Who am I?

Inferring is a tough skill especially for kinders since they don't do so good with the abstract. I created a lesson where I first the book "Whose tail is this?" by Peg Hall and Ken Landmark. They have a bunch of books Whose nose, whose eyes, etc.

 

We read and talk about how when we infer we put two things together. First we have clues in the book in the words and pictures and then we also have our schema (things we already know about in our brain) and when we read we have to put those things together.

These students said that the clues were the eyes and the whiskers so they wrote "I think is a cat"

So then I passed out pictures of close up images of animals and the pairs could write and draw on the sticky notes about what they were thinking.  Then each pair got to present what they thought and at the bottom I out the zoomed out picture.

Lessons Learned - Make sure there are enough clues in the pictures. Some of the pictures were too hard because they were too close up.

Check this out

Anyone teaching with the new Common Core Standards needs to check out this blog Kindergarten Kindergarten. I tried to use some of her problem solving activities with my students last year with fantastic results. The kids made these on their own during free play after this lesson.

Here is an anchor chart based off of one of her warm up ideas.

Out of the Pockets of Kindergarteners....

So usually I post funny things the kids say to me, but I stumbled on this gem while cleaning through photos. I remember this day. Once of my students kept going over to his cubby every couple of minutes while doing his morning work. Finally i went over to see what he was doing and this is what I found.

100 Days....A Little Late

So these were back in February here are a few things we did for the 100th day of school.

We finished our puzzle.

You'll notice it looks a little funky in the middle. I had a sub for a couple of days and I had trouble getting things to line up after that for a while. This is something that I will be doing again because the kids loved it.

We wrote 100 words. This was a good time filler for those early finishers. Many worked on and off throughout the day.

We found kisses hidden in the room and matched the numbers on the bottom to a hundreds chart. (Got this idea from mailbox magazine)

I know we made crowns but I have no pictures without kids faces :(

Don't be a Litterbug!

Fun idea for Earth Day. We always have a playground clean up complete with gloves because there are some yucky things they always manage to find. Then we do this craft. I will usually just use pieces of litter from our classroom so its not dirty :)

Blow off that hot air!

Here is an science and art lesson. One of our science units is about states of matter and we mostly talk about solids, liquids, and gases. In order to help students experience air I plopped down some paints and let them go to town and blow as hard as they could. I gave them very little instruction beyond blow the paint and keep it on the paper. Some of them really got into mixing the colors and it brought up such wonderful discussions.

A few tips.

Make sure your paint is watery so it will move around, but not too watery because then it will run off the page on onto your tables and floor...not that I would know anything about that. :)

Also try to get those little straws like they have a lunch for their milk. The thinner the straw the harder it is to blow. This is good because you want them to have to work at it.

Another handy tip I have is for how to dry painted paper. Since I have a limited amount of space I take a Styrofoam tray (I just used ones from the lunch room that the kids were done with) and cut paper to fit inside.

Depending on what you are doing you can have the kids paint with the paper already in the tray or place it in when they are done.

 Then just stack them up criss cross.

Sometimes a picture says it all.

The funny part about this is that I only had two students with blond hair and one was a boy. This same student had previously done some fashion design work with her scissors on her shirt...