Spiders!

We had a great time this week reading and learning about spiders.  It was a great introduction to fiction and non-fiction books.  We began the week reading Eric Carle's The Very Busy Spider.  The children loved the repetitiveness of this book, and soon chimed in right along with me.   I made sequencing cards with DJ Inkers clip art for the children to wear when we re-read the story on Tuesday.  We were supposed to make a list of all our characters in our reader's workshop notebooks, but that never happened! Time got away from us!  I also forgot to snap a picture of the children with the re-telling cards! I'll do that this week! 

 

Here are a couple of spider activities that we did in our math centers that I posted earlier.

 This is the Jill Egglton poem that we read throughout the week.  On Friday, we highlighted all of the S's and illustrated the poem.  I was so proud of this little guy! It was the best drawing of  a person that he has ever done! He copied mine, but it's a start, right??!

 We also played a fun game called "Spill the Spiders."  This is another one of Kim Adsit's fabulous ideas!  Put a select number of items in a container.  Sit in a circle and pass around the container until you stop the music.  When the music stops, the child will dump out the spiders and count them back into the container.  This is great for one-to-one correlation as well as counting skills.  I've done this a few times with other seasonal things, the kids LOVE it! I keep adding a few each time so it gets progressively harder.  You could also have them count backwards when taking the spiders out (just tell them how many there are to start!)

My mom was cleaning out her Halloween decorations just in time to give me this great spider web! We brainstormed words that start with /s/ and added them to our spider web.  I also had a GIGANTIC spider web that I hung from the ceiling! I wish I would have taken a picture of it before I took it down to hang up our spider glyphs!

We also read many non-fiction books about spiders.  We made a chart like this one from Deanna Jump's Blog.

 I used 2 experiments from Deanna's Simple Science packet - the children LOVED them!

 First, we did an experiment to learn how spiders kill and eat their prey.

Then we did an experiment to understand why spiders don't stick to their webs!  You can find the directions for the experiment as well as the response sheets at TPT .

I had planned to read this book as part of our preparation for our spider glyphs, but when I went to get it out on Friday - it wasn't in my lesson plan drawers.  Hmmmm.... I think my wonderful 3 1/2 year old swiped it out of my school bag and it never got to school! Oh well.. I had a back-up plan.

 

We read this version instead - the children LOVED it!

Earlier in the week we read this book:

 

Using these two books, we created a fun spider glyph! (Although my hand still hurts from cutting out those little spider legs!)

 We then analyzed our data from our glyphs.  This glyph as well as a great emergent reader (and many other spider activities that I didn't have time for) can be found in Deanna's Spiders packet on  Teachers Pay Teachers.

We also did a sorting activity on the whiteboard that came from Mailbox Magazine.

 

At the end of the week, we made a venn diagram comparing and contrasting elements of fiction and non-fiction books.  These are also on Kim's Reading Comprehension packet.  I forgot to snap a picture, so here is the picture from Kim Adsit's website 

Up next...oceans!

Apple-Licious!

We had a short week in Kindergarten last week, so we took some time away from our regular reading series to learn about apples!!  The children had lots of fun this week tasting, exploring, writing, and painting about apples!

We started off the week reading The Season's of Arnold's Apple Tree by Gail Gibbons.  We talked about the changes that that trees go through and how we can identify each season.  Here in North Dakota, we have 4 distinct seasons (most of the time!), so the children could make some great connections to the book.

We worked together to do some interactive writing, and create a mural of the apple tree's changes.  I was lucky enough to see Kim Adsit speak again this weekend at our state Kindergarten conference, and I learned a very valuable lesson:  when you are sharing the pen with children for interactive writing, they don't HAVE to do all the writing!  You can help things along a bit if it is too slow! We are still not quite finished with the writing, but we got quite a bit done in our three days of school.  I drew the outline for the mural, and outlined it with paint, and the children painted each section two kids at a time.  I was a little nervous about how it would turn out since we hadn't painted before, but I think they did FANTASTIC! (This was an idea that Kim shared at the conference)

We were working on the sight word the this week, and Deanna Jump has the best book for reviewing this word.  You can find it on here on Teachers Pay Teachers.  It's a great apple resource that has literacy and math activities in it.  We used the IWB to read and highlight the.  Each child got their own page, drew their self portrait and highlighted the.

Here are some other fun activities that we did last week: (syllable sort from Kim)

 

I got this idea from a friend.