Hopping from K to 2!: Octoberfest for Kids

Monday, October 6, 2014

Halloween!

So October is officially here!

You can look forward to the crisp cool mornings and the beautiful fall leaves. I love this season and everything about Halloween! I still love to carve pumpkins, do all the fall activities that kids do, and try anything that has the flavor of pumpkin! Do you know how many items you can eat that comes in pumpkin flavor??

I created Octoberfest (for kids!) for some fun and engaging learning activities for kids K-1. If you grab it this month, there's a bonus inside for you!

Octoberfest For Kids includes over 110 pages of math, language arts, science, writing, and art activities. It has 4 emergent readers (non fiction and fiction) and is aligned to the CC.

You can grab it here and get a FREEBIE too!

Here are a few previews:

Practice missing addends with manipulatives

Non-Fiction & Fiction Emergent Readers

(with an interactive book that teaches positional words)

Uppercase and Lowercase Letter Matching Activity

*NEW* Label It! Activities- children practice the skill of labeling (this is one of my best selling items - see Label It! in my store for a closer view of this type of activity)

Grab a FREEBIE Color by Code Here!

Some other fall activities to enjoy:

You can keep them as leaves and measure them to see who has the longest leaf or create a picture with them!

This month, we're working on non-fiction text features. I decided to have the kids work on creating their own book about bats. This tied in nicely with Halloween and the kids were so fascinated by bats.

In the beginning, students created a web with all the things they knew about bats.

We read a lot of books about bats (both non-fiction and fiction) and learned how to take notes using a 'can, have and are' organizer.
We used the following books that were great for note-taking.

I liked this book because it was written in a Question & Answer format and was very simple for kids to understand. It's also great for teaching what types of questions you would want to find out about bats.

These are some great books available from Scholastic Books.

Amazing Bats is great for note taking for older kids. Below are other great books:

Stellaluna is a favorite book of mine. You can have your class listen to it on storylineonline. Sometimes it's nice for them to hear someone else's voice =) Click here for the book.
After Stellaluna, students compared the attributes of bats and birds.

We read this non-fiction reader about bats. It's an interactive book where students identify and add in the missing text features on the pages in the book (not shown below). Comprehension questions and non-fiction text feature match up is included.

Here are some of the notes the kids took after reading some bat books.

Check them out!

Then, using their notes, students created a rough draft outline for their writing and then worked on their final draft. There is another outline enclosed for students who need more guidance.

The kids followed these directions to draw a bat and cut it out for their front cover.

This bat is hanging upside down! Pretty creative kids!

We labeled a diagram from a bat I made.

Here's a final product!

Create your own Bat Unit in your class.

Check out BATS here:

https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Bat-Text-Feature-Book-and-Writing-Activity-2110986

Here's a preview:

Here are some adorable bat crafts/treats to go with this unit:

Check the original pin out here.

MORE FUN HALLOWEEN IDEAS

The kids loved all the Halloween snacks and crafts, but my favorite healthy snacks were these:

Pumpkins:
Clementines with celery sticks

Ghosts:

Bananas with chocolate chips (mini chocolate chips for the eyes and regular chips for the mouth!)

Wednesday, September 10, 2014

School's in Session First Week of Activities

Well, it's official, the hottest day of summer was the day we started school. We all survived despite being a bit sweaty!

Hope you had a great start.

The first week was all about getting to know each other, learning the routines, and getting organized. We created our License to Learn All About Me Bulletin Board. It's editable so you can type in your students and your name! I keep the license plates up all year as a border to show the artists and authors of the work that goes up all year long.

This product has been updated.... check out the new look here:

We started our All About Me book and they are coming out adorable!

We also learned a little more about each other by creating a class dictionary. Not only did we reinforce proper nouns, ABC order, and dictionary entries, we also got to learn about our friends in our class. After we finished, we lined up in ABC order by first name to show how the book would be bound.

This freebie will be uploaded shortly to my TPT store. Till then, check out some of my other freebies and products.

We reviewed our class rules and despite the fact that I usually did the Wrinkled Heart activity (it's a freebie!) with the kinders, the second graders loved it.

Although, when I went to hang it up, they did ask if I could put a heart up that didn't have the wrinkles ... because it would just look better..lol!

We reviewed rules with Officer Buckle and Gloria. We created our 'silly' rules and then made our class rules.

We created bookmarks, laminated them for durability and they are already being put to use.

In math, we graphed our birthdays and created our class birthday chart from Everything Birthday!

We can't wait to celebrate a birthday and to make a special book for the birthday girl/boy!

A few great finds from some other fabulous teachers!

An easy graph for kindergarteners is this Favorite Color Graph. Copy a crayon on white paper, have them color it in and graph it. Super simple and great for a display!

Hopping from K to 2!