Welcome to week 17 of kindergarten, 10 days of putting our classroom management skills to the test and using our kindergarten December lesson plans to keep kids engaged. 10 days to make learning gains, laugh, make memories, and 10 straight days of dress-up days and Friday the 13th! Keep reading to see what we have planned for kindergarten gingerbread week!
Kindergarten Gingerbread Week: Lesson Plans
You can download our weekly lesson plans by clicking on the image!
You can get our lesson plan templates here:
Kindergarten Learning Activities: Word Family BOOTCAMP
This week, we’re continuing to work with CVC words using our Word Family Bootcamp, along with our required foundational skills curriculum. We’re continuing our focus on CVC words. This week will be all about decoding words, spelling words, and writing words. We will play games and do look alike words.
One of the tools we’re using in small groups are these word mapping mats. These are so effective at helping students read and write words. They also promote the mental process of orthographic mapping.
This week we’re also using our Digital Word Building tool! This is such a great way to word chaining and the kids LOVE it!
Phonemic Awareness Bootcamp
This week, we also continue Phonemic Awareness Bootcamp! Phonemic Awareness Bootcamp is all about hearing the sounds and the oral language. This research-based resource is designed for each lesson to take about 10 minutes. Then we move to Word Family BOOTCAMP, which has explicit phonics instruction focused on blending, decoding, spelling, and writing CVC Words.
This week in Phonemic Awareness Bootcamp, we’re starting on skill 5, which is middle sounds. This is such a difficult skill for students, and I’ve seen noticeable improvement in their ability to hear and spell the correct middle sounds! This week, we’re continuing the focus on middle sounds with a roller coaster ride! The students have roller coaster cars on popsicle sticks. We say a word and then the roller coaster goes up the hill while we say the first sound, at the top we stop and shake the car while saying the middle sound and down the hill for the final sound!
Sight Words
This week, we’re continuing sight words in our classroom using our science of reading-aligned resource: Sight Word 60! And yes, you can still teach sight words as long as you teach students to decode, spell, write, and read the words in context! We’re not teaching them to memorize words anymore.
Here’s the routine:
Monday: I will introduce the words by segmenting the sounds, decoding the words, spelling them, and using the word in a sentence.
Tuesday and Wednesday-review the words with segmenting and decoding the words; kids use the words in a sentence
Thursday-sight word: Students find and color the word!
Friday-we play a game to practice the words!
Kindergarten Gingerbread Week: Reading Comprehension
This week is GINGERBREAD WEEK! This is always such a fun week because there are so many great stories to read and so many great things you can do with a gingerbread theme. But ya’ll. There’s so much we just can’t fit it all in and do all the things we want to do! Here’s what we’re doing for our kindergarten gingerbread week!
Read The Gingerbread Man and sequence the story!
We will also read these versions of gingerbread stories and complete our story map. As we read the different versions, we compare and contrast the stories. And yes, the girls get very excited that The Gingerbread Girl is smarter than the others and doesn’t get eaten!
We love The Three Tamales because it incorporates the culture of many of our students. I love The Gingerbread Boy because it’s in a completely fun and unique setting!
Kindergarten Gingerbread Week: Writing
This is always one of my favorite writing activities because the kids create hilarious things. Sometimes, they even say things you don’t want them to say. Just saying… We do turn and talk and share things we would run from if we were gingerbread. We create our graphic organizer. Then, students write and draw what they would run from!
Kindergarten Gingerbread Week: Math
This week, we’re going to do some review math, some measurement, and some graphing! Basically, we’re doing all the math this week: counting, adding, subtracting, graphing, and more! It’s like a math grab bag!
For addition and subtraction, we are going to do ornament math. I make a giant tree from paper and use some ornament printouts (you can use real ornaments!) to practice adding and subtracting to 10! I might even change to a gingerbread activity. Same idea. Make a gingerbread cookie and add or subtract “candy”! See…I told you…it’s a grab bag.
We’re also going to measure ourselves using gingerbread!
We tape gingerbread to the wall and students estimate how many gingebred cookies tall they are. Then we measure to see how tall we are! We record the data on our chart. I also snap a picture and we print them off and add them to our recording page!
For our graphing lesson, we’re going to take a bite from our gingerbread cookie and graph the results! Each kid gets a gingerbread cookie. They take ONE bite (head, arm, leg) and then we graph the results. And every year, I ask myself why do these kids always go for the head??
To kick off gingerbread week, we use our green screen and take some fun pictures!
Kindergarten Lesson Plans: Holidays Around The World
December means it’s time for my favorite unit of the year. Hands down, I love this more than anything we do all year. I love the learning, the engagement, and how we incorporate so much from our students. And ya’ll, it’s fun—just fun, and that’s what we need!
Here’s how our trip around the world works: each day, we visit a country to learn about their traditions, we learn the language, we learn the food they eat, and we even locate the country on a map. We use Google Earth to find the country on the map. And we stamp our passports. We even get an airline ticket for the trip!
This week, we’re traveling to Japan, which is a brand new addition to our Holidays Around The World resource. The rest of the week will be spent learning about holidays without traveling. We’re learning about Ramadan, Diwali, and Hanukkah.
For each holiday, we also do an art project! Here’s what we are doing this week:
Holidays Around The World: Foodie Fun Friday
This week for Foodie Fun Friday, we’re going to enjoy our traditional Holidays Around The World feast! We have traditional foods such as applesauce for Hannukah, tamales from Mexico, and Panettone from Italy, and we also have some foods like Christmas tree cakes that represent other countries and holidays!
Kindergarten Morning Meeting
This week our greeting is our gingerbread greeting! This is a PowerPoint greeting!
Kindergarten December Lesson Plans: FREEBIES
WEEKLY RESOURCES
Click below for the resources we are using in our classroom this week:
For more information, check out these posts:
