The Mitten, Mr. Groundhog and a FLASH GIVEAWAY!

Brrrrr!  It's so COLD outside!

I am so thankful that January is over.  The month actually kinda flew by but there is something about saying goodbye to January that I think I'm saying goodbye to the snow and cold weather (if only, right?).

All in all, January is actually one of my most favourite months at school (minus the freezing cold weather and all that indoor recess!).  We learned about snow (melting and freezing), clothes we wear/things we do in the various seasons, and this week we are wrapping up our book study on Jan Brett's The Mitten.

Here are some activities we worked on:

 

Practicing our beginning sounds - ALL of my students are so good at this.  Time to introduce some centres that focus on ending sounds!

 

Clapping and listening for how many syllables each word is.  My students make me use syllables for EVERYTHING!  They love it when I say "If your name has 2 syllables, line up at the door!"

 

I got this idea my first year teaching from my dear friend and former teaching partner, Ms. Alves (one of the BEST Kindergarten teachers I know!).  The students have to "sew" the mitten (like Baba in the story) and then they retell the story by inserting pictures of each animal into the mitten (there is an opening at the bottom of the mitten - hard to tell).  My students realized that "sewing" isn't so easy after all!

 

Here is what the finished "sewn" mitten looks like.  The students will be using the mitten this week with their reading buddies to retell the story.

 

You can never get enough practice with those sight words!  I mixed them all up and the students had to guess which words they were.  (I had a list of all the words posted nearby in case they needed to refer to that.)

 

We've been working on rhyming words so I created this little activity for my kinders.  I had the students find rhyming words (yes, they are colour coded to simplify it for my JKs).  You could easily adapt this and print the carrots on white instead of colour so that the students aren't just matching.

 

Here's our pocket chart story from last week.

 

And this is the worksheet that goes with it.

 

 

You can find these activities in my unit The Mitten and from my All Year Long Pocket Chart Fun pack.

 

Isn't this little snowman the cutest?  We made them based on a glyph from my friend and teaching partner, Ann-Marie Parisi's unit Winter Fun.

 

Here's what the glyph looked like.

 

We sorted pictures into the correct season.  You can download this activity, Season Sort, for FREE here.

 

Here's what's to come this week:

 

So it looks like Groudhog Day this year falls on a Saturday.  We will be celebrating Groudhog Day this week by making a cute little groundhog craft and using it to predict and graph if the groundhog will see his shadow or not.

 

I also like to read the book The Substitute Groundhog by Pat Miller.  We choose our favourite substitute groundhog and graph our answers.  I also included a cute graphic organizer and writing activity for this book. 

This week we sure will be doing a lot of predicting and graphing!

 

 

You can check out these fun activities and LOTS more in my Happy Groundhog Day mini-unit.  It's only $4!  So if you are looking to do some fun activities and centres this week be sure to check it out.  All you have to do is click print and everything is ready to go!

 

***FLASH GIVEAWAY!***

I'll give it away to one lucky person first thing in the morning tomorrow.  So if you'd like a copy, leave me a comment below and don't forget your e-mail address!  I'll send it to a lucky winner at 7:30 am EST.

 

Have a wonderful week, friends!