Today...

My classroom got a little bit smarter:

My classroom is now equipped with a SMART board! I am SO excited to be able to use it as a fun and engaging teaching tool for the last 6 weeks of the school year. Hooray for awesome technology!

Childhood: A Journey

We are all on our own journey- children and adults alike. We learn things and reach certain milestones in different ways and at different times in life. We all have different weaknesses and strengths. We all have different needs and goals and dreams. In this competitive and fast-paced world, we must be careful not to turn childhood into a race. Children deserve to enjoy and be supported within their own, unique journey.

Happy Spring!

We've been having beautiful weather lately, and suddenly everything looks so green and bright.

 It is my favorite time of year! 

Happy Spring!

The Tree Frog

 After we studied tree frogs during our animal unit, one of my students wrote this book at the writing center. It made me smile!

"Once there was a frog. He was a great frog. There was a snake."

"The snake ate the frog. The snake was full."

"It was getting dark. The snake was asleep."

Kid Quotes

Kindergarten Boy: "Did you know Indiana Jones is a school teacher!?!" 

Being a teacher just got that much cooler. 

Animal Self Starter

I usually have some kind of handwriting self starter that the kids do first thing when they come in the morning. I call it "Morning Workshop," and it usually only lasts for about 5-10 minutes. This gives me some time to take roll and finish any last minute preperations, while also giving the students some time to socialize a bit before we get started...(as well as to practice handwriting, of course).

I read about this great idea on Fairy Dust Teaching, and decided to adapt it for the animal unit I've been teaching the past two weeks. At the beginning of the unit, I gave every student a simple book with a handwriting line on the bottom of each blank page. When the kids come in, there is a drawing of an animal on the board, with the name printed underneath on enlarged handwriting lines. Their job is to copy the drawing and the placement of the letters on the line as best as they can. If there is time, they can color it and add details. By the end of the unit, they will have filled up the book with 10 different animal drawings. I really like this concept, because they are working on fine motor skills and letter formation, in addition to animal vocabulary words in a fast and easy activity.

The kids love it too. They have been really excited to see which animal I have chosen for each day.

Here was yesterday's animal:

I picked  a tree frog yesterday because we spent the day learning about these animals using a nonfiction book from our language arts program. As we were reading the book, we got to a page where the tree frog jumps, and all of the kids got excited and said it looked like our tree frog on the board. That made me feel good about my drawing...

Some tree frogs:

Some other pages:

Animal Nonfiction Writing

We have been having so much fun with our animal unit! I wish I could spend another week on this unit, but we've still got some other science and social studies topics to get to before the end of the year. Animals has been such a great backdrop for discussing nonfiction reading and writing, and the kids have been really engaged in the activities to try out this kind of genre.

Last week, each student was asked to write about an animal for their Home Journal writing assignment and on Friday, the students shared something they learned with the class. I loved this idea for making a Did You Know list and book that I found on A Place Called Kindergarten, and thought it would be a great way to document some of the facts that everybody learned about animals. Half-day Kindergarten is so short that it seems almost impossible to spend as much time as I would like learning about all the amazing animals out there, so letting kids do some research and writing at home to share with everyone seemed to work really well with our schedule.

Everybody shared one fact that they have learned about an animal, and we made a chart.

Later in the day, I hung the charts up on the whiteboard so the kids could copy their sentence for our Did You Know? book. Normally, this is not the kind of writing I prefer to do with my kids...I heavily encourage them to write independently using sound spelling and other strategies. But I used this activity to focus on writing sentences, rather than spelling technique. Each student wrote down their sentence and then illustrated it to make a page in our class book. It turned out beautifully, and has been a favorite to look at during reading time!

Map Art

We made these land and water maps back in February...or March...the weeks and months are all starting to blend together. This is one of my favorite ways to explore the concept of representing and recognizing land and water features on a map. It is fun for the kids, and pretty easy to prepare. All you need is salt dough, small pieces of cardboard, and paint. You want the salt dough to be a pretty sticky texture, so it sticks to the cardboard. Although, once it dries, Elmer's Glue seems to do the trick if there are breaking problems.

The project takes at least two days, because the salt dough needs to dry out on the first day and the paint needs to dry on the second day. I love the creativity of the results, and ask the kids to give me a title for their map...I'm pretty sure the titles are my favorite part. Here are a few examples:

Titles (Left) A Pretty Waterfall and Volcano (Right) A Tree and a Volcano Squirting Water

Titles: (Top Left) Water and Curves (Top Right) King of the Earth (Bottom Left) So Many Lands (Bottom Right) A Flat Surface

Baby Animals

For the first week of our animal unit, we talked about baby animals.

I've had to try not to laugh as I read a story or show different pictures, and my kids (mostly girls) respond with a collective and sigh-like "awwww!"

I created a flip-book for the kids to read and match animal babies with their parents. There are some "tricky" animals in there, and some of the kids have been surprised to see how different a baby can look from its parent. When there is some free reading time, I often see a group of kids huddled around this book, trying to find matches.

We've also been talking about how babies can be born in different ways, depending on the kind of animal. We sorted animal pictures into "Mammal" and "Egg-Hatcher" categories to show the differences in how babies can be born. Once again, there were some kids that were surprised at which animals do or do not come from eggs! I was really was really excited when the librarian read a nonfiction book to the class about eggs during library time, and we were also able to learn that there are a couple mammals that lay eggs in addition to reptiles, birds, fish, etc. (they are the platypus and the echidna, just in case you needed to remember also...)

Their baby animal nonfiction writing turned out just as cute as the baby animal books we've been reading.

(Left) Dad, Baby Lion (Right) Baby hawk learns to fly.

(Left) This is a walrus and a baby. (Right) Walrus is good. My favorite.
 (Apparently the walrus is a popular animal this year!)

(Left- sorry, I can't decipher one of the words...) Walrus' have ...and big flippers. His mom has bigger ... (Right) Piggies are so cute.

The momma koala has bigger claws.

(Left) Mom's bring worms for babies. (Right) This is a baby alligator. It is 3 years old.

 And as if I'm not getting enough baby animal talk in my classroom, I've been able to go out and see some baby animals out in my community. (I may or may not have used the same "awwww" sound that my students use when looking at these baby chicks.)

When I Grow Up...

When I was a kid and people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up,  I would usually say one of three things:

1. A Veterinarian

2. An Author

3. A Teacher

Now I am considered to be "grown up,"

and I no longer have any desire to work closely with animals.

But I do still have dreams of becoming a children's book author someday,
and I feel lucky to be working as a teacher.
 Sometimes you never know where life is going to take you,
but I'm glad that I ended up in a place where I wanted to be. :) 

When I asked my Kindergarten kids what kinds of jobs they would want to do when they grew up, I got a lot of different responses. Many kids would change their minds from day to day...or even minute to minute. One girl said "Mrs. Carruth, I want to be so many things when I grow up...a teacher, an artist, a ballerina, a mom...I can't even decide!"  It's so fun to be a part of that dream-making process with kids so young. They are so imaginative, and at this point in their life, truly anything seems possible. In fact, several boys in my class decided they definitely wanted to be ninjas, and several girls wanted to be princesses. I love it. And who am I to dash their dreams, and tell them that jobs like that might be a little hard to come by...?

I hope you enjoy this collage artwork from our jobs unit as much as I did! 

(Left) "regular person..I want to be like my Mom." So cute. 

(Left) "Police Man...I help people." (Right) "Mail Carrier...I can go travel the world."

  

I Pledge Allegiance to the Flag

I'm getting ready to take down this bulletin board, and thought I would share it.

We made it after we learned about the words to the Pledge of Allegiance and American Symbols. 

And we may or may not have spilled red paint all over the carpet in the process...

P.S. I love this story about teaching the Pledge of Allegiance to Kindergartners. It really inspired me! 

Sentence Trains

This is a lesson on sentence structure that I created last year during my student teaching. I really liked how it turned out last year, and so I decided to try it awhile ago with my class this year. The basic idea is to compare the different parts of a sentence to a train, and I like to couple it with a train song and story to help build background knowledge about trains. Here is the jist of what I talk about with them: 

1. The engine is at the front of the train, and it is a special car- it usually looks a bit different than the other cars. In a sentence, the first word is also different and always begins with a capital letter. 

2. Each car in a train is separated by a bar so that they don't crash into each other. In a sentence, we need to separate each word with a space so that they don't run into each other when we read them.

3. The last car in a train is also a special car. It's called the caboose and it is the end of the train. We need something special at the end of the sentence to show that it is the end. That is why we use punctuation marks at the end of the sentence.

I also talk about how the words need to go in order, just like the cars on a train stay right in line and don't switch places. Just to keep it simple for this first lesson, I encouraged everyone to write an "I like ____" sentence. This worked really well, because it allowed every student to be successful in their own way, and those who could write more words did.

One thing that I love about this visual approach to writing sentences, is that it becomes very clear which kids are still struggling to understand certain aspects of a sentence. For example, there were kids that wanted to write all their words on only one or two train cars, and needed support with the concept of different words in a sentence. Also, it allows kids to work with physically building the sentence as they arrange their train cars, and I was also able to identify kids who needed support with word order. Of course, the most common thing for the kids to forget was the punctuation at the end, but it makes it a little more fun to remind them to simply "check their caboose."

The kids were really engaged in making their trains, and now during writing time I can remind them of that visual to help them remember parts of a sentence.

The other plus to this activity? It sure lifted me up to have kids writing things like  "I like school" and "I like my teacher." Kindergarten kids are the best.  :)

Book Love: How to Teach a Slug to Read

Author: Susan Pearson
Illustrator: David Slonim

Why I Love This Book: I didn't know about this book until recently. Last week was Reading Week at my school, and to kick it off the principal made a video of herself reading this book so that the whole school could watch it. The kids loved it, and so did I. It talks about the process of learning to read in a fun and humorous way. The illustrations especially bring the element of humor to the story with their creative depictions and captions. This is a great book to encourage young readers to keep reading and enjoy the process.