The Mitten

Last week's theme for stations was The Mitten by Jan Brett. After reading the story, I had students retell the story using the characters from the book. We cut out the paper characters and used a paper bag as the "mitten" to put the animals into. The ending of the story was the best because the tiny mouse causes the bear to sneeze and all the animals blow out of the mitten!

Matching numbers to number words

Counting and writing numbers

Finishing patterns

Ten Frames

Reading real vs nonsense words

Cracking the mystery code!

Rhyming words

Scavenger hunt around the room (tall, short and tail letters)

Sequencing numbers

In Science, we've been talking about hibernation and what it looks like with different animals. For example, bears sleep in dens and bats sleep in caves. We read Time to Sleep by Denise Fleming, and then did a Readers Theater where the students got to act as the different animals in the story. We learned what a script was because the kids had to use one in order to know what their lines were. The story is about winter animals who are preparing to hibernate. It starts with the bear who tells the snail that winter is coming, then snail tells the skunk, skunk tells the woodchuck, woodchuck tells ladybug, etc. It eventually ends up back with the bear and all the animals fall asleep.

The kids loved acting out the story! We will definitely have to do a Readers Theater again.

We made snowman glyphs in math. We've done several glyphs in kindergarten (at least once a month) and the students are getting very comfortable with them in the sense that it shows data about each other.

Other news of the week: We had our Junior Naturalists (older grade level students who help with environmental awareness projects at school) visit and review with us about our different colored trash bins. As a fun review activity, they gave each kindergartner a card with a picture of some sort of trash on it (some had food/drink, others had water bottles or paper). Each child had to go to the appropriate trash can based on what was on their card. 

Hope you're staying warm inside today! I don't remember having a winter this cold before. So crazy!