I have learned that if the class is truly interested in something, they will use reading, writing, and math skills as they explore their interests naturally. I observe and listen closely to discover what they are interested in. Sometimes a book or story will spark an interest. Sometimes an interest is sparked by something a friend shared with the class. Sometimes I notice interests by listening to their stories and their play. Our last large group interest was sparked when one of our friends found an almost dead praying mantis. The kids were fascinated with it and wanted to look closer, observe, and find out more. Every time we went outside they wanted to look for insects! I set out some invitations for them to explore insects further. They quickly started looking through books and models of insects to see what they could find out. I started encouraging them to record what they noticed using different materials. One of their favorites was the book Microsculpture:Portraits of Insects by Levon Biss. It truly took a closer look at insects including closeups of legs, wings, eyes feet, etc. it was such a beautiful book. I set it out with materials for them to create their own beautiful portraits of insects showing what they noticed. They are starting to figure out how to try to spell unfamiliar words by writing the sounds they hear in words. They practiced labeling their insects here also. But the insects they got the most excited about were the ones completely covering our milkweed plants! They wanted to know all about them! We looked at a picture of one and made our thinking visible by recording what we saw, thought and wondered. Then we got our Entomologist tools, took them outside and found out everything we could about them! They were amazing and thorough Entomologists! We recorded everything we noticed and then put some of our information in the computer and found out they are called Milkweed bugs! We then did an observational drawing as Entomologists and used our writing skills to label what it is and some body parts. Here is the display outside our room showing everything we learned about them! The other insects all took a backseat to the milkweed bug! I could have done a traditional insect unit, but these kids noticed something in their environment where they could truly experience it, so I followed the direction they took our insect study. I often let the kids direct our curriculum! They show me what they want to learn and I follow their lead and learn along side them. They were much more involved, interested and excited about learning as we followed their interest. Also, this fell naturally into our science standards of living things and what they need! I can’t wait to see what other interests this group will have that we can dig deeper into! They are definitely bringing in leaves by the bucketful... Here are some other things going on in our classroom: We are still working on those fine motor skills! Our finger muscles need a lot of work! Stories are being created in all of the areas of our room as we learn about story making! Here they are encouraged to show math in an open ended way. At the moment they are working on the numbers 1-10, shapes, writing numbers to 10, counting objects and matching to the correct number, counting to 25, subitizing and patterns. They are also learning to notice math all around us and how we use it in our every day lives. Some Fall art inspiration with sunflowers. They drew pictures of Mrs. Coberly wearing Michigan State colors and wrote “Mrs. Coberly loves Sparty!” Then we decorated her door! They loved this! Unfortunately, the Buckeye/Spartan game did not end well for me! It has been a busy place filled with all kinds of learning!
A super simple first day or first week activity for primary-aged children who are new to French. I like to teach "Bonjour!" and "Je m'appelle" on the first day of class. This page is something for them to take home to show their parents.
Just a few days until E begins JK (first full day is Thursday Sept. 7) and we're getting ready! Here's a list of things I've hea...
Writing report card comments doesn't need to be stressful, and leave you feeling mentally exhausted. As a former teacher, I'm here to help you keep a positive attitude, and get through the school year, and
Coloring activity is a great activity for developing fine motors skills and coordination and also color recognition. This time we have a new collection of printable Color Activities for Kindergarten as the perfect canvas for your kindergartners!
Are you looking for super fun measurement worksheets and activities for kindergarten?? You found them!! Your students will LOVE these hands-on learning activities and fun, extra practice worksheets that teach a variety of kindergarten measurement concepts.
Since summer has officially began, I have been working very hard creating some new products for the upcoming school year. I know that th...
Kindergarten Lined Paper Click the link above to download our free printable primary lined paper with larger lines suitable for ... Read more
Free, fun and useful Kindergarten - 1st Grade, Common Core aligned lesson plans, math games, calendars, behavior charts, materials and more!
Looking for fun August Morning Tubs for kids? Check out these 10 Hands-On Back to School themed activities for Preschool or Kindergarten.
K-1 NONFICTION WRITING My nonfiction writing unit is here! This is the perfect way to introduce kindergarten and first grade students to what informational writing is. This unit is so engaging for students because it uses real life photographs and animals. We discus
Free, fun and useful Kindergarten - 1st Grade, Common Core aligned lesson plans, math games, calendars, behavior charts, materials and more!
Try this fun positional words activity with your preschool or kindergarten students! It's free to download!
CUTE printable Construction Worksheests make practicing counting, matching upper and lowercase alphabet letters, and more FUN!
Your early learners are absolutely going to LOVE this school clip cards printable! Perfect for quiet time or free time in your early childhood classroom.
As an interest based learning teacher, I usually start out with something most children have some experience and interest in until I get to know them better. Color is something they always enjoy exploring! I set out paint at the easel and asked, what can you wonder and discover about color here? As they explore, I constantly model for them the growth mindset, language and vocabulary often used in an inquiry based classroom: What do you see? What do you think? What do you wonder? What do you notice? What did you discover? Did you learn something new? Did this change your thinking? These are questions I want them to ask themselves as they explore new things this year! I set up experiences for them to explore colors. They quickly on their own started focusing mostly on different shades of colors. Here are some pictures showing the invitations to explore and the children exploring and discovering things about color. They were also noticing shades of colors of objects in our room! When they discovered them, they would share what they noticed with the class. They noticed we could mix colors to make different shades of colors and that adding white made lighter shades and black or darker colors mixed in made darker shades. I wondered out loud if it was possible to create 100 different shades of colors? We looked at a book called Pantone Coors that you see in many of these pictures that showed there were lots of shades! The kids took it as a challenge and a project was born! We wanted to see if we could create 100 different shades! We did one color each day. We did it! Not only did we make 100 different shades, we made 120 different shades of colors! They were so excited to beat their goal and create that many colors! They also discovered that black was black but we could make different whites! I told them that I wanted to display their colors to show people what what they learned. We debated how to display them. Group them by colors separately? Group them by light or dark? Like a rainbow? I thought they would prefer that one but they surprised me. They agreed on a circle with all of the color together. I couldn’t fit the browns and grays/white/black in so those were separate. The kids helped label and write out some of the things we did and noticed for our display to document our learning. Here is the finished display! This was a fun way to get started with how we will learn in our classroom! As they learn more about letters/sounds and writing they will be recording their own observations of what they see, think, wonder and discover! As the year goes on, you will notice them using their writing and reading skills more and more in natural, authentic ways! This is one of our big goals! Now that we have finished, I have started to notice some common interests to start our next inquiry and take all of our learning further! Stay tuned! Here are some other things that have been going on in our classroom! Learning to identify letters and sounds. We start the year learning one letter a day through our Journeys curriculum and how to write the capital letter properly using our Handwriting without tears curriculum. Here are some of the experiences set out for them during this time. The kids have learned how to partner read with letter books contains predictable text. They are learning letters, letter sounds, and the first three reading strategies: 1) Use your pointer finger to touch each word. 2) Look at the picture. It is a clue to figure out harder words. 3) Look at the first letter and say it’s sound when trying to figure out a word you don’t know. They are also learning to help each other and encourage each other as they read together. Here they try to create the letter by putting the lines down in the order they should make them when writing. Here, if they can name the letter and/sound, they are allowed to use it to build a castle. Of course they can ask friends for help if they don’t know it! More ways to practice proper formation of letters and develop fine motor skills to help with writing. Pebble crayons to encourage their pincher grip, texture to feel themselves making the letter on both the the grid and the chalkboard (both provide resistance. A whiteboard does not so does not work as well. We learned about Mat Man to help us with drawing people. We draw his parts and then add details to turn him into somebody. We keep writing at a minimum for now so that we don’t continue the bad writing habits they have developed. We focus on creating stories through pictures and telling oral stories. We read these books to help us. It helped us realize if we don’t know how to draw something, we can draw it “ish!” Dog-ish, violin-ish, etc. it gives them the freedom to try and helps those perfectionists not throw away every drawing they don't feel is perfect. We also read Beautiful Oops and Oomph! These taught us to work through mistakes and to add the destabilization a picture needs to tell a story in itself! These books really helped them learn to tell stories through pictures. Good Dog Carl is a good example of a story told through pictures. A lot of literacy learning has been happening and it’s only just beginning!
Tracing Lines - Worksheets For Little People As your little one learns how to write, tracing lines is a great activity! And there are benefits to it too! Line tracing is one of those activities that develop your child's control of the small muscles in his/ her hands (fine motor skills). Tracing will teach your child to make the precise movements that are necessary for forming letters. Tracing improves hand/eye coordination. Line Tracing By Age Line tracing is predominantly for little ones as they learn how to write. It's therefore perfect for toddlers, preschoolers, and kindergartners. Your child's age and
Teaching patterns is so much fun with this Crayon Color Patterns FREE printable! Grab this low-prep, hands-on activity today!
Free Math Worksheets for kindergarten. Add using base 10 blocks.
Subtraction can be a difficult concept for kids to grasp. The best way for kids to learn challenging math concepts is through hands-on, interactive lessons and games. Get off my boat is a great w…
Journal writing with little learners is SO MUCH FUN (once they get the routine down)! It makes my teacher's heart overflow to see them drawing, writing, and sharing their ideas! I get to see them fall in love with writing and see themselves as writers! What a gift! In this post, I'm going to tell you all the details about how to implement journal writing in your classroom and get your kids excited about writing, too!
These free number sense activities are perfect for kindergarten! Your students will practice identifying numbers on a number line and on a hundreds chart.
Looking for money math for kids? This post has over 10 ideas for preschool, kindergarten, and first grade.
Need a fast -n- fabulous kindergarten lesson? You might wanna try these Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus creations on for size. In the following video, I demonstrate using a bingo dauber. I know you might not have those to try using either a black oil pastel or a Sharpie instead. This was a two-day lesson for my 40 minute kindergarten art classes. Here you go: Super fun and easy, didn't I tell you? I love doing guided drawing every now and again with my students. They LOVE it and are always excited by their results. Kindergarten is especially great at just "going with the flow" and not worrying about being "perfect"...but there are always some kids who do stress. That's why, before doing a guided drawing, we always chat about how we are unique people which means we are unique artists who create uniquely! We also love to give a shout out to Barney's book Beautiful Oops. Y'all know I had to wear my Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus dress! Each little squawky bird was so different, funny and cute. After reading the book, this was as far as we managed to get. I've gotten a lot of questions on where to find bingo daubers and what to fill them with. I got mine from my art supply catalogs but I've also seen them on the Oriental Trading website. I fill mine with India ink...I don't use any particular brand as all the India ink I've ever purchased has been fine. My go-to oil pastel for projects like this are Sargent's florescent brand. They GIVE ME LIFE. I love how creamy, bright and bold they are. And so do the kids. As for watercolor, you'll see in my video how I set up my trays. Every two kids gets a sponge, a non-spill cup of water (art supply catalogs!!) and my Crayola Mixing Colors watercolor paint. I always order: magenta, red, red-orange, yellow, green, turquoise, blue, blue-violet and purple. I cannot wait to get these hung in the halls! I've also been asked a lot recently about what kind of paper we use. I ALWAYS order 80lbs paper and we use it for EVERYTHING. It can take a lot of art: paint, watercolor, collage, you name it. This paper is strong stuff. We called these our Party Pigeons...I like how hard some pigeons partied!
Use hands-on activities to engage students in learning about lines of symmetry. Use a variety of materials to practice symmetry for kindergarten students.
Use a sound wall in your kindergarten classroom with these tips, ideas, and suggestions about using a sound wall in kindergarten!
Kids will be WOWED with this hands-on, fall science experiment where they will explore Why do Leaves Change Color for kids! Fun Leaf Activity!
Today my gorgeous class increased their knowledge of 2D shapes by making a 'Shape Pizza'. We used paper plates as the base of our pizzas. Students then coloured the paper plates to make the pizza base. I printed off the shapes onto different coloured paper and students cut them out and added them to their paper plates (pizzas). Students then completed the worksheet provided by recognising and counting how many shapes they had used to make their pizza. What a fun time we had! If you wish to create this with your own class here is a link to my activity on Teachers Pay Teachers: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Mrs-Steffensons-Kindergarten
Are you looking for fun hands-on kindergarten activities? This list has 25+ play-filled activities for kindergarteners to do at home (from Busy Toddler)
Hi friends! I'm super excited to share with you how I made graphing in Kindergarten fun and independent this year! Every year my kids find graphing super fun and engaging but teaching JK/SK (that’s Pre-K/K for my American friends) it was always hard to make this an independent centre. This year I found a solution that worked well! Here is how I taught it: Day 1: Learning Goals & Success Criteria First I introduce the learning goal "We are learning to make graphs". Then we start by talking about the first step in the success criteria: I know I can do this when I can make a question. I give them a few examples first then have the kids share and added their questions to a chart. Then I typed up the questions and laminated a couple copies to keep in our question folder so that the students can reference them if they need help coming up with a question. Day 2: Make a Question and Collect & Graph the Data On the second day, I introduce the rest of the success criteria I can collect and record data on my graph. Data=information Sidenote: I followed some of the kids around as they graphed the first couple of days and asked them questions like "What do you need to do first?" and "How do we record _____'s answer?" etc. to uncover some student thinking. I took pictures and notes as I followed along and then printed a couple out as exemplars for the success criteria "I can collect and record the data on my graph." I can answer questions about my graph using the words most, least and the same. Then we practiced making our graph. I was going to start with a concrete graph (in theory that might be better) but I have a higher group of kiddos than usual this year and I wanted to introduce the graphing papers that we they would be using at the graphing centre so I could open it that day. So I put this graphing paper up on the smart board and we went through the steps together. First we read the question together and I showed them how to trace the question. Then we picked three colours for the choices. We talked about we could do a small scribble with crayon to indicate our colour choices if copying colour words from the word wall was too tricky. I also told them that even if they can copy the colour word to do a small dash of the colour with crayon underneath to help them remember what is what. Then I modelled how to ask the question to each student in the class and add the data to the graph. At the end we talked about which colour was the most popular, least popular and if any were the same. I left out this paper with clipboard, pencils and crayons for the kids to try. Here is an example of a completed "What is your favourite colour?" page. I told the kids that if there were no colours that were the same they could either put an X or write "none". The kids also used these "Photo Class List"'s to keep track of who they've asked. As they asked their question and graphed their data, they crossed out the person they asked. On the third day we made our first concrete graph. First we reviewed that the first step was to make a question. I told them that the question we are going to answer and graph today is "What is your favourite animal?" I then quickly taped 5 different animal pictures around the room. Then I had the students move to the picture of their choice. Then we called 1 group at a time and graphed the kids on the carpet. We have the perfect carpet for this as our carpet is a grid! We had the person at the front hold the animal picture, took a picture with the iPad and showed the image on the SMARTBoard. Then we talked about which one was the most, the least and the same. Here is a sample of an favourite animal graph they could complete at centre time: On the fourth day we made another concrete graph. This time we graphed siblings in our class! We followed the same steps as favourite animal but I taped the signs for "sisters only", "brothers only", "brothers and sisters" and "no siblings" instead. The rest was the same as the third day :) On the fifth day we created our birthday graph! First I had some of my kiddos write the months of the year for me. Then I put them up on the bulletin board. Then I printed out a square picture of each of my kiddos and mounted it on black construction paper. Then we added the pictures during whole group math time and we talked about which month has the most birthdays, which month has the least birthdays and if any of the months have the same. Next time I would have the students write their birth date on a whiteboard and hold it in from of them when I take the picture so that I could easily get that information from this graph. I also used this graph on my graphing wall and put it under "I can answer questions about my graph using the words most, least and the same." Then I put a velcro dot on top of each column and the words most, least and same on a velcro strip underneath. This way, the kids can come and practice identifying which month has the most, which month has the least and which months are the same number of birthdays on the graphing wall. If you would like to try the pre-filled favourite animal graphing sheets click on the button below to download them for free :) All of the printables above can be found in my newest product, Graphing for Little Learners! You can click on the image below to check it out in my TPT store :) My kids are still loving graphing and it is a popular centre every day. How do you teach graphing in Kindergarten? I would love to hear your fun ideas!
or at least changed the way I approach my pre-k and kindergarten classes! I started teaching pre-K for the first time this year, but not o...
