October is here! That means everything fall and, of course, Thanksgiving!
This coming week we will be preparing for Thanksgiving by creating a craft and card, as well as reading some beautiful stories. If you teach in a Catholic school like I do, this time of year is lovely for heading outside and observing the seasonal changes - we stop and thank God for everything!
October 4-8, 2021
We are going to be brainstorming all the things we can thank God for and creating our own fall wreath that we can take home for Thanksgiving.
You can find this activity (and so many more fun lessons perfect for October!) in my
I received this beautiful flower arrangement from Fiorissimi Floral Designs. The students love drawing and painting the fall flowers!
We also set up our Farmers Market at the Dramatic Centre! We added plastic vegetables and made pie pieces from felt. YUM!
We will be continuing with sorting in math this week.
I love using these attribute apples. They are perfect for students to describe how to sort in so many ways!
You can find these on Amazon if you are interested!
If you'd like to see more about how I teach sorting and get a copy of my 2-week plans for FREE head over to my blog post all about sorting!
Click the picture below to download a copy of my weekly plans for FREE!
October 11-15, 2021
I hope everyone celebrating had a very happy Thanksgiving weekend! What's coming up this week?
A few students have been having apples as their snack and saving the seeds. We have a small jar with a dozen apple seeds in our classroom - we may just be planting them this coming week! So, of course, I planned for a great poem to introduce all about apples and set up a virtual field trip to an apple orchard for Friday!
On our field trip we will be learning about all the different foods that we can make using apples, working on a STEM challenge, playing a search-and-find game, listening to stories and so much more!
You can check out my Apple Orchard Virtual Field Trip by clicking the picture below. You can use this not only if you are teaching remote but also in person - I will be projecting mine on my Interactive Whiteboard.
We are also starting subitizing this week and next. If you take a look at our long range plans, we added number sense in every month. That's because our school, as a whole, believes that a strong sense of number is key to learning anything in math so we always go back to teaching basic number skills.
Subitizing is being able to instantly recognize how many there are in a group. Say you roll a die - what number did you roll? Did you have to stop and count the dots? Well, with subitizing you are able to instantly know how many dots you got on each roll. And it goes so much further than that...
I have been working on this new math pack for the past few months. There are so many fun subitizing games you can play with your students so they become familiar with numbers in many ways.
I just posted this pack earlier today and we will be using it for the next 2 weeks. It comes complete with a 2-week lesson plan guide also! I'll post specifically about subitizing in kindergarten soon!
We are starting to introduce a few provocations around our room since our students are now becoming more comfortable with exploring the different centres and are getting better at cleaning up after themselves! Here are a few for the week:
Last week I introduced these Alphabet Crowns. I don't know about your students, but my class LOVES anything to do with making a crown! To help them with making these (it's still early in the year and some children are working on cutting skills), I actually pre-cut them and just left the middle dashed line for students to cut and tape the band to the crown. Super easy! Since we are already working on letter Ee, I left letters A-D at the Writing Centre if students would like to make them.
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October 18-22, 2021
Lots of fall things happening in our class this week!
The students loved the apple orchard virtual field trip last week. They even asked to do it again and watch the directed drawing of an apple! Here is another challenge they loved from the field trip - this time we set it up as a provocation.
This past summer I won a Tuff Tray from Louise Kool & Galt. This is THE.BEST.THING.EVER! So many possibilities! We started by adding all of our scrap paper and scissors and had students practice cutting. Well they grabbed glue and turned their creations into so many things! Definitely a hit!
In math we will be continuing with subitizing.
I made my own dot plates and introduced them to the whole class. Then I left them at the Math Centre for students to play with each other.
We will also be playing games with our fingers, dominoes and 10-frames!
You can find all of my subitizing activities in my new Subitizing in Kindergarten pack on TpT.
We set up a special place in our classroom for our Prayer Table (it's actually more of a shelf this year but for the purpose of my lesson we used a small table LOL). After choosing various items and discussing the importance of each, students chose 2-3 things to draw.
We had to tweak our schedule just a bit (we moved the afternoon snack earlier) which freed up the last, short block of the day. I actually love this short block of time! I set up a game to play as a whole group or read a story. This week I will be starting to introduce coding in a very simple way using a Cartesian Plane. For those of you new to this, think of the game Battleship - it's the same thing but on a simpler level.
This is the first activity to try. There are less squares to choose from and pictures are larger.
Choose a letter on the bottom and a number from the side (X and Y axis). Bring your fingers together. Which square should you remove?
You can see that part of the backpack is hiding behind squares C4, C5, D5 and one more square!
The game gets a little trickier! Now there are more squares and pictures are only hiding behind one spot.
There are even slides for students to make their own!
Click the picture below to see more!
You can use this both in person (on your interactive whiteboard) or if you are teaching remotely.
Click the picture below to download a copy of my weekly plans for FREE!
October 25-29, 2021
It's almost Halloween! While things may not be completely back to normal, we are going to have the best day ever this coming Friday to celebrate Halloween! The students will be having a small dance party and we have been planning lots of fun activities!
I just made these new digital packs (as I know a bunch of teachers who are teaching hybrid in the public board and wanted to help them out) - but these are perfect to play on our Interactive Whiteboard in class!
Here's a fun and easy provocation we set up - how many spiders can you pick up in 1 minute?
We will be carving our pumpkin on Monday during our religion block. I love this book I stumbled across last fall and will be reading it as we carve! If you teach in a Catholic school, it's definitely something you'll want to check out! We also left it out with blank papers for students to draw what they want our pumpkin to look like (or their own at home).
We are starting a new unit in math - all about patterning!
You can follow along with my weekly plans as everything comes from this pack:
With Halloween just around the corner, we left out these fun provocations (foam stickers are from Dollarama):
I had students join me to make a Halloween pattern bracelet. Everyone wanted to make one to take home!
This is a FREE download if you need something last minute to set up or work on in small groups (and it's perfect if you are working on patterning!). Click the picture below to download.
Click the picture below to download a copy of my weekly plans for FREE!
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