Fun at the Beach! Math Centers

Well, I guess it took me a week to post my beach math centers! Sorry!!

Here they are!

At this center, the children scooped out shells from the bucket, counted them and tallied the number.

Practicing subtraction!

My kiddos LOVE to play Flip 5 and practice sums to 5.  I made an Ocean theme for them to play at centers.

We also practiced reading the dime with “digital numbers” – this was tricky for some!  But, we’ve been working on time to the hour, half hour, and even quarter after and quarter to during our calendar time!

School is out for me now, but I’m already thinking and planning ahead to next year.  I’ve got a long list of ideas to work on and books to read this summer!

I would love to hear what you would like me to blog about this summer – anything that you’ve been wanting to know just comment below and I’ll try to blog about it this summer!

Here is me and my girls on the last day of school! My oldest will start middle school next year *gasp!* and my youngest just finished Kindergarten.  I love these girls so  much and am looking forward to spending the summer with them!

Yep, we’ll be doing a lot of this this summer!

Fun at the Beach! Literacy Centers!

The last few weeks of school are simply CRAZY!  Constant interruptions, assessments, organizing, special events and so on! I try to keep the day as consistent as possible for the kiddos.

They loved our literacy centers this week.  Here is a peek of what we did!

We used our Lakeshore fishing rods (love these!) to go fishing for sight words.

 

Had a little beach ball fun by rolling the ball to each other and writing the sight word that was closest to our hands when we caught the ball.

Played some CVC UNO.

and unscrambled our sentences.

I am so happy that the children love our centers – they stay engaged the whole time, and I am able to pull kids for assessments, for small groups, or for one on one work. 

These centers are all from my Fun at the Beach unit if you’re interested!  I’ll post pictures of math centers tomorrow!

Fishing Up Some Fun!

Last week, we dove into the ocean!  We follow the Scott Foresman Reading Street series in our district and it was time for Life in An Ocean!

There is SO much that could be done with this unit, but I wanted to save some ocean fun for the spring too, when we’re all dreaming about the summer and the beach! (well, it’s a lakeshore – no ocean beaches around here!).

Our new science curriculum fits in perfectly to this book.  We are in the beginning stages of adopting parts of the FOSS curriculum, and the amazing K science team have come up with some great correlations to our SF curriculum.

So, we had some new arrivals to our classroom:

I don’t think you can really see them floating around.  We started with 5…then 4…then 3…ahem.  We have 2 little goldfish friends left.  Bubbles and Otto.  Fred went to fishy heaven shortly after this photo was taken.  But, we also have some guppy friends too! I don’t have a pic of their little home, but they live right next to the goldies.  Hopefully, after our 5 day break…they’ll still be doing just that…living.

We had fun learning about the structures of a fish, how to care for a fish, what living things need, and just observing these little fellas. 

We also had lots of fun in our math and literacy centers too.  Here they are:

(plus a couple of standard centers – sound sorting, and beginning sound roll and write)

and the Math Centers:

And the science and math center for free choice time:

Here’s my post from last year’s ocean unit too!

Life in An Ocean

Last week, we did a quick study of the ocean.  It was a crazy week with the 50th day of school and Veteran’s day!  I tried to squeeze in some activities in the three “normal” days that we had!  Here are some of the activities that we did:


We read many fiction and non-fiction ocean and fish books.

 

The inspiration for this thinking map and the graph above was from one of Kim Jordano's sessions at the saw at the I Teach K conference in Vegas.

(I made the describing map blank and just put the cards on velcro so that I could use it for other things!)

This project was super fun – just a simple crayon resist – we used oil pastels instead of crayons though.  I love how the colors turned out so bright an vivid!

These centers are from Lakeshore Learning – it is a three in one center kit.  I won it at the National Kindergarten Conference this summer!

I put these masks (I have a few more) in the dramatic play center.  They are so simple, but the kids think they are really fun! I’m can’t remember where I found them though!