Monday, May 23, 2016

Writing about our Playground

We read several of Donald Crew's books and talked about them as mentor texts.

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We decided that Donald Crews must like transportation vehicles!  We supposed that he observed the places where the vehicles were to get more information to write.  He must have looked at the vehicles and listened to them.  We also noticed that he used a few words and that he placed the words at the bottom of the page.  He also liked to use colors and details in his illustrations.

For our writing piece, we chose chose a place that we loved at school - the playground. First, we observed the playground and took some notes about what we saw, what we heard, and the actions that took place there.  I took a picture of the students on the playground. Later, they wrote sentences about what they saw, what they heard, and what actions took place at the playground.  They glued their black and white photograph to the top of the large writing paper.  They added color to their picture and extended the playground to the entire space.



For some additional fun and learning, we designed a playground for an ant a few days later. I showed the children a few ways to fold paper to make it 3D.  They took off on the idea and added many ways of their own.  

 Enjoy!   Molly




Monday, May 9, 2016

Measure Me!

With Spring here we have been growing sunflowers (see earlier blog), sorting seeds, and comparing heights and lengths.  It's a good time to introduce non-standard measurement activities.  Last week we measured many classroom objects - scissors, pencils, glue sticks . . .  But, the very best kindergarten measuring activity was measuring each other.  What fun!





The children measured each other and recorded how many cubes long the parts were on a body picture (feel free to copy the page below if you'd like to try it).  I left it open to see what they would like to measure. They measured feet, head width, ear length, mouth width, hand length, leg length and even body length!  They giggled and laughed during measuring, but turned into serious mathematicians when recording:)  It was time to end math even before they were finished.

Enjoy!  Molly

Feel free to copy recording paper here: