Witches Brew and a Halloween Safety Freebie!

I love Halloween! It has always been one of my favorite things to teach about or celebrate in my classroom. I love how excited my students get and as I mentioned in a previous posting, it is a great thing to anchor writing too! Click Here to read more about how to encourage writing in your classroom with a Halloween twist! Another thing that I liked to incorporate into my classroom was Buddy Classes. Each year I would pair up my Kindergarten or First Grade class with a Third or Fourth Grade class. We would then try to develop monthly lessons (usually themed around a holiday) where the students could work together to complete an activity. This worked great because the older students would help out the younger ones and the teachers could then just wander and supervise. Plus it was a great learning experience for both classes. This Withes Brew Project is what we would do for our October buddy lesson.

We would print enough mats for each student to have one and laminate them for future use. We would assign a grade level a particular number mat and print the corresponding record sheet for that mat. For example: all kindergarten students would have mat number one and all third grade students would have mat number two. We would ask  parents to donate supplies for our project by sending home the following letters (which are included in the unit).

By sending the follow up note we eliminated the possibility of ending up with 50 bags of candy corn and nothing else. Once we got all the students together (usually on Halloween if it fell on a school day) we would recite the poem while mixing the ingredients (its really fun to do this in a dollar store caldron) and then pass everything out and let the buddies start working. Once the students were finished and their papers were checked they could eat their witches brew! This activity could also be done as an independent class if you had some parent volunteers. You can grab this fun unit by clicking here.

Now for the Halloween Safety Freebie! I always spend sometime talking about the importance of Halloween Safety with my classes. It was always very difficult to come up with enough Social Studies grades so my team developed this Halloween Safety Test.

 Click Here to grab your free copy! Happy Halloween!

Pumpkins and Apples and a Freebie!

October just would not be the same with out some pumpkins and apples! As many teachers do, I always would spend the last week in September celebrating Johnny Appleseed's birthday and teaching all about apples. As October began, I would then use the previous lessons to dive into a unit of pumpkins. My students often found it quite exciting to compare the two fruits. If you are in need of some fun and research based lessons to teach about pumpkins and apples then check out my Pumpkins and Apple Unit by clicking here.

This unit is designed with fall in mind. It is a great unit to explore apples and then compare them to pumpkins. It has a venn-diagram comparing the two, a printable to explore and learn how to describe the inside and outside of an apple and of a pumpkin, a pumpkin and apple comparison through investigation activity, inside a pumpkin craft, pumpkin vocabulary cards and assessment, how to carve a pumpkin sequencing and procedural writing activity, and The Great Pumpkin writing activity and craft. Check out the samples below!

For those of you who are starting to plan for Red Ribbon Week here is a fun graphic freebie. Click Here to grab your free graphics!

Fire Safety Unit

As many of you are aware next week is Fire Safety week. My students have always loved learning about fire safety and it always helps that our local fire department comes to do a wonderful presentation. If you read my last posting then you know it was all about mentor sentences for the primary aged classroom. I decided this year to add a mentor sentence into my unit about Fire Safety. I love Gail Gibbons and her non-fiction text: Fire Fire. Nevertheless, my favorite mentor text for fire safety week is: Miss Mingo and the Fire Drill. I love how this text uses a fire drill as a means of teaching fire safety, especially since this is something my students can connect to. Plus, this story has cool details about animals and their different ways of expressing fear and protecting themselves...my students always get a kick out of this. So here is what my fire safety unit includes: four word of the day worksheets (two levels for each word) and posters. I love using the word of the day to expand on vocabulary.

The words are: stop, drop, roll and fire. There is also a stop, drop and roll writing activity and a smoke detector homework activity.

I have also included three different versions of the family meeting spot writing activity so you can pick the level that is most appropriate for your kiddos! There are vocabulary cards, a cute hat craft, a song, and the mentor sentence unit. 

Click Here to purchase your copy of this updated fire safety unit. You can also try out my mentor sentences by downloading my Officer Buckle and Gloria mentor sentence freebie by clicking here.

Primary Mentor Sentences

So what is a mentor sentence and why would it ever be useful in Kindergarten or First Grade? In theory it is a sentence that is taken from a mentor text that is used to model different kinds of sentence structure. Last February, we were introduced to the concept of mentor sentences during a professional development presentation. Granted the concept is geared to second, third, and fourth grade students (more to come one this later) however; I liked the idea so much I immediately started to brainstorm how I could possibly bring the idea into my classroom or even make it appropriate for my primary students. It seemed to me, that no matter how many times I went over that a sentence begins will an UPPERCASE letter and ends with a period, my kiddos still seemed to forget to do it in their own writing. I decided to focus my attention to this concept (or lack there of) using mentor sentences. Each week, I would choose a mentor text and take a sentence to focus on for the week. On day one I would read the story. Then we would look at the sentence together, we would circle the uppercase letter and period, count the words in the sentence and look for any sight words in this sentence.

 The students would then set to work on illustrating the sentence. On day two we would review the story and we would work on unscrambling the words to put them in the correct sentence order. The students would finish the day's activity by rewriting the sentence in their best handwriting.

On day three we would go over the story and sentence a third time and then the students would set to work by writing their own version of the sentence. We would start by brainstorming a list of ideas together and I would complete one example. This way, my struggling students could participate by copying the example and my more advanced students could write their own. All students were then expected to illustrate their sentence.

On day four we would review the story and sentence one last time and then the students would complete the weekly assessment. 

On day five we would review the sentence and complete the corresponding craft. I would usually display their weekly writing and craft on my bulletin boards. What I found was through the repetition of completing these mentor sentences each week, my kiddos finally started to use the proper conventions in their everyday writing. If you want to bring these into your classroom Click Here for my Officer Buckle and Gloria Mentor Sentence Freebie. You can also check out my other Mentor Sentence Units. 

Click Here For the Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything Unit

Click Here For The Very Busy Spider Unit

Click Here For the Skeleton Hiccups Unit

Click Here For the Stellaluna Unit

You can also purchase all of these October Units by Clicking Here. 

Kindergarten Writing With A Halloween Twist

When I first started teaching Kindergarten I was faced with the overwhelming knowledge that somehow, someway I would need to teach my kiddos how to write beyond the basic letters. How do you even attempt to teach a five year old how to make a sentence? What I learned was that anything is possible if modeled correctly and students are given opportunities to practice, practice and practice. My school chose to teach one letter a week. We would front load all of the letters through our small group and then as whole group go back and dig deeper by teaching a letter of the week. For writing, I chose to front load the writing by spending all of August and most of September teaching basic letter formation. By the time we would finally get to the end of September most of my students could write most of there letters correctly. Now the challenge became how to teach them to write a basic sentence with proper conventions. Enter the Halloween Writing Project. This started as something that I (Sydney) actually did when I was in first grade to reinforce handwriting. When I taught first grade I used this version to not only review basic handwriting and penmanship skills but also to teach about poems and  review rhyming words. My first grade students would work on this independently for morning work. When I moved to Kindergarten, I had to reshape this project so that my younger kiddos could also participate. Instead of it being an independent activity; however, it became a shared writing activity. Each day until Halloween, we would work on one letter. We would read the sentence together and talk about what our picture might look like. I would model how to write the sentence and then we would brainstorm ideas for the illustrations. We would talk about what my expectations were for their writing and pictures (best handwriting, coloring in the lines, appropriate colors). Then I would let the students go back to their seats and get busy while I wandered around and assisted as needed. What I saw from this, was how my sweet little students enjoyed not only becoming writers but also adding their own illustrations. Often students would become upset if we missed a day or ran out of time. I even had days were my students chose to miss recess to write. Seriously, missing recess?! I never imagined that it would be so successful but each year the same thing happened. So if you want to change the way writing is going in your primary classroom then click the link below and grab one of our Halloween Writing Poem Projects. On a side note I always introduced this project my reading my favorite Halloween story: Room on the Broom Happy Writing!

Click Here to purchase your copy of this Halloween Writing Project!


Click Here to purchase the first grade version of this Halloween Writing Project!



Here are some student samples:

Here are Samples of the inside pages:

Back to School Boost

Well it has been a long time since our last posting. Sydney and I had a YOLO ( You Only Live Once) trip this summer. We spent six consecutive weeks traveling from the Florida Panhandle to Canada and back. We had a fabulous time! We spent a few days visiting family in Atlanta then went to Asheville, North Carolina and loved the area as well as touring the famous Biltmore House. From there we hit the historic triangle of Williamsburg, Jamestown and Yorktown and just ate up the history of the area. Our next stop was several days in Washington DC, did all the normal tourist things in our Nation's Capitol and then off to New York  City, where we had a white knuckle adventure arriving in the city at 5:00 in the afternoon on a Friday, no less! Once the car was parked safely in the hotel garage it did not emerge again until we were ready to leave. Boston was the next stop. My son is going to school in Boston so we had an extended time within that wonderful city, again the history is all around you and it is impossible not to get soaked up in it. From there it was Niagara Falls for a few days. Oh my goodness is all I can say, the amount of water cascading down the falls is unbelievable. If you go be sure and stay on the Canadian side. The view is much better as well as the surrounding area. It was off to Pittsburgh, PA for a few days with some extended family. It was so wonderful to catch up and have Sydney see where I grew up. Gettysburg was our next stop. We stayed in this great hotel that had once been a school. After having been in Yorktown which dealt with more specifically the Revolutionary War and then going to Gettysburg, which of course was the Civil War, how interesting it was for us to see how differently the battles were fought. By this time we were winding down our trip and heading back home. We stopped in Virginia Beach and got a shot of King Neptune on the boardwalk, Wilmington, North Carolina  and walked along the River Walk at night and of course if you are heading south, Charleston, South Carolina is a must. Before heading back to the Panhandle we hit Atlanta again to see my 91 year old mother!

It was a absolutely fabulous trip, to be able to spend so much time with my daughter and to end the trip still enjoying each other, what a blessing!

So now it's back to school time! We are joining in with TPT and adding 10% off our products as well on Wednesday, August 20, so Happy Shopping!


Susanne

Do you really know your Social Studies and Science Standards?

If you are a teacher in Florida then you must ask yourself this question: Do you truly know what the Science and Social Studies Standards are for your grade level? We thought that we did until a grade level planning session sparked a whole new conversation and realization. We discovered that as we worked to combine our Science and Social Studies Standards with the ELA Common Core Standards that there was a great deal of crossing over between grade levels. In other words, as we worked to stretch out our units and meet the needs of our students we ended up not only teaching our standards but those of other grade levels as well. After realizing this blunder we were asked by our school to create a outline of the Social and Science Standards for our state, in a comparison like format for kindergarten through fifth grade, and then present it to our school faculty. This process was very eye opening for everyone involved and we felt that we needed to share this document with all of the Florida Elementary Educators. It is for sure a tool that we wished we had either been given or thought to create sooner. So if you would like a copy then grab ours (its free!) from our TPT Store and see for yourself if you might have been crossing over into other grade level standards too!