A Kindergarten Smorgasboard Saturday Kindergarten Post!

It’s time again for The Saturday Kindergarten Post here at the Kindergarten Smorgasboard! It was a super busy week…but we had a lot of fun. And we had two days of boot camp. I had a sub on Monday (the dude WAS HORRID! He told the kids “you can do whatever you want…and you can use any of Mr. Greg’s stuff…”) so we had to have two days of tough love to get ourselves back into shape!

This week was all about turkeys and the letter D! Turkeys…ducks…doughnuts…how’s that for a super fun week?!

We learned all about Thanksgiving and being thankful this week! And of course Thanksgiving means turkeys! We made a lot of turkeys!

These are one of my favorites! Paper plate turkeys! They turn out so fun and look awesome hanging in the classroom. And they’re MESSY! You know motto: messy=success!

To make:

Paint 3 paper plates. 2 brown. 1 orange.

After the plates dry, TEACHER hot glues the 2 brown plates to a popsicle stick.

Cut the orange plate in half and staple on for the wings.

Cut out eyes and glue on.

Cut out a red gobbler and glue on.

Cut yellow triangles for the beak (which we totally forgot!)

Legs-2 strips of orange paper fan folded!

And people, this happens every. single. year. No matter how much we go over directions and model, one turkey always ends up with Dumbo ears. Seriously, been doing this for 5 years. The streak continues. But this one inspired a spring craft idea! hehe

These are another fave! These are our sight word turkey. I assess each child’s sight words and they get feathers for each word they know! I love that we get to make assessing fun and we get to take a minute to discuss being thankful for words and reading and learning! And really, how cute are these?!

These goofy dudes came from Mrs. Miner’s Kindergarten Monkey Business! They were so easy to do and are just plain fun!

We spent a lot of time this week being thankful! Our morning meeting greeting this week was “Good morning, I am thankful for…” We wrote lists of things we were thankful for, we did a predictable chart about being thankful and we spent time writing about what we were thankful for!

Some of things we’re thankful for…

Mr. Greg

food

home

momma

spiders (?)

scarecrows (you know…so the birds don’t eat the corn)

And the best thing we’re thankful for:

CHINA (as in the country…true story!)

Of course, we did our MAD SCIENCE FRIDAY! This week we made slime. We were supposed ot make glitter slime…but the glitter glue is $3 a bottle…so we used glue with a little glitter glue mixed in! The ‘staches had a blast making slime. They were so excited that one of them yelled “WE KNOW HOW TO MAKE SLIME!” They also thought it was pretty gross when they had to pull the slime out of the water!

I love the two very different reactions!!!

If you want to make slime, you can get the directions my clicking on this freebie!

Of course, you MUST have a hat to make each week complete! This week was D for ducks!

And or course, we made our circle map of D words. My drawing is D for disastrous!

And finally, how about Foodie Fun Friday? So, it’s the letter D…so that can only mean one thing: DOUGHNUTS!

True story. We fried doughnuts for the entire kindegarten. We alerted the principal that we were frying…and that we might or might not set off the fire alarm…he said “OK..we can just let the fire department know!” (yeah, he really is that awesome!!!!!)

Now, of course we took safety first. The ‘staches were kept at a safe distance from the frying…and we even set up next to the fire extinguisher!

SAFETY FIRST!

And in case you missed it, here is a fun “staching Christmas” freebie! Click the picture to see it on TPT! Click download preview to get your freebie!

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Greg Smedley-Warren

Howdy, I am Mr. Greg. I have been teaching for 11 years. I spent a year teaching fifth grade, two years in second grade and am now in my 9th year in Kindergarten. Kindergarten is my passion and my calling but honestly, that wasn’t how it started. Read the whole story >

A Kindergarten Smorgasboard Five For Friday!

5 comments

kaspenson5 November 23, 2013 at 10:58 pm

Where did you get your sight word turkeys?

aliraebaby November 23, 2013 at 11:32 pm

I cut feather shapes out of construction paper and let the kids write their own site words. I am curious about your school districts because we have such tight regulations on both food and with the fire marshal will allow.

Greg Smedley November 24, 2013 at 2:40 am

The sight word turkey is from my Gobble Gobble Thanksgiving pack! We have a very supportive principal! And I adhere to the theory that it's better to ask forgiveness than ask permission!

Mrs. Miner November 24, 2013 at 3:00 am

Thanks for the shout out! Love all your turkey stuff! 🙂
Krissy
Mrs.Miner’s Monkey Business

Rachel Rubright November 25, 2013 at 3:54 am

Just wanted to say I have bookmarked many Kindergarten blogs and yours is BY FAR my favorite! I'm a first year teacher so all of your wisdom and cute ideas have been a real life saver for me. I'm purchasing the Gobble Gobble pack right now so that I can do the sight word turkeys with my kids this week. 🙂
You're a great inspiration. Thank you for taking the time to blog and create!

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Happy Saturday!! Did this week seem to drag on for anyone else?! And on top of that, the ‘staches were a little bonkers this week. But we made it! We learned a lot…we had a lot of fun..we even painted with the very special glitter watercolor paint! Mr. Greg only gets that paint out for very special occasions…So here’s a wrap up of our week…

Pilgrim-palooza!

This week we learned all about the pilgrims. I am always impressed at how the little ‘staches get so into learning about a topic. We compared ourselves to the pilgrims, we made paper plate pilgrims and a hand-print mayflower. We ended our Pilgrim study with a tree map of what we learned!

The ‘staches love the Draw Write Now books! When I told them we were going to draw pilgrims, they literally cheered!!! The pilgrims were tricky to do but they turned out cute!

I have to admit that these little guys are just too cute for words! You can’t beat an angry paper plate Pilgrim lady!!

This was a powerful learning experience. It’s one thing for 5 year olds to learn about a group of people who lived a long time ago, but when you compare the Pilgrims to us, they get a better understanding. They were very upset about no electricity, no toys and the fact that kids had to do a lot of work. And wearing the same clothes?! Forget it…they were done!

This week we read There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly and ended our week with a pie graphing Foodie Fun Friday! We tasted cherry pie, apple pie and a homemade peanut butter pie! The homemade pie was created by the mister! The winner? A store bought apple pie. The mister was devastated that his pie came in third! hehe

We also enjoyed our Mad Scientist Friday! We did some magic and made colors vanish! It’s so much fun doing this experiments with the ‘staches. Hearing them oooohhh and aaaahhh is priceless. I also love hearing them discuss with each other as the experiment unfolds before their eyes! If you’re not doing science with your kids, give it a shot! You will be amazed!

We worked on addition story problems this week! We learned to draw pictures to help us add. And i am a very proud teacher because we did so well on this. 99% of the class GETS IT! I think the dinosaurs and unicorns were a little engaging! We will be doing more of this next week!! Can’t wait to see them grow even more!

This week was all about letter H so we did our word circle maps. Seriously, someone needs to host a professional development class for teachers on how to draw. Monday we brainstorm words and I draw them (draw is a term I use loosely!) and Tuesday we spell the words. This week we added in counting syllables as a quick way to keep practicing this skill!

And since it was H and Veteran’s Day on Monday, we honored our military with HERO HATS!

We also honored our military with two art projects and a thank you note writing activity! These are currently en route to Afghanistan where I hope they bring a smile to some soldiers!

Click the picture to see Monday’s post about our Veteran’s Day activities!

This week we also learned a new review game called DUELING CHARTS! We had a blast playing the game. I didn’t realize how much of a blast until the ‘staches were BEGGING to play on Friday. Like jumping up and down begging! This will definitely become a staple in the Kindergarten Smorgasboard for sure! To learn more, click the picture to read my post about how to play!

And finally, how about some Common Core learning in the bathroom?! I finally put up our Common Core Math Vocabulary cards in the bathroom. Hey, I figure they spend so much time in there, why not give them something to study!!

And how was your week?!

I put my Thanksgiving Common Core Creations on sale for 50% off! Check them out if you need ideas and activities! And quite honestly, next week we do our “I Am Thankful For The Words I Can Read” turkey…which excites me to no end. You just have no idea how much I love that project!!!

And the winner of Trotting Turkeys and Gobble Gobble is:

Kim Tran! You have mail!

And stay tuned for my next giveaway of this guy: OMG I CANNOT WAIT TO FINISH THIS AND USE IT!!!