Beginning Sounds Baby!

I just realized that I had posted some beginning sound activities on Teachers Pay Teachers and never posted about them!  We are hitting beginning sounds hard!  Not all of my little lovelies know all of their letters yet, but they are getting there.  We have been using our Itty Bitty Beginning Sound Books as we have learned the letters during our literacy workstations.

Itty Bitty Beginning Sound Books on TPT

We have also been using activities from my Beginning Sounds Bundle during literacy workstations and in small groups.

Beginning Sounds Bundle on TPT

As with everything I post on TPT, I have to give a few away.  If you would like a copy of Itty Bitty Beginning Sound Books and Beginning Sounds Bundle, enter below.  I will pick two winners on Monday morning!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Plants and Some Word Work

We have had a crazy week! We did our final round of MAP testing this week and I'm so proud of my kiddos!  It was amazing to see how hard they were working!  Some of my high kids were presented with multiplication and division during the math portion, and their little pencils were just flying all over their scratch paper trying to figure out what to do!  This was our first year of MAP testing with kindergarten, and at the beginning of the year I thought the whole thing was going to be a complete fiasco, winter was a little better, but watching them take their spring tests, I am blown away.  We also started our spring benchmarking for DIBELS.  
 
With all of the testing going on, we have had a hard time getting to our learning about plants, but here is some of what we have done so far...
We observed dry kidney beans and then wet kidney beans.  After our observations we disected them, drew them, and labeled the parts.

We talked about what seeds need to grow. We also began our bean sprouting experiment.  

Wetting our paper towels to provide water for our bean.

Fitting that wet paper towel into a sandwich bag is trickier than it looks!

Hung in a hallway window to provide sunlight  for our beans.

We also started our observation journals.

"My seed is shaped like a rainbow. It's a wet bean."

"The seed looks like a banana."

"Takes the seed 8 days." (One of my ELLs predicting that it will take 8 days to sprout.)

Here is the cover that will go on our journals when we assemble them tomorrow. Simple, but it gets the job done!

We also started our Plant People today.  Awhile back I found this picture on pinterest...

Source: Pinterest via Carolyn from The Teacher Wife

When I followed the link, I was bummed to find out that the download was no longer available :(  With all the copyright craziness going on, maybe Mr. Potato Head had to come down, but I was in love with the idea, so here's what I created to use instead...

We didn't put shoes on, and I'm not sure if we will add them or not, but they are there if anyone wants them.

Adding our seeds.

Gently watering our newly planted grass seed.

In all of our planting fun, I forgot to take pictures of their plant people with the parts on.  I'll try to remember to snap a few tomorrow.


And finally a bit of word work.

I wanted a bit more practice with our color words after our rainbow words, so I created Can You Build It?  This one is just color words and has a recording sheet to practice writing their words after they build them. We did rainbow writing with ours.

You can find this freebie at TPT. 

If you download it, I would love some feedback!  I am thinking about creating some more for number words and our end of the year sight words.  If you think these or other versions would be useful in your classrooms, leave me a comment and let me know.  Also, if you have other ideas to extend this idea, let me know!

Weather Activities (with feebies)

Our theme for the week is wild, wacky, wonderful weather. I wasn't going to make anything new for this week.  I have tons of weather related things, but when I started looking back through them there were a few skills that I really wanted to hit again before spring break.  For some of my little lovelies digraphs are finally starting to click, others can put the correct sound with the digraph, but they are only identifying the digraph when it's the initial sound.

Thus, the Rainy Day Digraph Sort was born.

Download this freebie from TPT

And some more freebies...

Download this freebie from TPT store

A simple write the room with weather words.  There is one set of words, but the cards are slightly different.  The blue cards have the entire word, and the red cards have blanks that they must fill in when writing the word. I am planning to hang both sets and then let the kids know which color cards they are looking for.  There is also a recording sheet that will work for either set of cards.

Due to the size of our school and the need to give us all plan time our kids have science as a special.  I miss teaching science and incorporating it with the rest of the learning that goes on in our room.  It has been ridiculously windy here lately, so I thought it would be fun to do something with the wind.  I saw a wind sort on Little Giraffes and decided to set it up as a station this week.

Download this freebie from TPT

I have just opened my TPT store.  Everything is free, so if you download any of these freebies I would really love for you to rate them and leave me feedback!  Pretty, pretty please!  You could even follow my store while you're there!  I have also uploaded some of the other freebies from my blog, and will try to get the rest uploaded this week.

St. Patrick's Day Fun

We have been having lots of fun this week.  We are fascinated with all things green, and sneaky little leprechauns!


I have been bad about snapping photos, but here's a peek at some of our literacy work stations.

Making a list of green things

Pot of Gold Mini book from Scholastic

See the post about these goodies here

We did our syllable sort in the pocket chart as a whole group and then students have been practicing during work stations.  Some groups started making their own syllable cards to add to our sort.  They are always so motivated to create and add to our current stations.

Syllable Sort can be found here

We are also doing a St. Patrick's Day themed write the room.

St. Patty Write the Room Recording Sheet

We also brainstormed adjectives to describe our sneaky little leprechaun friend and completed a bubble map that we will be using tomorrow for students who choose to write leprechaun stories during writer's workshop.

Leprechaun Bubble Map

And at our math work stations we continued with the theme.

Fill Your Pot from Musings of Me - can't seem to find her blog anymore :(

Surveys are always a hit, and I tried to sneak in a bit more practice with adding and subtracting fluently to 5.

Potato Survey

We also practiced ordering numbers in a pocket chart.  I use a multiplication pocket chart that I have folded down to make a hundred chart.  They can also practice counting by 5s and 10s in the smaller pocket charts.  The cards are sized smaller to fit the multiplication chart we use, but feel free to grab them below if you like.

St. Patty Number Ordering

We also sorted, graphed, and practiced addition with Lucky Charms.

Tomorrow and Friday we are hitting inferring hard as we follow clues hunting for the leprechauns pot of gold.  Hope everyone is having a great week!

Syllable Sorting Freebie

Just a quick post to share a syllable sorting activity that I made for literacy work stations next week.  Today while working on syllables during our daily auditory battery routine I realized that many of my ELL students are really having trouble with syllables.  We will continue our auditory work, but I wanted to give them some more practice in our literacy work stations.  This station has a pocket chart sort, a cut and glue sort, and an option for write the room.  For my kids that can clap out syllables they will also have the option to create their own syllable sort using blank syllable cards.

Download this freebie from TPT

Google Docs is being a bit weird tonight with the preview, so let me know if you are having trouble downloading it. 



We have also been doing a fun "Kiss Your Brain" activity with syllables.  We found 100 Hershey's Kisses on the 100th Day of school, but then I forgot to pass them out to the kids at the end of the day.  So I instituted the Kiss Your Brain Jar.  At the end of our literacy block I asked the kids to give me 4 syllable words.  If they came up with a word, we clapped it out and then wrote their name on the board.  At the end of the day, they kiss their brilliant brain and pick a Hershey Kiss from the jar.  This has been a huge hit!  I have kids running up to me in the morning to tell me 4 syllable words they came up with last night.  I think I am going to have to fancy up the jar, and change out the skill periodically, because my little accident has turned into a great motivator!

Medial Sound Mitten Sort

During the weeks before break one of my teammates and I used Christmas Write the Room with CVC Word Families from the fabulous Deedee Wills.  

We both loved the activity, but I really wanted my kids to be focusing on the medial sound.  My teammate came up with a great solution.  I then took her idea and adapted it to have a winter theme.

 

Download this freebie from TPT

 
Students will sort cards by medial sound and then write on the recording sheet.  There are two levels of cards to support varying levels of students.  It could also be used as a Write the Room, but I plan on putting it at a literacy station.


On my original post I forgot to credit KPM Doodles for the adorable mitten clip art I used in this freebie.  I have added a credit to the front page - here is the link to the corrected version with the credit to KPM Doodles. So sorry for any confusion this may have caused!


I have no idea where my camera has gone to.  One of my kinders saw me looking for my camera and rushed to the scene with our Fisher Price student camera.  Not the best quality, but not bad for a 5 year old with 1 megapixel,  rubberized camera :)

They really had to focus on the medial sounds and this was a great, quickie assessment for identifying the medial sound and short vowel sound discrimination.