Saturday, October 29, 2011

Jack-O-Buddy-Lanterns

Here's a Halloween activity for doing with upper grade buddies, an older sibling or any sort of 'grown up.' This week in Kindergarten we worked on making paper plate jack-o-lanterns with our 4th grade buddies.

Step 1: the K's drew a jack-o-lantern face on the inside of the plate, being sure to make the shapes large enough to cut.

Step 2: the 4th graders cut out the faces.













Step 3: the buddies worked together to paint the
plates orange (on the outside). When the plates were dried a piece of yellow tissue paper was attached to the back, covering the holes.








The teacher who suggested this project placed her class' jack-o-lanterns on the classroom windows, creating a glowing effect. Due to lack of window space I hung our jack-o-lanterns from the light fixture- it turned out pretty festive!

Friday, October 14, 2011

Great Halloween Read Aloud/ Audio Book

With Halloween quickly approaching I found myself searching my book collection for one of my favorites, Big Pumpkin. Not only is this an adorable book to use for a read aloud but it also works really well for a dramatic re-tell. The best feature of Big Pumpkin was brought to my attention a few years ago by a parent in my class. After finding a radio that still had a working cassette tape player, I discovered that the audio recording was fantastic! The voices are perfectly matched for the characters and the background music adds just enough drama without being a distraction. My suggestion for your pre-Halloween activities is to dress up in your best witch's hat and give Big Pumpkin a listen!

Big Pumpkin audio (via YouTube): http://youtu.be/bHkuZKAW7bs

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

More Tech-Savy Literacy

I was recently chatting with a librarian friend of mine about Elephant and Piggy books by Mo Willems. I am HUGE fan of Elephant and Piggy books and am always looking for a new way to use them. If you do not know what I am talking about you need to run (not walk) to your nearest library and start borrowing the collection- they are so good I would even say skip the library and head straight to the book store!

What's nice about Piggy and Elephant is that each character speaks in an assigned colored bubble, pink for Piggy and blue-grey for Elephant (who sometimes goes by Gerald). My librarian friend told me that she uses the ELMO (you can use a document camera, or a laptop camera if you are really stretched for supplies) to project the books and have the classes read along. She sits half of the class on one side of the projector and the other on the other side. She then assigns a character to each side of the rug. Occasionally, there will be a character other than Piggy or Elephant who has a random colored bubble, which she reads.

The books take about 5-7 minutes to read, despite the high page count the word count is relatively low. The stories are adorable and enjoyable for both children and adults. While picking a favorite is a challenge (since I love them all) I would have to say, my personal favorite is Today I Will Fly.

One more thought on this: The year that I taught 3-year-olds they noticed that the word 'monday' and the word 'mo' started with the same two letters. Once the surprise of this discovery settled, we made an official decision to make Mondays 'Mo Mondays' and chose to read a new 'Mo book' every Monday. Mo Mondays were much anticipated and totally fantastic!

Here is a link to a great 'Piggy and Elephant Party Pack,' complete with activities for both home and classroom. http://www.pigeonpresents.com/teachersguides/eandp_eventkit_09.pdf

Happy reading!


Saturday, October 1, 2011

Tech- Savy Literacy


I have been working on my computer for most of the day and got to thinking about how many links I have bookmarked that I use for classroom purposes. Every teacher has a slue of bookmarked pages to assist with lesson plans and of course there is that list of those great ideas we never seem to have time for. In addition to those, I have a few favorite links for direct classroom application (think students on the rug, eyes on a projection screen.)

This is one of the links I use to enhance a literacy and math lesson for 10 Apples Up on Top. I will add some of the other projects I connect with this book in another posting.

Sit back and enjoy! Be sure to listen through the credits- I love the extra lines the artist added in!