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.  :)

On Building Airplanes

"Being a new teacher is like trying to fly an airplane...while building it."

(Rick Smith- Conscious Classroom Management)

I first read this analogy as a student teacher.  I remember laughing at it then, and felt I mostly understood what it meant- at least, I could relate to the feeling. But it is only now, as I'm more than half-way through my first year of teaching, that I really understand how it feels to be doing just that on a daily basis. 

These past several months have been so full of "live and learn" moments. There are times when everything goes just right, and times when everything goes perfectly wrong. I find myself in a constant state of tweaking--trying out new ideas, sprucing up old ideas, throwing out failed ideas, making things and then re-making them a little better. I definitely feel like I'm trying to build my own airplane, and sometimes it feels like such a slow-going process! It seems that no matter how much work I put into building my plane, there is always something more to do and improve to make it fly more smoothly. I'll be honest- there are days when I feel overwhelmed and frustrated by the whole process because my daily progress seems so small.

However, I recently read the book Outliers by Malcom Gladwell that has given me a slightly different perspective. In one of the chapters, he talks about experts, and discusses that while raw talent can play a role in someone's success, what really makes a difference is practice. He quotes neurologist Daniel Levitin as saying that "the emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert- in anything. In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again...It seems to that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery." (p. 40). In other words, those people who are really successful and become experts in their field, work really hard to get there. They put in 10,000 plus hours to reach that level of knowledge, experience, and expertise.

As a part time teacher, I am only teaching an average 2 .4 hours a day. That's about 432 hours a year, which means at this rate, it will take me about 23 years to have 10,000 hours of teaching practice.

Full time teachers at my school teach about an average of 6 hours per day or 1080 hours per year, which amounts to a little over 9 years to have 10,000 hours of teaching practice.

While to some those numbers might still sound enormous and discouraging, the idea means something a bit more encouraging to me. It reminds me of this quote:

"The expert in anything was once a beginner." -Rutherford B. Hayes

As much as I wish I could be an amazing, master teacher right now, I have to remember that I am a beginner. I can't expect myself to be performing like an expert teacher because the fact is that I can only gain experience and knowledge one day, one hour, one lesson at a time. I would never expect my students to become master readers in one day...so maybe I should stop expecting myself to be a master teacher without the necessary incremental learning that, by all accounts, takes years to acquire.

 In other words...building an airplane takes time. There's no way around it.

When I look at my job with that perspective, it reminds me that teaching is a learning process. It would be nice if it were the kind of job where you could be an expert once you have a degree and a bit of on-site training--but it's not. As John Cotton Dana says: "Who dares to teach must never cease to learn." But isn't that one of the exciting aspects of teaching? There is always something more to learn, and every day is an opportunity for improvement and growth.

So, instead of feeling frustrated by the knowledge that I'm not a master teacher and won't be for a very long time...I want to enjoy the learning process. I want to celebrate the successes and strengths that I do have right now, even if they might seem small. I want to remember that every day is one step closer to where I want to be, and that the more I practice, the better I will become.

Do I still feel overwhelmed by it all?  Of course I do. (I think that feeling is in the fine print of my job description.)

But I try to remember this quote from Abraham Lincoln:

 "The best thing about the future is it comes only one day at a time."

Thank goodness for that. 

Leprechaun Day

Thanks to the Art of Teaching for the cute Leprechaun idea. My kids loved it!

Number Partner Hearts

In math, we've been talking a lot about how number partners join together to make a new number. I made these partner hearts to use for a cooperative activity with my students (which also tied in nicely with our current emphasis on friendship).

Each student had half of a heart with a number of dots on it. Their assignment was to first, count the dots on their piece, and then to find the person who had the missing piece to their heart. Then, together they needed to decide what number their two pieces made when joined together. I created a simple worksheet to help visualize that process, where they could draw their heart and write the number sentence that matched their partners.

To wrap it all up, each partnership shared their number sentence so we could review some of the different number partners out loud as a class. It was a fun way to explore the concept of number partners and addition.

Accordion Books

Our awesome art teacher did this project with us last week. She showed the students how to fold paper and glue it together as an accordion-type book. I decided to leave it as an open-ended activity and let them choose how they wanted to fill up the pages. I love how open-ended activities can help students to feel successful and be creative, no matter what level they are at. Everyone's book was different and their individual creativity really shined. I loved all of the results, and what's even better is the kids loved it too. They were all so proud of their books! Some were even carrying them around at recess and showing them off to other kids. It was great. :)

It's always an adventure to "interpret" Kindergarten sound spelling...have fun!

Friendship Art

While some young children may find it easy to make friends, most are still learning and developing the necessary sills to interact in a positive, social way with their peers. I did a small unit on friendship at the beginning of the year with my Kindergarten class, but felt like the season of Valentines was a good time to bring the subject back up again in more depth.

I definitely feel that teaching and modeling social skills is an important part of my job, as doing so will help them to be more successful students and allow my classroom to continue to be the safe, happy community that I want it to be. My hope is that every student feels a sense of safety and belonging at school, and helping everybody to develop positive friendship skills is one way to encourage that environment.

One of my favorite friendship activities is friendship art. It coincides perfectly with reading this book, which also happens to be a part of our language arts program. Each table group gets one piece of paper, and they work together to create a picture. The rules are that everyone can contribute something that they like to the drawing, but they need to use their own space in the picture to do it. We also talked about the possibility of working together to make a drawing (one person does the tree trunk and the other person draws the leaves) and we decided that it was not nice to make fun of someone else's contribution to the picture.

Each picture turned out differently, and each group worked together in different ways. It also turned out to be a great teaching moment for some of the students who had difficulty sharing the space and getting along during the process. :) All in all, it was a successful activity and every group was excited to share their creation with the class.

 More friendship ideas and activities to come!

P.S. We had a fun Valentine's Day Celebration yesterday. I came away with so many yummy treats and cute Valentines. I felt spoiled!

I loved some of the creative ideas--- a couple favorites were Rolos wrapped up like dynamite for "You're the Bomb" and a bunch of glue sticks for "You're the glue that keeps our class together!"

100 Days Later

Today we celebrated our 100th day of Kindergarten- which means I am 100 days through my first year of teaching. In some ways I can't believe how fast the time is going by. I've been thinking about the nervous excitement I felt pretty much every day during the first few months of school. Everything was so new, and even though I have had a lot of experience in classrooms and working with kids, this was my first time doing it all on my own. It almost felt unreal to finally be running my own classroom after so many years of education and preparation.

100 days later, I still feel that feeling of nervous excitement sometimes, but most of the time it just feels normal to be a teacher in my own classroom. I'm learning so much and constantly working out the kinks, and I love it. I  even felt a bit sad today, realizing that we are more than half-way through the school year now and eventually I will have to say goodbye to my first Kindergarten class. But I've got plenty to keep us busy between now and then. There's so much more to do before this year is over!

As part of our Hundreds Day Celebration, we read this book:

And did some writing:

A lot of students wrote that they wanted to eat 100 Jellybeans, because they had jellybeans in the book we read. 

It made me happy to see that some students wrote about learning to share and be kind this year. 

The Planetarium

Yesterday was our Kindergarten field trip to the Planetarium. Field trips are always such an adventure! We had a lot of fun exploring the space exhibits and watching two movies in the theater. I am sure grateful for all the parent volunteers who helped to manage the kids. We could not have had such a great experience without them! What a great way to wrap up our little unit, and lay a foundation for future learning.

Happy Groundhog Day!

Today we learned a little bit about groundhogs, and how they come out of hibernation at times during the winter. We heard that this year the groundhog did indeed see his shadow, which means 6 more weeks of winter...although, here in Utah we haven't had much of a winter so far, so maybe the next 6 weeks won't be all that bad. Also in honor of Groundhog Day, we spent some time exploring shadows. In centers this week, the kids made shadow puppets by outlining shapes on black paper and gluing them to Popsicle sticks. Today we used the overhead projector to see what kinds of shadows we could make with the puppets. It was some good, learning fun!

Enjoy some cute groundhog artwork, that also reflect some of the things we learned!