If you're a kindergarten teacher who dreams of thematic centers that are BOTH...
Heeeeeey friends!!!! jdhfkjshdfksjdhflksjdhfskd Yes, that was my excuse why I haven’t shared my weekly updates in a couple of weeks! HA! Anyway, I’m baaaaack and ready to share with you our seed to plant and butterfly weeks with you! Up first, seed to plant!
Our nonfiction selection and close read for the week was Seed to Plant {a national geographic reader}. We paired that with a fiction text, The Tiny Seed!
Our essential question for the week focused on the plant cycle and how it is “never ending.”
Our vocabulary words for the week! Some BIG words like pollination and germination!
I always like to find hands-on and meaningful ways to relate the vocabulary words to their lives! I ran across this ADORABLE here! I purchased the juice AKA nectar and the Cheetos and we got busy exploring pollination! I had the kiddos drink as much nectar as they wanted while touching their Cheetos. After we were done with the nectar we explored around the room spreading pollen!
LOVE this poem! Maybe we can do something with it for Mother’s day 🙂 🙂
Our writing focus for the week aligned itself with the close read. We worked on procedural writing! On Monday the students all planted grass seed. We then filled out graphic organizers for the three steps it took!
We then took our graphic organizers and placed the information into procedural booklets!
You can download these freebie writing templates by clicking below!
The procedural booklets took a view days so afterwards we read Planting a Rainbow! The students then created their own flower garden and wrote a story to match.
I loved seeing their creativity with just a few scrap of paper!
We also got our fingers dirty with this Pinterest inspired craft…..although I must say with 20 kindergartens it didn’t quite turn out like the pictures BAHA! They were still adorable none the less!
Here is the craft my sister’s class worked on!
And my class worked on these cutsie parts of plant crafts!
Here is our grass seed….over the weekend it grew and GREW! The kiddos took it home this past week and they were very excited!
We also planted some veggies…they are still growing…not sure we will produce any actual veggies 😉
In KinderPhonics we’ve been working on blends! We finished up our l blends and are now conquering r blends! #endoftheyearisnear
Now off to butterfly week!!!! This past week was SO.MUCH.FUN. the butterfly close read last year didn’t even compare to this year’s 😉 Our close read text was Butterflies {a national geographic reader}. However, because we were reading informational butterfly booklets for writing…we read A LOT of great butterfly texts!
Our fiction selection was of course…The Hungry Caterpillar.
Our essential question continued with life cycles from the week before. We also paid close attention this week to vocabulary and why it is such an important part to our understanding!
I purchased these little life cycle figures on Amazon and the kids loved them. I would have them take turns throughout the week coming up and using the pieces to restate the butterfly cycle!
A lot of our words this week were not so cut and dry…we talked a lot about these words and made connections to our lives and previous topics we had studied.
After reading The Hungry Caterpillar we compared the two texts!
On this day we also turned ourselves into caterpillars with these hats!!! Now mine were cute, but my sisters’ class had the most adorable hats ever! She made the eyes much larger than the red headband…so basically they had HUGE caterpillar eyes…it was PRESH!
Keeping up with our butterfly fun we made coffee filter butterflies! Y’all know that I don’t do anything hard when it comes to crafts! 😉 If you have never done these they are super simple. I gave each kiddo a coffee filter. I had them place the coffee filter on two sheets of paper to soak up the water. They then colored their coffee filters with markers.
After they had their design finished I lightly sprayed them with my spray bottle of water.
We laid them out to dry and within a few hours they were ready!
The kiddos helped me wrap the pipe cleaner around the butterfly and twist it up for the antennae! I mean how cute, right?
The kids also made their own version of the butterfly life cycle! For this activity we had 3 different versions of noodles and beans for the egg! The paper plate had a line drawn down the center. The kiddos colored their leaves and glued the noodles/bean down to match the life cycle! You can snag the FREEBIE leaves/butterfly life cycle labels below!
Download the freebies below!
This upcoming week we will be having some 3 Billy Goats fun! We will then spend a week for Mother’s Day, and finish up with some ocean fun! Can you believe it..19 days left!!!!!!
Also, if you you’re a mega bundle owner you can snag these new updates by downloading your bundle again, or emailing me for the updates! 🙂
Have a great week and talk soon!
