Friday, March 13, 2015

Silly McGilly (Giveaway!)

Recently, I received an email from 3 sisters from New Jersey telling me all about Silly McGilly.  A little leprechaun who will help bring some fun and excitement (and learning) to your classroom during the month of March!
Well, today I received Silly McGilly and I was BEYOND excited to get started! Right away we opened the package and read the story. The story explains that the leprechaun we have is just a toy doll. But, if you place the doll in the window of your classroom at night, it is an invitation for a real leprechaun to come visit and play a trick!
After I read the story, I passed around our new leprechaun doll.  The kids loved him!!
 They were SO excited! Look at that face!
 Some of the children even wrote notes for the Leprechaun.  This one made me smile...'Do something that makes me laugh.'
Silly McGilly is now in our window.  I wonder what will happen when we arrive at school on Monday?!
You can head over to Silly McGilly's site to find sample activities and tricks that will enhance learning.
I am so excited to use Silly McGilly in the classroom this year and many more years to come!! Such a great idea!
If you would like to purchase your own Silly McGilly and his book you can HERE, or you can enter to win your own copy on my Facebook page HERE.  Good luck!

Thursday, March 5, 2015

Kindergarten Poetry Journals

Poetry has become a lot of my students favorite time of the day! They love getting the opportunity to stand up and lead the class in our poem of the week.  They take turns pointing to the words while the class sings the poem. I also let them choose who sings while they point-girls, boys, or everyone, and how they are going to sing-in normal voices, quiet voices, girl voices, boy voices, like monsters, etc.  They have a blast!
Each student gets the poem of the week to add into their poetry journals.  We usually have a focus word that they have to highlight; however, in this case, they had to highlight all of their word wall words.
Then, I give them an image that correlates with the poem to color and glue into their poetry journals as well.
When they are done gluing in their poem and image, they have to create a setting! This is usually my favorite part haha. I love to see the details they add!
When they are finished they place their poetry journals into their book bins for the week.  During the Daily 5, when they go to Read to Someone or Read to Self, they have the opportunity to choose their poetry notebooks as one of the books they can read.  This is definitely their favorite book to read and even your non-readers can feel extremely successful with this poetry book!  
On Fridays they place their poetry notebooks into their backpacks to take home and share with their family over the weekend. I have parents sign each poem to show that they read it over with their child.
To grab your poems, just click on the image below!
Enjoy!

Monday, March 2, 2015

Celebrate Reading!

My students love, love, love celebrating Read Across America week.  There are so many great books to expose to children throughout the year, but this week always seems to make reading just a little bit more fun!
We read One Fish, Two Fish and made these delicious cookies! Next time I need to remember the blue food coloring to turn our icing blue for the water! 
Then we read Green Eggs and Ham and played this super cute roll and color game from Rowdy in First Grade.
Of course we had to read The Cat in The Hat and make our own hats to match!
The next game was my students' favorite! We read There's a Wocket in my Pocket and we played pin the wocket in the pocket...so fun!
We read My Many Colored Days and made these cute books.  (This idea came from Pinterest, but I can't find the pin now to link it to.) The students drew a picture on each page of soothing that was the matching color.  They turned out adorable!
We made these little Happy Birthday cupcakes to decorate our bulletin board along with a writing activity on our favorite author.
We also try to tie our books into our center work this week.  In the activity below, students had to read the directions to color in the cats correctly.
 In Roll, Add, and Color students roll two dice and add them up.  Then, they follow the color key to color their picture in.
 Another skill we have been working on is counting base ten blocks (with counting the 'cube train' as ten and not counting the blocks individually).  The kids did great with this Spin and Dot activity.
 This week we will be using a bunch of activities from my Read, Read, Read! pack on TPT.  Would love to hear your great reading ideas for the week!!