Happy January! I hope you all  are having a wonderful start to the new year! Even though we haven't had any snow in our area yet (last year was completely different ❄️❄️) I still incorporated a few snowman activities our first week back.  Thought I'd share with you what we did.

I read several of the books from the snowmen at night series, which my kids just love. 

There are several read alouds available on you tube, but I was looking for something a little different but still based on one of the books.  I found a version of Snowmen at Night that is set to music rather than read aloud. Here's a link below if you'd like to check it out.

We also completed this writing below which went perfectly with Snowmen at Night.  It's from SSS Teaching and you can find this for free HERE!

After their wring was complete, my first graders glued their half sheet on the back of black construction paper and painted the background for their snowman art.  This cute project came from Babyccino and you can find the link {HERE}!

       Here are some completed snowmen!

My kiddos wrote and painted one day, and created their snowmen the next day.

I made an ABC order and word search using some of the words from Snowmen at Night.  I'll use this as a choice activity at some point this week.  If you'd like a copy, click below!

Hope you all have a great week!

Kindergarten Listening Centers

Hello friends! It's Erin, making a rare appearance on the blog today! Since changing schools, and moving to kindergarten, along with raising my 4 crazy kiddos, I don't have time to blog as often as I'd like. The pile of posts and freebies, products to upload, and things to create grows rather quickly in my little world. Luckily I had a few minutes to share with you have I changed my listening center since moving to Kindergarten.

My new school is lucky enough to have all the technology that we can ask for. I was offered to go 1:1 iPads this year, but after some thought I decided to just go 1:2, and see how that goes first. It definitely changed how I run my listening center, since my kids don't have to use my iPod Shuffles as much. I didn't abandon them completely, but i have definitely organized them a bit differently that I did in first grade. Last year I used 5 iPod shuffles (which I still LOVE), and had them organized into colored bins, which included the books that were on those iPods. I only put about 15-20 minutes worth of stories, and they usually went with the theme of what we were learning.

To make this a little bit easier for my kinders to keep organized, I added this poster at my listening station. This really helped keep the kinders more independent when cleaning up the station. Books always seem to get stuck into the wrong box, which can create a mess. Now they know exactly where the books belong. This only takes a few minutes to create, and is super helpful for my kids.

While this is a fabulous way to run my listening, I am having to change the books weekly now. I was afraid that I wouldn't have enough books on cd to last the whole year. Plus I have many stories I want my kinders to listen to, that I don't have on cd. That's when I found QR codes. BEST. THING. EVER. My school really tries to save paper, so we used QR codes for a TON of stuff at the beginning of the year. So easy to make! So now, I rotate my listening center between my shuffles, and their iPads. At the listening center, I include a sheet like this.

It took me introducing the procedure to run this once, and they've got it. Our story this week is Snowmen at Night, so we are listening to snowmen books. This was the first Listening center that I created, and my goal is to create at least 1 a month. I will share them you as I create them!

To use these with your iPads, all you need is a QR reader app. I use this one, just because that's what our tech guy put on our iPads. It works great for the littles.

They just scan the qr code, and it takes them strait to the SafeSearch version of whatever youtube video I've found for the story.  For instance, if you scan the QR code for There Was A Cold Lady... it will send you {HERE}.

Would you like to make these yourself? Follow these 3 steps!

1. Find the link for the story you want them to listen to on youtube.

2. Go to the SAFESHARE website ({HERE} and make the link safe for kids, with no adds. 

3. Copy that link into the QR Code Generator {HERE}

Then just take a screenshot of the code and you are good to go!

And if you've made it to the end of this post, you can get a copy of Our Snowman Stories QR Code Freebie. Enjoy!

And on a sidenote, how stinking cute are these ABC bean bags one of my student's grandma made me over Christmas Break?!?! LOVE!

How to Writing, Some Great Children's Books & A New Product!

Well it may seem a little late to have your students complete a how to writing about building a snowman, but around here we rarely get snow and just a few weeks ago we did get snow!
And it was enough to make a snowman or two! 

 Our kiddos enjoy how to writings, especially when they know a lot about the topic, and making a snowman is a topic they DEFINITELY know about!  We read a story, watched a short YouTube video, and are just about finished with our class how to writing.  Monday the kiddos will write their own independently.  Below is the book, video and writing template :) 

We found this book on iTunes and read it to our kids on our iPads while displaying it on our Smartboards.  They love to listen to books while they're displayed, so much larger!

It's a cute little story about Caillou building
his first snowman with a friend. 

Next we watched a short YouTube video showing a
 person making a snowman.

Finally we started our shared how to writing piece.

Our kiddos helped us glue these cards in order on the chart below.

 Here's our process so far.
We shared the pen through this process, which our kids love to do!  

We're finishing this up on Monday and our first graders are going to complete their own How to Make a Snowman writing sample using this template.  

We have several options, just click the picture below to download!

We'll update tomorrow with our finished chart and some writing samples :)   

On Friday, our school will celebrate Dr. Seuss Day (March 2nd).  During the week our kiddos sign up to listen to a reader.  Then on Friday, at the end of the day, our students get to go and listen to another teacher read stories.  They have so much fun and love it!  Every year we like to find new books to read to the kids that come to our rooms!  We thought we'd share a few books that we've recently found!

We just LOVE Mo Willems around here and this book is hilarious.  We're reading the traditional Goldilocks and The Three Little Bears then reading this one to compare.  

And then there's these sweet stories.  So ADORABLE!  Sweet little Rocket is such a cute character and his teacher (the little yellow bird) is just as cute! We love reading how Rocket learns to read and write, and are sure our kids will enjoy following him on his journeys as well.  

Rocket's Mighty Words (board book) contains labels and pictures, 

which makes this book perfect for beginning readers and writers. 

                  

 Finally, this sweet book goes well with our newest punctuation characters we've added to our store.  This story involves an exclamation point who feels that he just doesn't fit in amongst a group of periods.  After meeting a question mark, he soon cheers up and realizes he is special!  We love that the question mark always asks questions and finally gets exclamation point to say exclamatory sentences and words.

And here's our newest addition to our store!

Punctuation People

Stop on by {HERE} and check them out!

Have a great week!

Planets, Stars and Space... Oh My! (giveaway and freebies)

We made it through another week! Man these kiddos have been all sorts of crazy! We've spent the last few weeks learning all about the solar system and snowmen. Quite the combination, right? This year our school has gone to a school-wide science theme schedule. Each month we have a focus, which is taught K-5. There is a list of vocabulary words for each focus, and the thought is that by 5th grade, the kids will have a strong grasp on all of the words. Of course, each grade has their own twist on the theme, and we only teach what is grade appropriate. To be honest, so months have been more fun than others, but it seems to be working well so far.

This month our focus has been the solar system. I haven't taught this since my very first year teaching, so it was so fun to revisit! Our goal was to introduce the kids to the concept of the solar system, but to mostly just focus on the 8 planets. We want them to know their names, the order of the planets, and a few facts about each. We've also introduces the earth's orbits, and rotations. The kids have had a blast, and we have as well. Here are a few activities that we've done with them.
Click {HERE} to get a copy of our planet book.
The first graders water colored the planets, and then made a poster out of them.
We made a few posters of all of the planet facts we've learned.
This next week our school is having a door decorating contest to celebrate Love of Reading Month. Since we were on a space kick, we kept the theme going with STAR: Sit, Think and Read. Each rocket shows a picture of a student reading, and we included another set of water colored planets to really make it look like space.
This isn't ours, but had to share. One of our 5th grade students made this INCREDIBLE model of the solar system. This picture really doesn't do it justice. (*I apologize for the photo quality btw, I left my camera at home and had to use my phone for many pics.) The bright stars are actually Christmas lights. Isn't it cool?

And of course this isn't all we've done. We loved this theme so much that we had to create a fun unit to go along with it! Introducing our newest baby, Planets, Stars and Space... Oh My! She is a 70 page unit packed with planet-themed activities, and lessons for teaching your first graders all about the planets. Included in this unit:

*planet posters

*planet game board & cards

*”BLAST” sight word game

*fact family activities (3)

-including worksheets

*addition/subtraction game

*mnemonic device poster

*original mini-book

*Planet report

*Planet riddles

*planet cards

*inner & outer planet activities

*sentence builders

*Word sort

*color & b/w printable planets

Here's a little preview of what you'll get!

Click {HERE} or on the picture below to head on over to our store to check out our Planet Pack.

Need some Solar System vocabulary cards? Check these out!
Make sure to grab these for free too!
Vocab Cards

We ended our week by incorporating one of our Snowman Fun Pack math activities into our day today, and boy was it fun! We began by retelling Sneezy the Snowman and then we conducted our own data experiment by tasting one of Sneezy's favorite foods, ICE CREAM! We brought in four flavors and each of our students had a sample.

Next our kiddos colored an ice cream scoop that represented their favorite flavor out of the four flavors that we tried. Then we grouped the scoops to view our data.

You can definitely see that each of our classes had completely different data! Our kids were surprised to find out that the other classes most favorite was different than their own.

Finally we recorded our data, answered questions, and created a bar graph that was attached to their packets (sorry we didn't get any graph pics).

This was such a fun math activity and our kids really had fun. They couldn't believe we could complete a math lesson and eat ice cream too! We can't wait to do this again next year! Interested in checking this unit out, you can look {HERE} and read all about it!

Before we head off to bed, we'd love to host a quick giveaway! We'd love to give a lucky follower a copy of our Planets, Stars and Space Unit. So leave a comment with your favorite science theme to teach, and we will draw 2 lucky winners on Monday night, February 6th. Good luck!

We hope you all have a great weekend! We'll be back soon...