St. Patrick's Day!

I love doing fun craft ideas with my students especially for various holidays.  I think it's important that students learn about special days.  We explained a little about St. Patrick's Day early in the month since the calendar helper usually gets to dress up in various items that are based around the month.   I was really excited for my student to learn more about St. Patrick's day because I constantly want to expose them and build their oral vocabulary.   So, on Friday March 15th we celebrated St. Patrick's Day with lots of fun crafts, graphing,  and writing.  We read the book The Luckiest St. Patrick's Day Ever! by Teddy Slater and discussed the various symbols of St. Patrick's Day!

I used A Cupcake for the Teacher Leapin Leprechaun activity found here in her TPT store to make fun Leprechauns with my students.  They were gorgeous....and my students listened and followed directions well. Funny story, I had no skin color paper so, being the resourceful teacher that I am :) I use manilla folders and it worked really well. Manilla  folders will now be my skin color substitute.

Most of my students seem to only remember that Leprechaun's favorite color is green, they are sneaky, and they find a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

hahahaha!!! I would go to someone's house and steal their food.

I will drink green juice and eat green broccoli ( I like this one!) 

Yesterday was my birthday and I'm 16 again!!!! or 18!!! or 100!!!!  Mr. J, the sweetheart that he is, sent me two cakes. He had them delivered to the office???? Can you believe that? He knows how to make a girl happy :)

                                                   

Have a slice!My kids enjoyed the chocolate cake.  They were both delicious. 

 

Oh and me !!!

Onomatopoeia: Robert Munsch Author Study feat. Michael Martchenko

This author study was my brain child as a way to maneuver our curriculum.  This week's theme in my curriculum was I Can Move.  Now, we already did a theme in the beginning of the year according to the theme called My body as well as one called Healthy Habits therefore doing this theme would be a repeat of the idea.  My team and I talked it over and we decided to use an author that use sounds to describe various movements aka onomatopoeia and who else would be more fitting than the one the only Robert Munsch.  In addition, it is a Pre-K standard for students to be able to identify their favorite author or types of books but many of our students will not know these authors unless they are read a series of their books.

We read Mortimer as a part of our music theme the Friday before this unit which was a great segue way into a whole week on Robert Munsch.  I made an anchor chart to assist my students in the sequencing.  I asked the students what happened first and so on and I wrote and drew the pictures as they described it to me.  

Mortimer anchor chart. 

Onomatopoeia anchor chart based on BOO! and Mmm Cookies

We read Mmm cookies and made our own person and their colored cookies and decorated it with various paper scraps.  They were adorable.

We also read Aaron's Hair which is a personal favorite of mine.  It's a fun, silly story about a boy who hates his hair so much that the hair runs away.    I was inspired to do the craft by Step in to Second Grade and  it can be found on her TPT store or through the link on her blog.  Unfortunately, I did not have any skin colored paper or my new manilla folder alternative so we did them on white paper.   In addition, I created my own sequencing sheet where my students drew the beginning, middle and end of the story and then write a sentence about it.  Those also came out really great.  Here is the link to that sequencing  worksheet that I made.

This student is a great illustrator and her handwriting is even better,.

   

This student decided to show the outcome with his hair on his face.