Presidents and Patriotism

One of my favorite units in February is Presidents. We have so much fun learning about George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and just our country in general.

One art project that gets them thinking about the whole idea is this....
We color and cut out the 2 monuments (after talking about them and looking at real pictures of them) then we put watered down tempura paint onto the paper where they use a straw to blow on it and make it look like fireworks. The original idea was to use black paper, but you just couldn't see the paint on it, so we switched it. I am not sure where the masters for the monuments came from.

One of my favorite lessons for this unit comes later... we use a variety of pictures to discuss symbols. We say again and again, "a symbol is something that stands for something else". We talk about traffic signs (a review from the beginning of the year). We talk about letters and numbers. Then I introduce some of our patriotic symbols. I have about 15 both national and California symbols.... for example, the Washington and Lincoln monuments, the bald eagle, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Redwood tree, etc. We look at each one and discuss what it is and whether it is a National symbol or a State symbol. On a different day, we brainstorm words that these things stand for... justice, freedom, protection, beauty, strength, honesty, etc. Then we hold up the symbols and say some sentences: "The California Poppy stands for beauty." "Abraham Lincoln stands for freedom." Then, each child chooses a symbol and draws it with a pencil. When the pencil drawing is done, they go over it with a Sharpie marker then watercolor paint it. On another day, we all choose a sentence and write it. This particular example says, "The bear stands for protection."

Snowman Goodness

We are up to our neck in snow here in Kindergarten, even though it has been sunny and 65 degrees this week! We are starting our "Cold Places" unit. This is one of my favorites with so many great activities. The pictures above were taken at the California Kindergarten Conference some previous year. Aren't they cute? I haven't actually made these, but they are on my list of things to try.

Writing Assessment

I created a Kindergarten rubric because all of the primary ones I found did not really apply to the challenges of teaching writing to Kindergartners. My goal for students who come to K with letter knowledge in place is to reach proficient or advanced in all areas: phonetic knowledge, conventions, and idea. For students who start out with no (or very limited) letter knowledge, I am happy to see them progress into the basic category, especially in relationship to "idea". The scaffold of a basic sentence structure seems to help them to write independently and confidently. These samples show the independent writing of one of last year's students. The date the writing was created is written by me in marker.
This one says "pumpkin".

This page says, "I like to count." You can see how much growth was made in just a couple of months. Conventions like spacing and use of lower case letters are not yet present, but he is well on his way to being a writer.
This is the rubric. I am sorry it is hard to read. If you are interested in a pdf copy, you can email me.
Happy writing!

It's OK to be Different!

One of my favorite art projects of the whole year....


First we read the book It's OK to be Different by Todd Parr. Then at my reading group table each child decides what his or her sentence will say. I dictate the sentences on the back of their papers, and they use their pencils to make a drawing. I encourage them to make the drawing fill up the paper. f they finish the drawing, they use a Sharpie marker to go over all of the lines they drew and erase the pencil marks. If they don't get time to do this, I do it that afternoon. I also type their sentences on the computer. The next day, the students use their watercolor paints to fill the whole page up with color. I encourage them to use non-traditional colors like Todd Parr does in his book. They also write their names into the rectangles and paint those.

Ususally, we make these self portraits during our "All about Me" unit in September. This year I was late, but figured they were worth the effort. I pre-tear the ovals for the faces, but beyond that, the students all tear the pieces. Paper tearing is really good for developing hand muscles used in writing. This page is saved to go into our large art memory books.

Pumpkin Patch Writing

After our field trip to the pumpkin patch, we did this writing activity to begin getting ready for paragraph writing in First grade. This activity is very "doable" for Kindergarteners and we use it again and again throughout the year. We add more writing as we become more capable.
First, we talk about the field trip. We decide together what word works best in our topic sentence, and we all write it. (I use the overhead projector.)
Then, we discuss what we did after we got to the pumpkin patch. I always have students whisper among themselves before raising hands. This gives more people an idea to share, and people who like to share every idea a chance to talk to someone. I call on a couple of people, and we choose an idea.
In this example, it is "First, we walked through the corn maize." After we draw our pictures, we go back and read what we have so far.
We continued on with the other two boxes using the same routine: whisper, share a few answers, choose an answer, draw it, read what we have so far.
The other boxes were, "Then, we picked a pumpkin." & "Finally, we got back on the bus."
Last, we choose a word for our closing sentence, and reread the entire paragraph.

More Chicka

Another fun activity we did for Chicka Chicka Boom Boom was to make a 3-D tree book. We used toilet paper tubes for the trunk and cut the fronds in the same way as on the art page. The students used white glue to attach the fronds and the pom pom coconuts.
Inside the tree we either had a long piece of adding machine tape with the alphabet written on it (if we were feeling very smart) or a page that had the alphabet typed on it that they traced. If they chose the tracing alphabet, I had to cut the page into strips and staple them together before rolling it up to insert into the tube.
But guess what I caught some of my little geniuses were doing? They were putting the adding machine tape on top of the tracing page and tracing right through! So, next year everyone will use the adding machine tape and trace over an alphabet page.