Fall Projects
I love Fall. Every year, I spend a few days studying pumpkins the week before Halloween. Here are a few of the activities that my kinders participated in this week.
We created these square pumpkins after reading the story "Spookley the Square Pumpkin." It was pretty simple although it took us a couple of days so that the glue and paint could dry.
We labeled the parts of a pumpkin together on the smart board.
I set up pumpkin stations that included measuring the height of the pumpkin, testing for sinking and floating, counting the lines on the pumpkin, and looking at the inside of the pumpkin.
We discovered that the pumpkin floats. They loved to bounce the pumpkin while it was in the water.
We recorded our answers on this recording sheet.
We counted our pumpkins seeds by 10's. I gave each of my students a paper plate and had each of them place 10 pumpkin seeds on the plate. We then practiced counting the seeds by 10's.
We created these pumpkin life cycle flip books.
We created this pumpkin poem craft. After we scooped all of the pumpkin pulp out of the pumpkin, we washed the pulp. I took a hair dryer and dried the pumpkin seeds. We then placed the seeds inside this zip-lock bag along with some orange yarn. I cut a hole in this pumpkin template and attached our bags to the outside. They turned out very cute as you can see what the inside of a pumpkin looks like.
These projects are included in my Pumpkin Patch one day unit. If you are interested in seeing more, click the link below.
Fall Centers
I have been working on creating some new centers for my students to use while I am working with my small reading groups.
I created these acorns, laminated them, and attached magnets to the back. I use the magnetic tape that has the sticky on the back so all I have to do is cut and stick. My students will order these acorns to 20 on my magnetic white board and then take their expo marker and write their numbers on the acorn mat.
At this center my students will measure the height and length of pumpkins using measuring strips.
This center was created to help my kinders with alphabet recognition. My students fill in the missing alphabet letters with candy corn alphabet pieces.
This center is my rhyming center. My students match rhyming pictures.
This center will let my kids match alphabet letters to beginning sounds.
This activity is in my math center. My kids count the number of birds on a fence and match it with a bird nest that has a certain number on front. I have a few kinders that still struggle with one-to-one correspondence so I created this for them.
This center is my favorite of my new Fall Themed Centers. Students count real acorns and place them in the numbered squirrel cup. I will have my kids order the squirrel cups first and then count acorns to place in each cup.
The centers at the top are all part of my Fall Themed Kindergarten Common Core Literacy and Math Centers. You can get them at the link below.
Math & Literacy Centers
This is a part of my sight word center. I laminated my new sight words and attached magnets to the back. I also created letter tiles to spell each word. Students arrange the magnet tiles in order to spell each word. They love working with cookie sheets and magnets.
These are some play-doh mats that I created to use at my math center. Students build each of their numbers with play-doh.
My students are building shapes using popsicle sticks and shape building mats.
At this center my students look through magazines and cut out pictures of certain shapes. This student was working on circles.
This is a pattern center that lets my students extend and build their own patterns. This is part of a jungle themed set of centers that I created.
At this center students are sorting coins on coin sorting mats. Money is not a common core standard for Kindergarten, but I still think it is important.
