamping station is always fun! This farm ...
Ocean Week: Part Two RD
This week we got to preview Deanna Jump's new Ocean Animals unit... It! Was! Perfect! Here is my techie tidbit. I use doceri to link my iPad to my computer. My Promethean Board is a bust. After only a about a year of solid interactive awesomeness, my pens started to fail. The fix? Open and close the program, jiggle wires, reboot system... with 5-6 year old children waiting... um... NIGHTMARE! No Thank ...
Peek at my Week-Oviparous Animals-FREE download RD
I love, love teaching about oviparous and viviparous animals. Eggs are coming to our building this week... exciting times! At the end of the week, my sweeties feel so smart (and they learned TONS along the way). We will be doing our Oviparous Poem this week (no picture...fail), but you can find it in my March Poetry Unit. I have completely updated this unit. If you have previously purchased it, you can get ...
Peek at my Week-Groundhog Week!
He's back! I sort of love the non-pressure of Groundhog's Day! A new month means it is time of me to swap out my monthly staples! Our writing station is up and ready for February! I am ready for President's Day... Knock on wood... we will not have a snow make-up day that day. We have not seen much snow here in Missouri this year, but we are playing games like we have! Differentiated Cubes can be found HERE. My class never ...
Peek at My Week: Polar Bear Week
Polar Bear WEEK! Here are some kindergarten polar bear resources! Source These looks like really simple cupcakes (just my level of cooking expertise... simple)! I think we can do it! Source: Create These are pretty sweet! Source: Clown and Poodle This week our reading will be centered around this book. I LOVE this book! It is written in both a narrative and informational ...
The Emperor’s Egg Unit of Study
Kindergarten Penguin Resources for informational text study makes penguin week was pretty spectacular! Penguin Informational Texts The Emperor's Egg by Martin Jenkins is a fantastic book! This book pairs informational text with narrative texts! Love it! Here are a few pages of the book. We also have this book as part of our Reading Comprehension/Guiding Readers units. We learned a TON about penguins. ...
Peek at my Week-Bats! (and a Giveaway)
Last week was a busy week. On Wednesday we celebrated Missouri Day at our school. We kicked our day off with some square dancing. Yes, that is me Do-Si-Doing with the 4th graders. They needed a stand in, so I was it! They kept me straight, nothing got broken... I call that a WIN! We got to feed a mule (Missouri's state animal)... plus a million other fun adventures! Next week we are going to really hit those long vowel sounds. I ...
Peek at my Week (week 5)
Fall is in the air. This weekend is downright chilly! This week we're working with these kindergarten farm lesson plans! Last week we really zeroed in on rhyming. I used the cute Show and Tell Apron to play a little "odd man out" with rhyming cards {unit coming soon.} I love the apron that I got while I was in Vegas. Rumor has it that these aprons sold out at the conference in less than 24 hours. She has added them to her TpT store and ...
Peek at my Week-Superheroes and Princess…and more Eggs!
So my class is CrAzY over princesses and superheroes! On ANY given day, I will see at least one of these themes show up in their daily writing. So when one of my followers asked me if I would make some games based on these themes... I said... certainly! Thank you Lori who emailed me and pointed out (in the sweetests of ways) a funny error I made. Super Heros are REALLY big sandwiches. I actually meant Superheroes. I fixed ...
So… How are my stations going? Oviparous Unit
Ta Da!!! Here are some photos! Silly Sentences... Not sure why I did not crop my foot out... but I sort of like my spring-like red flats! Rainbow Centers from Little Warriors. We are measuring here! Oviparous Making 10 Spin and Graph Math Journals for March... I promise to have April's ready by this weekend!!! Star Wars CVCe Game Stamping Word Fun Writing Work Station for March...Again... I promise ...
Lesson Plans for Next Week Oviparous Animals…Some Freebies!
First I made a little oviparous book FREEBIE for you! It is truly nothing fancy, but the final pages will serve as an informal assessment at the end of the week. April from Chalk Talk: A Kindergarten Blog has put this very informative unit together. With her permission, I created a few pages for me to use next week. She was gracious enough to let me share them with you. This will be our shared reading. Click to ...
The Chickens are coming~Oviparous Math Stations
Oh My GOODNESS! Our eggs are coming this week so I decided to make an Oviparous Math Work Stations for my class to use while we are getting ready for these babies to hatch! As you know, I (like many) use a ton of spinners. I know you can use the brad and paperclip trick, bit I really like to have spinners of hand. They are actually really inexpensive. These are from Really Good Stuff. You get 10 for $2.99 These are from ...