Rainforest Week #1

This week we started our rainforest unit (One of my favorites!).

We started talking about the layers of the rainforest and the children made their own trees, labeled the layers and put the animals in the appropriate place.

We talked about mammals that live in the rainforest such as monkeys and elephants.

Then we talked about lizards and snakes.

The children painted lizards and completed a graph about whether they thought snakes were cool or creepy.

On friday, we talked about alligators and crocodiles. The kids wrote facts about alligators and we made alligator pie! (Thanks Mrs. Jump for the idea!)

More to come next week!

Check out my rainforest unit plan on Teachers Pay Teachers.

St. Patrick's Day Fun!

We had so much fun last week celebrating St. Patrick's Day!

I love all of the fun projects that you can do for this holiday.

The main event was building Leprechaun traps. 

The kids were so creative and it was incredible to see what they came up with.

We set up the traps on Thursday and when they came in on Friday the leprechaun had left them some treats and a note. He also messed up our room!

It was very funny to watch them try to figure out what happened! (Gotta love their innocence!)

We did a lot of other great projects which can be found in my unit plan on teachers pay teachers.

I hope you and your class had a fun week :)

Dr. Seuss Unit

In honor of Dr. Seuss' birthday this month, we are celebrating by reading his books and doing projects by Dr. Seuss all week long!

So far we are having so much fun!

First we read the Cat in the Hat, we made hats like the Cats to wear all week. Plus, we did a journal about what we would do if the cat came to school! (Some very cute answers!)

We read Horton Hatches an Egg and did a sort of which animals we thought came from eggs and which did not. Then we checked our answers and fixed our chart. We made our own animals hatching from eggs (they came out so cute!).

We read the foot book and measured our feet to make our own foot book! 

We read "There's a Wocket in my Pocket" and made our own 'Wocket' (or something else that rhymes with pocket!) and put it in a pocket! It was a great way for the children to experiment with letter sounds by making silly words. 

Next, we read "Green Eggs and Ham" and made green eggs! The kids had so much fun and thought it was amazing that they were green. Then we made a graph about who liked the green ham. 

We read "One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish". We practiced addition by making addition aquariums. We drew our problem with crayons and then painted over it with watercolors. (The wax doesn't get covered by the water plots and it gives it a neat effect!) 

We have a lot more fun activities to do this week (More pictures to come!)

Check out my Dr. Seuss Unit on Teachers Pay Teachers!

America Unit

The last few weeks in February, we studied American Presidents and Symbols. We learned about past presidents such as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. 

We also learned about some American Symbols such as the bald eagle, the American flag, and the Statue of Liberty. 

We made bald eagles using our hands and feet! 

We made a tissue paper American Flag and practiced the Pledge of Allegiance. 

We did a penny experiment to see why the Statue of Liberty is green. We soaked copper pennies in salt and vinegar over night. The next day we took them out and after a few minutes of being in the air, they began to turn green. It was so neat, the kids really enjoyed it! 

(Thank you Mrs. Jump for the idea!)

Hopefully you can use some of these ideas with your class!

Word Families

One of my favorite activities that we have done this year is working with word families. It is a great way to get children to practice sounding out letters and words. I usually have children work in partners for this activity. They use a cookie tray and magnet letters to create words in a particular word family. They record the words that they make on the recording sheet. Then I have them practice writing the words in the packet (The unit is available at my store on Teachers Pay Teachers). First they must read the word, then use letter stamps to create the word, trace the word with a pencil, and finally draw a picture to represent the word. I also like to use the book “25 Read & Write Mini-Books That Teach Word Families” by Nancy Sanders. These mini books include a story that is easy for kindergarteners to read.  Enjoy!

 

Teachers Pay Teachers

So I just became a member on the site Teachers Pay Teachers. I posted a few items if you would like to take a look here's the link:

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Jessica-Rosace

We did some great projects this week at school and I have some pictures I will post along with some of my unit plan ideas. Hope everyone is enjoying their weekend!

My First Post

Hello, my name is Jessica Rosace and I am a Kindergarten teacher. I previously taught preschool, and this is my first year teaching Kindergarten.  I recently stumbled across other teachers blogs and I was inspired! I hope you enjoy following this blog and get some great ideas to use in your own classroom.