Earth Day

12:07 PM

to Read (

Words)

Earth Day is celebrated each year on April 22nd. I have been working on a few activities for my kiddos to complete on Earth Day. This is an Earth shaped book that my kids will create. Students draw themselves, the Earth, and write about and draw ways that they can take care of Earth.

These are labels that I will be placing on the front of storage containers. My students will practice sorting recyclable materials in the containers.

This is an emergent reader that I created that is Kindergarten friendly.

I cut Earth shapes out of butcher paper. My students will be given "good choice" and "bad choice" statements. Students will then sort the statements on the Earth shapes. I will display these when they are done.

This is a writing prompt the my kids will complete on Earth Day

We will be making Earth Day hats using this template.

You can get my Earth Day set by clicking here!

QuickEdit

Crystal McGinnis

0 Comments

100th Day

2:55 PM

to Read (

Words)

We have finally reached the 100th day of school. We celebrated the 100th day on March 17th, which was also St. Patrick's day. We usually have the 100th day of school in January. We have had more snow days this year than any other year that I can remember since I have been teaching. (27 snow days to be exact.) Here is a sneak peak into our 100th day activities.

This is the banner that I hung up on my door. I wanted my kids to feel proud that they had made it to day 100.

I hung up balloons all over our classroom. Inside the balloons I had messages that gave us "100 things to do." Some of the messages read "hunt 100 pieces of candy," "do 100 jumping jacks," "find the number 100 hidden around the room" etc. The kids LOVED popping these throughout the day and completing the tasks. I told the students that I was watching for the best behaved student to pop the next balloon. It was amazing what an incentive this was.

This is a little "When I am 100 Book" that we created.

I loved this page. This student said when he was 100, he would not be good at playing basketball.

This little girl said that when she is 100, she will be good at baking cookies.

We had 100 snacks and counted and sorted our snacks on this snack mat. Students had to put 10 snacks in each section to make 100 snacks.

We created self portraits of what we will look like when we are 100.

We played a game called race to 100. Students rolled a dice and colored in that number of squares. The first person to color in all of the squares was the winner.

We each brought in a 100 day collection. We counted our collections on these counting mats (counting by 10's)

We wrote 100 words and created a book of our words. (We did these as a table)

We read 100 words (not all at the same time, but sporadically throughout the day).

Our 100th day activities were so much fun! I am so proud of what my kinders have learned their first 100 days this year! All of the activities, and more, are part of my 100th day pack. Click below to see it!

See my 100th day pack here!

QuickEdit

Crystal McGinnis

0 Comments

Plants

3:36 AM

to Read (

Words)

I just finished my plant mini unit. This unit focuses on the plant life cycle, plant needs, plant parts, and how to grow a plant.

I also added a plant craft to use as my hall display.

Students create a flower that has a picture of themselves in the middle of the bloom.

Students write about and illustrate what makes them grow. The example is a picture of my daughter. She wrote that candy, lemonade, and shrimp made her grow. She is so funny!

I created some activities that focus on plant needs. This set includes an emergent reader and a picture sort.

I added a plant life cycle pocket chart sort, flip book, and ordering printable to the set. I tried to make it pretty basic for my kinders.

This books lets students read about how to grow a plant and then illustrate their own images.

When we were studying the parts of a plant, my kids created these coffee filter flowers. My kinders took dot markers and dotted the inside of a coffee filter one solid color. They then dotted the outside in a striped pattern to look like petals.

My kinders took butcher paper and twisted it to form the stem. They then cut the butcher paper to create leaves.

Here is the finished product. After we added roots using brown yarn, we labeled the parts of the flower. They turned out really cute!

We planted three different kinds of seeds. We planted a bean seed (they sprout quickly), some flower seeds, and some grass seed. Wow, this was messy!

We finished our plant unit by reviewing what we learned using this graphic organizer. I loved that my kids could finally write these on their own. Writing in kindergarten is such an accomplishment!

I created these little flower pot desserts from materials I found at Dollar General. The flower pot is a pudding cup, the dirt is crunched up cookies, the worms are gummy worms, the stem is a green popsicle stick, and I found these cute little flower stickers in the stationary section.

Grab a copy of my plant mini unit here!

It is definitely spring in my room! Today we made these cute little frogs that show the life cycle of a frog. The students put together the frog and then added the life cycle of the frog on the stomach. These looked perfect next to our life cycle of a chick craft.