Week 22 of kindergarten is going to be WILD and packed with learning, celebrations, and fun! Ya’ll. It’s Lunar New Year, the 100th day of school, and Groundhog Day is Sunday, so we will learn about it this week. This year, my team and I decided to scale back our 100th-day-of-school celebration, and instead, we’re going to do a huge 101st day-of-school party!
Groundhog Day Activities And Lunar New Year 2025: Lesson Plans
You can download our weekly lesson plans by clicking on the image!
You can get our lesson plan templates here:
Kindergarten Phonics And Phonemic Awareness
This week, we’re continuing Blends Bootcamp with digraphs. We did our circle charts last week and worked on decoding and writing words with digraphs. The kids did great, but I noticed in decodable text that they didn’t notice the digraphs, and we were still having some issues with the sounds. So this week, we’re going to be doing digraph sorts, lots of decodable texts, and continuing to read and spell words with digraphs.
For these activities, we’re using our digraph cards!
For phonemic awareness, we’re moving on to skill 6 of our Phonemic Awareness Bootcamp. Skill 6 is syllables. We will be stomping syllables, using sticky notes to count syllables and sorting words by the number of syllables!
Past And Present: Reading Comprehension And Social Studies
This week we’re starting our 3rd module of our required reading curriculum. This one always surprises me because the kids get so into it and really engage with the content…which isn’t true for most of this curriculum. It’s also a lot of fun for them to see how people lived in the past. And by the past they think how I lived in the 80s…
This week, we’re focusing on how school has changed, and we’re reading When I Was Young In The Mountains!
We start with the book School Then And Now. The kids are fascinated by how different schools are today. As we read we create a list of questions we have about school then and now!
The rest of the week is the story When I Was Young In The Mountains. Kids love this story for two reasons: the outhouse and the grandma kills the snake. True story. Real talk. And if it hooks them, go with it!
This week we’re working on generating questions and answers and learning the main idea and details! I actually like this book for both skills because it’s very concrete so it’s easy for kids to grasp the skills. Especially the main idea. What’s the story all about? She was young in the mountains. And the details: All the things she did and experienced.
2D Shapes Activities
This week we are kicking off Shapes Bootcamp and learning about 2D shapes!
Our required math curriculum has us creating a shapes anchor chart on day 1 so we do that but we make it much more fun and hands-on! The kids work together in pairs to make shape monsters!
After they make their shape monsters, they present them to the class by telling the name of the shape, the number of sides and vertices, straight or curved lines, and real-life objects for the shape! This means we’re doing art, learning shapes, having math dialogue, and using math terms! Isn’t that better than making an anchor chart?!
We also go on a shape hunt! The curriculum says to walk around the school and put color-coded stickers on things we find for certain shapes. Sure. Let’s just wander around and put stickers on things. No issue there at all. None. Zero. Instead, we do something our kids LOVE! We go on a shape hunt using magazines! I give the kids magazines and they cut out items for each shape and glue them on our giant shape posters! And trust me…make them show you the pictures and identify them before they glue them on or you will end of up a picture of a lady in her bra on the circle poster. Trust me. Just trust me.
Then the students do their own shape sort!
We also focus on a shape day to create individual shape anchor charts! We identify the shape; students identify the attributes: 2D or 3D, sides, vertices, and real-life objects for that shape!
Lunar New Year 2025 Activities
Lunar New Year 2025 begins on January 29th, so this week, we’re learning about and celebrating the holiday!
Monday and Tuesday will be learning about Lunar New Year and then Wednesday will be our Lunar New Year 2025 celebration!
We use books and read alouds to learn about the Lunar New Year and create graphic organizers for all of our learning!
We will also make lanterns to decorate the classroom for our celebration!
We also make a snake since this is the year of the snake!
On Wednesday, we decorate the classroom for our celebration!
We learn about the Year Of The Snake and create a graphic organizer about the year of the snake. We graph if we like rice and we eat noodles with chopsticks. We also get to eat fortune cookies!
And now, here’s where it gets a little dicey. Groundhog Day is February 2. That’s a Sunday. So, of course, we have to learn about groundhogs before then. Well, Friday would be the day. That happens to be our 100th day of school. But this year, we all were feeling a little blah about the 100th day, so we decided as a team to celebrate the 101st day of school! So Friday will be learning about Groundhogs and a little 100th day of school fun, too! And then Monday, February 3rd, will be a 101st day of school blowout!
Groundhog Day Activities
Groundhogs are fascinating animals. Yeah, they can damage yards and stuff, and they were my dad’s arch nemesis when we lived on our farm, but they’re cute and fun to learn about!
We use the book Groundhog Gets A Say because it’s a fun story packed with facts about groundhogs so one of our first groundhog day activities is creating a graphic organizer about groundhogs.
We also label a groundhog! We learn about their adaptations which are pretty cool and get some explicit vocabulary instruction!
Another one of our favorite groundhog day activities is our groundhog flip! The students have “coins” to flip. One side is a groundhog with a shadow and one side is no shadow. They flip the coins and graph their data!
And yes, we make a groundhog!
If you’re celebrating the 100th day of school this week and want more ideas and resources, check out this blog post
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Kindergarten Morning Meeting
This week, our greeting is passing a flower, and our activity is passing a flower! For the greeting, we hand a fake rose to our friends and greet them. The activity is using a clothespin to pass the fake rose!
WEEKLY RESOURCES
Click below for the resources we are using in our classroom this week:
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