Happy Schedulin Sunday from The Kindergarten Smorgasboard World Headquarters!
Sunday is my favorite day because I get to plan a week’s worth of fun, engaging, hands on lessons that are not only fun but rigorous (you know that word…it’s the educational word of the moment….hehe…I wonder who first wrote it on a napkin somewhere and now it’s THE THING!) And then by 9:13 on Monday morning, those lessons are all thrown out of whack because of teachable moments, dance parties, tears, snot, meetings and paperwork! But that’s why teachers are awesome…because we’re the most flexible people in the world. Now, if only my body would be that flexible!
I’ll get off my soapbox now…and give ya the goods!
As always, you can download my weekly plans by clicking on the pictures below!
(The template I use is called THE GREG and it’s available from A Teacher’s Plan!)
This week is all about BATS! So here are some of the bat books we’re reading this week!
(Click the books to see them on Amazon!)
I always start bat week with Stellaluna! I love the story of acceptance and diversity. I love that a fiction story gives great information and facts! And it leads right into a comparison of bats and birds!
After we read Stellaluna, we sequence the story using a flow map and we’ll do a story map to retell the story!
We will also read The Old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly and work on more sequencing with a flow map!
As we read and learn about bats, we will label bats…we will make a Bats Can Have Are Chart and a Bats Live Eat chart. We will compare birds and bats with a double bubble map. We will describe bats with a bubble map.
We’re going to make a bat hat (duh…you know my rule: No Learning WIthout A HAT!)
We will make cylinder bats! These are so easy and they look AMAZING hanging from the ceiling!
We will make a bat snack with oreos, M&Ms, Doritos, candy corn (MEGA YUMMY!) and licorice (MEGA GROSS)!
And that’s just week 1 of bats….I’m pretty sure I’m Batman BTW!
All of these bat activities AND MORE plus math and literacy centers are in my Bat Research Project Creation!
In math, we’re all about the shapes, all about the shapes, no …..and I can’t finish it. EPIC FAIL!
We kick off our shapes unit by making shape monsters!!!! I love how these turn out every year! The ‘staches love making them! And I love how we use our shape monsters to complete our 2D shape anchor chart!
The shape monsters are free in my TPT Store! Check em out!
After we finish our shape monsters, we count the sides, the vertices and we come up with real life objects that look like our shapes!
Then we get to build our shapes using toothpicks and marshmallows!
This is a great way to for our kids to visualize the shapes and helps them understand sides and vertices. For 3D shapes, it’s great for helping them understand that 3D is real life (fat shapes)!
And we get to eat marshmallows! So…it’s a win win! We learn. We eat. BAM!
To assess shapes, we will do a shape sort and we use ESGI to assess shape ID and naming!
We also use our shape powerpoint to review shapes each day! You can get the powerpoint by clicking on the picture!
All our shapes activities and more are in my 2D and 3D Shapes Mini Pack!
This week we’re working on being good writers! We’re working on drawing pictures and writing about our pictures. We’re working on stretching our words and using our sounds to spell our words! We’re also working on labeling our drawings!
This week is the -an word family! We will blend an words, read an words and use Letters Alive from Alive Studios to build -an words!
And of course, we’ll have an explosive Mad Science experiment!
It’s time to get messy!
In honor of Halloween, we make magic potions! You can download the fun freebie for this experiment by clicking the picture! So messy! I LOVE IT!!!
And that’s our week!
How about some FREEBIES?!
Here are our poem and emergent reader for the week! We read these each day for our shared reading time!
And how about a fun GHOSTLY counting freebie?! This freebie is so awesome because you can use it in about 3,108, 954 ways! For serious. That many. Because I counted!
Here are the creations we’ll be using this week:
I’m linking up with my friend Deedee at Mrs. Wills Kindergarten for Peek At My Week!
Check out her post for lots of ideas for your week!
