Five for Friday~Spiders Galore & So Much More!

I can’t believe it is Friday already.  The weeks are just flying by.  I guess that’s what happens when you’re having fun.  I will admit I hate it when that alarm clock goes off at 5AM, but once I am up I am excited to see what the day will bring.  Kindergarten is a new adventure everyday.

 

Today I am linking up once again with the fabulous Kacey at Doodle bugs teaching for this weeks 5 for Friday.

Here is a peek at our focus wall for the week.  We are making our way through the alphabet, this week was R and S. 

Yes, we skipped Q.  I go back to that and teach Qu.  They are married ya know and so they are always together…always.  We make it a super fun week. Anywho…here are our letter circle maps for the week.

Mr. Greg, from The KindergartenSmorgasbord had a great idea to make a book using pictures of your circle maps once you have gone through the entire alphabet.  Lucky for me I have been taking pics each week.  I think it will be a favorite in our library.

Another one of the things we have been focusing on is our reading stamina.  Once we hit the 5 minute mark I gave each little their own whisper phone to use. 

They were so excited.  If you want to make your own like I did check out my tutorial here.  They were super easy.  They really help my kiddos hear how they are pronouncing their words, it is especially helpful for my ELL’s.  But…we are stuck at the 10 minute mark.  Any suggestions??  I stopped even counting my 2 little’s that are on IEP’s otherwise we would still be stuck at about 7 min.  I just stay close to them and redirect quickly when they start to get off task so the other students won’t see it.  About ¾ of my other students I know could go much longer, but I have some real young ones that just can’t get past 10…ugh!  Help!

Another highlight of our week was a visit from our reading buddies.  Every other week our 5^th grade reading buddies come for a visit. 

It is so beneficial for both groups.  It builds confidence and leadership in the upper graders and allows my littles to feel special that the “big” kids come to read just to them.  Many of my higher kiddos can now read a book back to their buddy and you should see their smiles!  They are so proud of themselves.  Next visit we are planning an art project together, it should be lots of fun.

Do you do sharing in your class??  We do and it is a fantastic way to build listening and speaking skills.  Each child has an assigned day that they can bring something to share.  I have some black tote bags they take out to their backpack to put their item in and bring in, so it is a secret from the other students.  They choose 3 clues at home about their item.  Then I help them read each of their clues.  We give a clue, they choose 3 students to guess, then the next clue and guesses, etc.  Once they reveal their item I usually ask a few other questions of them. 

The kiddos love it and it usually only takes about 5-7 minutes of our day, but it is so worth it.  They are becoming so much more comfortable talking in front of the class.  To be honest they don’t always remember to bring something on “their day” so sometimes it goes even quicker.  I got this fantastic idea of using the 3 clues from the wonderful Kim Adsit, in her Ultimate Open HousePack.

One of the things that makes my job so rewarding are the wonderful notes and pictures of love that I receive from my kiddos.  How do you keep yours??  This year I created a little bulletin board area on one of my cabinets to display them.  

The kiddos love seeing their artwork displayed and it is always a great thing to look at if I am having a "tuff" day...lol.

Our main focus this week was all about Spiders.  I don't do Halloween because I have kiddos who don't celebrate, but we study spiders, pumpkins, and bats during October. 

We had a blast learning with some fun thrown in there too. We started off by putting our schema on our spider interactive chart. Then we read several books and watched several videos all about spiders.  Next we added our new learning to our interactive chart.

Then we made these fantastic All About Spider books from Deanna Jump's unit.  We unscrambled the sentences, glued them in our book and then drew a matching illustration.  They did a fantastic job!

We are working on our first word family -at.  So we completed this super cute craftivity with all of the -at words that we came up with. 

These are a FREEBIE from Susan Jones at Thank God it's First Grade.  They came out super cute!

We had to do some spider writing. This was perfect to help support those kiddos they are still needing a prompt.  While my above level kiddos could add additional sentences on their own. 

These were the great idea of Miss Kindergarten Love.  You can get her FREEBIE mini unit here.

We also had a great time with our Math and Literacy centers from my new pack Spiders Galore .  One of their favorite things to do is write the room.  So we're reviewing all of our important spider vocabulary as we wrote our words from around the room.

We did some rhyming practice by matching the spider card with it's rhyming web card.  My high students then drew pictures and sounded out the words to the matches that they found.

We also did number and tally mark matching, a counting spiders around the room activity, measuring spiders, unscrambling spider sentences and so much more. Unfortunately I had to do assessments during center time so I wasn't unable to take more great pics of our center fun.  But here are some previews of this unit so you can check them out.  

We ended our week with one final craft.  We had learned all about spider webs so we made some of our own.  They couldn't have been easier.  Draw your web with a pencil on your black paper.  Trace your drawing with glue.  Add glitter, yes glitter and dump of the excess.  Ta Da!  Beautiful spider webs where everyone was able to be creative and feel successful.

As a reward for making it through this marathon post leave me a comment with your email and I will giveaway one of my new Spiders Galore Math & Literacy Centers. We have a big weekend of racing so I will pick a winner when I get home Sunday night!  

So what were you up to this week?  I would love to hear all about it!  Be sure to check out the linky and see what everyone else has been up to this week.

~Laura