Colourful Vocabulary

Wish you could make your student's writing a little more colourful?

Found at Mrs. Kelly's Klass, she let us in on her wonderful way to add some colour to our student's writing! Using paint chips, which can easily be picked up for free at your local home hardware/paint store, provide students with various and interesting vocab to replace overused and boring words. It's a wonderfullly visual way to illustrate that these words all mean the same thing, but are a good way to become a better writer. The concept can be re-iterated by showing that each of the colours on a paint chip are the same (they are all blue, or all green, etc), but that each is unique and makes it interesting.
I also loved the way that Mrs. Kelly put them on a binder ring - perfect for space-saving storage, plus it makes it really easy for the children to pick up and bring over to their desks when they need it.

Thanks so much for sharing Mrs. Kelly!


Hope you all enjoy,

Ms. Feeney

Safety Science Dino!!

I stumbled across this amazingly cute dino, in a lab coat!!!!

The link for the pattern is here.

I am so so stoked on how handsome this safety-conscious dino is! 

Introducing Mapping to the kindies..

I found this fantastic mapping activity on Pinterest (where I find everything that I love!).

I'm using it as a more concrete way of helping the students to understand that community memberships don't have to be exclusive - we are all members of more than one community.

We started the conversation by talking about who we spend a lot of time with, and who are important people in our lives. I asked them to close their eyes while thinking of how they like to spend their time, and who is with them as they do things. They gave asnwers like my family, my soccer team, my friends, my family in another city, intramurals, etc.

Then we talked about how our classroom is a community that we participate in everyday, a place where we learn and  make friends and have fun. I asked them to take a look around at all of the special things that make our classroom 'our classroom' while we walked around the room. The students pointed out alphabet strips, word walls, calendar, our carpet, the blocks, informational posters, etc. I then asked each student to pick one thing that they really enjoy/associate with our classroom, and they drew that on our first 'map' page, and labelled it 'class'.

The link for the full lesson plan is here, and a huge thanks to Jenn and Robi at finallyinfirst for sharing.

Enjoy!

- Ace

Dental Health

Hey folks! 


I hope that everyone is enjoying their weeks =). Today was an indoor lunch recess (the worst!) so the kids had a reeeeeeally hard time staying on task and getting anything done. To try to make up for our bad day today, I'm hoping that by having lots planned for our dental health day tomorrow we can really make some progress! 


To start off learning about dental hygeine on a fun(ny) note, I will be reading them the Crocodile's Toothache by Shel Silverstein. Silverstein is such an incredibly talented author, and I really hope that the students grow up loving poetry and free verse as much as I have, as I genuinely believe that it's good for the soul. 


Anyways, in case you're not familiar with the poem (and you should be!) I've posted a link here. Enjoy! 


Here is a copy of a tooth pattern/outline - great for using as a math work mat or you can place some lines on it to create a simple writing activity. 


A link to another blog with a ton of cute dental health ideas 

April Showers Bring May Flowers - Free Unit

What better way to wake up and start the day than with a delicious pot of hazelnut coffee and a free unit!?! A Huge thanks to Amy Marshall for creating and giving away this delightful Spring unit of math and literacy centres. I'm really looking forward to setting it up to be used during our centre time!

Community Helpers - Resources and Ideas

As I'm gathering resources to use for our new community helpers unit, I came across this wonderful word bank from Enchanted Learning. It offers a long list of community helpers listed alphabetically - a great resource to draw inspiration from and to help demonstrate to your students how much variety there is in our communities, and all of the important people we require to make it work!

Enchanted Learning - Community Helpers Word Bank

Mrs. Nelson's Class also has a fabulous page of recommended books and resources for the unit, so a huge thanks to Mrs. Nelson for sharing!!

Please feel free to add any comments or suggestions!

- Ace

Earth Day - variety of activities

Babalisme was kind enough to share this cute "I will/I will not" earth day writing prompt.  A great idea to help reinforce the idea that not only are there important things for us to focus on doing more of (recycling, turning off the tap when we brush our teeth, etc) but we also need to work on doing less of certain things - starting our cars early, leaving chargers plugged in, etc.
Very cute illustrations too!
Earth Day writing prompt


Earth Day Mini-Book (Freebie!)
ABC Schoolhouse is giving away this minibook for free at their TpT store. =)

A good review activity or busy-work for students who need printing practice or early finishers.

Introducing Addition via Ten Frames

In the upcoming weeks we will be working on learning the very basics to addition, using ten-frames.
Katy, from Wild About Teaching, has kindly shared an earth-day themed set of ten frames on her teachers-pay-teachers shop.

Click here for her free download.

Conversation Starters for Kids | iMOM

iMom has posted these awesome pdfs of kid-friendly conversation starters. Could be great for the beginning of the year, bid-buddies or practicing interviews. 

Download Color PDF

TEAM

Love this acronym!! 

[This was on pinterest, but it was a dead link so I can't properly credit the owner of this.]

Communal Spring Eggs

To help us celebrate the Easter weekend in a non-demoninational way, I chose to have the students create communal spring eggs. The idea here was that we would work together in creating some communal art, before we worked individually to create our own unique egg.


Materials 
Tempura Paint
paint brushes
watercolour paints
crayons
11x17" white paper
Fingerpainting paper
plastic tub
Marbles
newspaper

Directions:

Have the students sit down at their tables with an 11x17" piece of paper each, with access to crayons.
As a group, discuss the shapes and lines that they can make (circles, triangles, squares, flowers, as well as straight lines, dashed lines, zig-zags, squiggly etc).
Demonstrate with them making a simple patter across the top, and discuss careful colouring, filling in all of the shapes etc.  Talk to the students about the way the crayon resist works, and why we want to fill in our shapes and patterns.
Once the students had filled in an adequate amount of space using thier patterns, we used to watercolours to colour-block the page - some students used only 2 colours, some used 17 - give them that freedom.

While the students were working on their crayon resist patterns, I was pulling students one or two at a time to come create a marble painting. Using a platic tub/bin, I placed fingerpainting paper into the bottom and directed the students to splatter some paint blobs onto the paper by flicking a paintbrush with their wrist. They loved this part!! The students then dropped in 4-7 marbles and worked together to roll them around the paper by tilting the tub. The results were really beautiful and unique - and a great way to reinforce to students that art doesn't always stay in the lines.

During the Lunch break, I cut their art work into a variety of pieces - thick rectangles, thin zigzag lines, etc. I used lots of my crazy scissors, which I always enjoy.

When the students came back from lunch, they arrived to bunches of strips of paper, which they then glued down to a standard piece of 8.5x11" paper. Once they had arranged their papers so that they was no more white, they cut out the shape of an egg, which was outlined on the other side of their papers.

The result was fabulous!!