Language Arts:
Reading: This month as we read together we will continue to distinguish fiction from nonfiction texts and use a variety of sources to gather information and answer questions. Students will also continue to segment (separate) one syllable words into their beginning, middle, and final sounds, and blend sounds together to make spoken words.
The Gingerbread Man: In December we also begin our study of folktales and legends by reading as many different versions of the Gingerbread Boy as we can get our hands on!
After reading the first version, we split the class in two and each group will create a setting backdrop (as seen in the photos below) and a puppet that they will use to re-enact the story. This activity builds students retelling skills and their understanding of story elements and structure.
Later, in the retelling center students use magnetic cards and a metal board to retell the story. They can also use the books if they need added support.
After acting out the story, we create story maps or arcs for each version of the Gingerbread Man we read to uncover story elements and structure, and then practice comparing the versions using Venn Diagrams.
Character Traits and Motives: We also analyze character traits, motives, and how they change over time by tracking what each character does throughout the story and then coming up with words that we believe describe those actions. This way we are using evidence from the text and drawing conclusions from what we read.
Theme/Big Idea: We also discuss each version's story elements and what we believe the author's 'big idea' is that he wants to communicate to us. The students work in groups- one group per version- to record the elements on a giant comparison chart.
After studying and comparing the many different versions of the Gingerbread Man, students will use what they learned re: story elements to create their own version of the story and will practice acting it out with various props for their classmates:
The Runaway Tornado:
The Gingerbread Man:
The Runaway Robot:
The Gingerbread:
The Runaway Santa:
Family Project: During our Gingerbread unit, the students will complete a 'Flat Gingy' project with their family. This awesome project- a spin-off of Flat Stanley- was taken from: http://www.first-grade-fever.blogspot.com/. Basically, the students will take home a gingerbread boy or girl and will take/draw a picture of them doing something special with their gingerbread friend. They will also write about what they did on their adventure;
Take Home Reader: The students love creating the silly gingerbread story below (from growingprek.com) and taking it home to read to their families!
Math Connection Graph: After reading the different versions, students will vote for their favorite one by placing their name on a sticky-note and tacking it to the chart below. We take advantage of this opportunity to practice our graphing skills and make generalizations about the feelings of the class toward the different books.
Here are just a few of the versions of the Gingerbread Man that we use:
We even have a song version:
Folktales and Legends: As we continue to learn about different cultures and their customs and traditions in Social Studies, we will begin reading different Christmas folktales and legends during reading time. In Kindergarten, we also begin to discuss theme, or the author's message, in the stories we read.
Writing: The writing genre we focus on this month is 'Question and Answer' or informative writing. In lieu of our Social Studies unit of cultures, holidays, customs, and traditions, we will have guest speakers visiting our class this month to tell us about the unique ways that their families celebrate the winter holidays.
Before they come, the students will work in groups as 'news reporters' and will come up with questions that they would like to ask these special guests (each group will be assigned to a different guest and country) and will record them on a 'cueing card'.
We will also discuss what our visitors should 'hear' and 'see' if we are being a good audience. The class creates these guidelines and I record them on a giant chart that we will be referring back to when each visitor arrives.
When the visitors come (down our red carpet :) ), the reporters for that day will wear their press badges and will interview the guest with a microphone using the questions on their cards.
The students will then write down the answers to those questions in their 'passport' on the page dedicated to the country of the day. Doing this also helps keep our audience members accountable and helps ensure that they are listening as the speaker is talking.
We will also get to read a story, eat a special treat, look at pictures, learn a new song or phrases in another language when our guest visits us as well. We have even had guests visit us through Skype!
We've cracked poppers to celebrate English traditions...
...tasted aloe vera gel from Vietnam...
...tasted meatballs from Italy...
...and re-enacted Las Posadas!
After all of our guests have visited our class, we use the information we gathered to compare and contrast the different traditions and celebrations we learned about. Also, as a grand finale to holiday traditions, we turn our classroom into Santa's workshop to celebrate America's holiday traditions of decorating cookies, wrapping presents, and exchanging holiday cards and gifts. As we play holiday tunes in the background, the students rotate to the following stations: cookie decorating, holiday card writing, gift wrapping (the students place their cookies in a tin and attach a bow and 'self-scribed' gift tag), and holiday story reading. The cookie tins will be a special holiday gift for their families:
After all of their hard work, the students treat themselves by enjoying one of their self-decorated cookies!
Centers:
Writing: This month at Writing Center, students will use the December word wall to support them as they create their writing pieces, and can also use sentence stems to create holiday cards for their loved ones.
The class can also use the winter stencils made from die cuts.
Students can use holiday stationary, greeting cards, and stickers kept at the center as well. *Note: This holiday season instead of throwing out old holiday cards, you can tear the front cover off and have your child re-use them to write cards of their own.
Another activity that makes writing relevant to the students this month is having them create 'to' and 'from' gift tags to stick on the gifts we make for their loved ones throughout this month.
I also keep models of writing that I have created with the students to support them in creating their own pieces.
ABC:
Sight Words: To review sight words, students can play the 'candy jar' game. Players will pull out a piece of 'candy' with a sight word written on it, and if they can read the word, they place it in their pile and record it in their journal. The player with the most words at the end of the game is the winner.
Initial Sounds: Students can match cookie tins of gingerbread men with letters on them to objects in a gingerbread house that begin with that letter's sound. I keep pictures of the answers at the center and an alphabet chart to support students in their work.
Digraphs: Students who have already mastered producing letters and their correlating sounds can also practice hearing and identifying initial sounds in words when they begin with digraphs (-ch, -th, -sh, and -wh). They will sort pictures according to their initial digraph sound by placing them in the stocking with the appropriate digraph:
Matching Upper and Lowercase: Students working on letter identification can match lowercase letters on snowmen's hats to the capital letters on their bodies.
Building Sentences: Students who are already working on building sentences can clip different characters to the sentence strips below to create silly versions of the Gingerbread Man's catch phrase. Students will copy/illustrate these sentences in their Language Arts journals:
Read and Find: This month students order and read the stanzas in the "I'm a Little Reindeer" poem (sung to the tune of "I'm a Little Teapot"). The poem is color coded and has pictures to give the students some extra support in re-assembling it. Also, each word has a dot beneath it to help the students with one to one correspondence while reading.
Students who are already writing words, will search around the room for pictures that they will write the words for on a recording sheet that has word boxes that correspond to the size and shape of the letter that belongs inside. This month, each word ends in the silent 'e' (fire, white, robe, pine, etc.):
Art: Hand in hand with our Gingerbread Man unit, students will create their own gingerbread. They will first trace and cut out a gingerbread figure on construction paper (a great activity for strengthening fine motor skills) and will then decorate it with various embellishments (including sequins, glitter, buttons, wiggly eyes, and markers).
After students create their gingerbread, they will invent their own story elements to pair with their boy/girl on this awesome sheet from: kindergartensmiles.blogspot.com:
Housekeeping/Dramatic Play: Throughout the holiday season, our class will collect their favorite holiday recipes (written in a 'Kindergarten-friendly' form- see August's page and scroll down to the Housekeeping Center section) and will keep them in our class recipe book at the Housekeeping Station. Students will use the recipes to create an imaginary holiday feast and will then practice creating recipes of their own.
Students can also create shopping lists for their holiday meals or use the holiday catalogs to write their lists for Santa.
We also keep a variety of seasonal, relevant literature (Christmas tree ads, holiday festival guides, holiday songs and poems, etc.) at the station for students to flip through as they engage in dramatic play.
Library: Library center this month is stocked with seasonal literature as well as holiday themed stuffed animals for students to grab a book and curl up with.
December Books:
Math:
Students will also predict which surface of paired holiday cut-outs will have the greatest and least area. They will then work with me in small groups to practice counting how many counters are used to cover the area of each shape and recording the results on an area sheet. Students will then analyze their results to determine which cutout from each pair had the greatest/least area to cover.
The students will cover the area of gingerbread cookies with 'buttons'....
...the area of cookie sheets with gingerbread men...
...and the area of gift boxes with bows:
(Note: we will also measure the gifts with different size bows to compare whether we needed more larger or smaller bows to measure the area of the gifts and will discuss why we think that is):
Counting Videos:
**Students should be able to count to 70 by the end of the month.
Math Center: At the math center students visit during Language Arts time, students can brush up on their number recognition and counting skills by placing the pom-poms in order on Santa's beard or the snowman's belly (great dollar finds from Target). As an extra challenge, students can do the same activity by trying to count backwards too!
Estimation Jar: This month students will be estimating the number of Christmas marshmallows in the jar!
Math Centers:
Area: We will extend what we have learned about area this month to measure the area of different sized 'cookie sheets' using die-cut gingerbread men.
Students will place the gingerbread men on the cookie sheets and will count how many each sheet can fit. When I introduce this center, I explain to students that we cannot place gingerbread on top of each other or halfway off of the cookie sheets. I also model measuring the sheets by making one row of gingerbread at a time, moving from top to bottom and left to right to ensure the accuracy of our measurements.
When students are done measuring a particular sheet, the will flip the sheet over to find a color name on the back (the words are color-coded to help students who do net recognize the color word vocabulary). They will write then write the color word or make that color's swatch in their journal and write the number of gingerbread men that sheet could fit beside it.
Upon measuring all of the cookie sheets, the students will use the sentence stem below to record in the journal which sheets had the greatest and least area (the other sentence stem is on the back of the one shown in the picture):
Sequencing/Ordinal Numbers: Students will apply what they have learned about sequencing and ordinal numbers to determine the logical sequence of decorating a gingerbread man cookie on a cookie sheet.
They will first order the magnetic cards on the sheet and will then velcro 'first' through 'sixth' labels beneath the cookies.
After completing the sequence, the students will use a class i-touch to record themselves orally describing the steps to decorate the cookie and will practice using the correct ordinal number vocabulary. This activity builds students' oral language fluency (which is a pre-cursor to effectively developing reading and writing skills) and supports their acquisition of academic vocabulary.
Patterns: Students will create holiday patterns of their choosing by tracing cookie cutter shapes on cookie sheets and then coloring them.
They will also label their patterns according to the alphabetic sequence (for a more detailed description as to how patterns are named and labeled, see the "Math" link on the "Month by Month" page (accessed from the "Going Deeper" page).
Sets: Students will create sets up to 10 by placing foam ornaments on Christmas tree cards from Kelly's Kindergarten (http://www.kellyskindergarten.com/). Students can also practice sequencing by placing the cards in numerical order before making the sets.
Number cards are kept at the center to support students who are still struggling to recognize numbers 1-10. Before placing the ornaments on the trees, they first match the ornaments to the objects on the number cards to ensure they are using the correct number.
Shapes/Spatial Awareness: Students will use pattern blocks to complete holiday puzzles. Some of the puzzles have the added challenge of only using a certain shape or an exact number of shapes to complete the puzzles.
Students can also manipulate the pattern blocks to create their own Christmas tree design and will record the number of shapes they used below the tree. This activity helps students develop their understanding of spatial awareness, counting and sorting shapes, and practicing to cover the area of different surfaces.
Graphs: Students sort bags of different colored gingerbread men and then graph the results of their sort on a graph recording sheet.
As students visit the graphing center, they can also sort bags of erasers and transfer their results onto a graphing sheet. They will then use their graph to answer questions regarding which eraser they have the most/least of, and to compare which group of erasers has more/less than or an equal amount as another group.
Compare and Order Height: Students will compare and order the height of a set of gingerbread men by lining them up above a sentence strip (we use this to make sure students are lining them up at the same place). Students will first choose a title card paired with an illustration that indicates how they will order the gingerbread (shortest to tallest or tallest to shortest). They will then take a picture of their results by placing a popsicle stick with their name on it beside their work in order for me to check their results and ensure their understanding of the concept.
Compare More/Fewer: At this center, after counting out 10 unifix cubes from a bag (orange representing foxes and brown gingerbread men), the students will line the cubes up in color-coded rows directly aligned to each other. They will then determine which row has more and which has fewer and will record the results in their journal. Students may label their comparisons with 'more'/'fewer' or, for those who are already capable, may write a complete sentence using the label on the instructions sheet.
**Note: Next semester, students will begin to independently recognize and write how many more or fewer items one group has than another.
Blocks: The blocks center this month highlights the Gingerbread Man and other seasonal locations we have discussed as we studied holiday traditions in Social Studies.
Students can also build a gingerbread house using the peeling sticker set from Target:
Science:
Our Science activities this month will be a continuation of the rock investigations we began in November (please see November's page for details). At the Science and Social Studies center, the students will carry out the Scientific method by predicting what will happen when we add a saltwater solution to a paper snowman and Christmas tree. They will observe the results and record them in their Science journal while also taping their conclusion to the experiment on an i-touch (crystals are made when...):
Social Studies:
In December we will continue to compare traditions and customs across cultures and families by learn about the different winter holidays that people celebrate, including Christmas, Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, and Diwali, and the different ways that they are celebrated.
Holiday Folktales and Legends Books:
You can watch Moishe's Miracle on Youtube too!
Christmas:
This month we do several special holiday crafts. One of the students' favorites is a Christmas caroler. Each student brings in a toilet paper roll and an old sock and we convert them into a holiday caroler. We first wrap the toilet paper rolls in origami sheets to give them a unique color and glue an oval circle face to the top half of the roll. Students then trace and cut mittens out of old wrapping paper squares and make song books out of tin foil. Last but not least, we cut the tip off of our socks and tie them to the top of the roll. The students are always so excited to bring these little carolers home to their families!
During our last week before the winter break, students make gifts for their families by rotating between a variety of stations. The students are as busy as the elves in Santa's Workshop!
The first station students visit is a cookie decorating table.
They then take their cookies to the gift wrap station where they choose a holiday tin to place their cookies inside and decorate it with a holiday bow.
Students then take their tin to the gift tag center to make and attach a tag to their cookie tin for their special recipient (some students even choose to give the gift to themselves :) ).
Last but not least, students take their picture wearing Santa's hat and beard and will use their picture to make a card for their family.
Getting Ready for Santa:
We start off the season by receiving a personalized video message from St. Nick himself!
Parents, you can make your own personalized videos at the PNP website ;)
One December afternoon when we arrive back to class from recess, we find a letter left in our classroom from Santa! He leaves us the secret recipe and ingredients for us to make reindeer food. We make bags of the food and get to take them home to sprinkle on our lawns to make sure Santa stops at our homes on Christmas Eve.
The following link has the recipe Santa leaves us along with some other great December ideas you may want to do at home with your little one:
We also make and hang stockings by coloring a pattern on a paper lunch sack and then cut the top and glue cotton balls on the edge. The next morning, we are thrilled to find that our stockings are filled by Santa!
Santa Photos: Our class loves putting on Santa's beard to take Christmas pictures! We will then use these pictures to create holiday cards for our families.
Celebrations: Our Kindergarten class is privileged to have the opportunity to have second graders come and read with us for thirty minutes each week. We call this our "Book Buddy" time and both our students and the second graders are able to reap the rewards in building reading skills and confidence. As a special treat in December, we watched The Polar Express with our book buddies on the giant ACTIV board screen in their classroom while we snacked on buttered popcorn. Each student also helped create a holiday card for our Book Buddies by decorating and signing a gift box on a class card that we hand delivered:
Holiday Class Party: Upon completing our gingerbread unit, the students get to build their own gingerbread houses! Before the party, after the students collect milk cartons at lunch, I hot glue them to paper plates to keep them stable when the students are decorating them. I also pre-cut graham crackers and place them in ziploc bags to help cut down on prep time before the party. Parents help out by donating one type of decorating candy or tub of icing for our houses. The day of the party, I write the students' names on their spots on butcher paper I tape to the tables. This way, the students can keep track of where there house is once it's dry, and I can assign their seats for behavior management (the butcher paper also makes clean-up easy!).
Each student will have their own bowl of pre-poured candies inside and a tongue compressor with a tub of icing to decorate their house.
No comments:
Post a Comment