Holiday Crafts with a Educational Twist

During the month of December, I'm always looking for ways to keep my students engaged in learning activities - as any teacher knows, the closer you get to Christmas, the bigger the struggle that is! I wanted to find a way for my students to practice skills, but not with your typical worksheet, so I created three different holiday crafts that you can use with your students to practice any skill or concept!

In this resource, all of the template pieces are included to make a reindeer, Christmas tree, or gingerbread house. On the blank templates, you can have students practice any skill you want including sight words, math facts, word families, spelling words, letters, fact families, grammar skills, and MUCH more!

Here are some of the ways I used the Monthly Skills Crafts in my classroom:

I wanted to give my students a chance to practice reading and writing their sight words they'd learned for the first part of the year, so I put this activity in a center and they wrote their sight words on the Christmas lights and put them on the reindeer antlers. After they created them, I hung them up in my classroom and they made the cutest decor to boot!

This student decided to make hers like Rudolph!

In math, my students were working on decomposing numbers so I decided to have them create a Christmas tree to practice their math facts for making ten.

There are SO many different ways you could use this craft! You could also have students practice addition and subtraction strategies, place value forms, number writing, skip counting, and more! One way I may use it this year is to have them write adjectives to describe their tree after they decorate it.

For the last craft, a gingerbread theme is always one that students enjoy. This template allows students to decorate a gingerbread house the way they want it and then use the candies to practice different skills! This example has students practicing writing words in the "short I" word family. There are so many great options for this template and they always turn out so cute and creative!

My favorite thing about this resource is that the activities are SO versatile, students love creating them, and they make fantastic holiday decor to hang in your classroom as well. 

If you'd like to add this resource to your classroom this year, click on the picture below to find out more!

Teaching Story Elements with Kevin Henkes Books

I just love Kevin Henkes' books. Every. Single. One of them. Not only are they creative stories, but they also have great life lessons to teach my students as well. Another reason I love his books is they have the most incredible characters; and they really lend themselves as great resources to use while teaching story elements and reading comprehension!

A class favorite that I always read every year is Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse. It's a great story, especially for the beginning of the year when you are introducing rules and procedures in the classroom!

In this book, Lilly brings all sorts of fun little trinkets to school and she is excited to share them with the class - a little TOO excited. She interrupts the teacher multiple times until, finally, the teacher takes her prized possessions away and she gets just a little upset. Various shenanigans occur throughout the story until she finally realizes that she shouldn't have acted the way she did. The book is great for a character study on the main character, Lilly, because she changes so often throughout the story and goes through a myriad of emotions. So I used the book for a little study on identifying character traits and describing how the main character changed throughout the story from beginning to end. We created a little anchor chart together and these are all of the words my students came up with to describe Lilly - they did a great job!

You can see from the web words how much the main character changed throughout the story and it was a great discussion to have with my kids to help them understand how to describe her!

The next day, we read the story again and my focus was to have them work on retelling the story by sequencing events. We used the picture retelling cards from the wonderful Guiding Readers K-1 pack by Deanna Jump and Deedee Wills. I put my students into small groups and gave them each a set of retelling cards. They then had to work together with their groups to try and retell the story by putting their pictures in order from beginning to end. It was awesome for me to walk around and hear them all collaborating together on why a certain picture should be moved; or put in this spot; and why, etc. It really helped them think more deeply about the events of the book.

After they put their pictures in order, we came back together as a class and I put the pictures in the correct order so they could check their work. They were SO excited when they got a picture in the correct sequence! Having my students talk with each other and use visuals to retell the story really helped them have a more in depth understanding of what happened in the book, rather than just hearing me stand up there and talk about it as they listened.

Once we finished our group work, my students then got a smaller version of the retell pictures and had to sequence the pictures again on their own. This was a great check for understanding for me on who really understood the sequence of events and what little friends still needed a bit of support on it!

(The small retell pictures are also from the ladies' Guiding Readers pack)!

On the third day, we read the story again, this time by listening to this version on Youtube, just to change it up a little bit so that it didn't get too stale for them:

I liked this version because it is read by a teacher and she stops and asks little comprehension questions here and there! After hearing the story, we focused on story elements: characters, setting, plot, problem, and solution. Mind you, even though our activity on the third day focused on story elements, we had been talking about story elements and learning about them long before this day, so they had a little background knowledge. To make it fun, we made a little book in the shape of a purse: Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse Story Elements! The kids did SUCH an awesome job writing and illustrating these details about the story. They absolutely loved that they had their own little plastic purse at the end, too! It was the perfect culminating activity for this story.

Another Kevin Henkes book that I love reading to my students is Kitten's First Full Moon. It's a simple book, but a great beginning book for teaching students how to retell and summarize a story.

First, I read the story aloud and, as we go through the story, I'll stop periodically and ask my students what the kitten did using order words such as first, next, then, after that... this helps them recall the order that events occurred in the story because they've got that vocabulary to guide them. After discussing the main events in the story, I modeled how to summarize the story in their own words. I told my kids excitedly that they would get to tell the story with the words that THEY wanted, as if they were going to be the author. They were so into it! I whipped up this little writing craftivity to put with their summaries and they turned out so great! In the story, the kitten sees the moon and is attempting to get to it because he thinks it is a bowl of milk. In the craftivity, he is peeking over the edge to try and get to the moon, which is popping off the page 3D style!

Here are some student samples of the Kitten's First Full Moon story summary craftivity:

If you're interested in adding this story summary/reading comprehension craftivity to your Kevin Henkes' study, you can grab it from my TPT store by clicking the picture below! There are multiple differentiated writing template options available in the pack to help you best fit the needs of your students!

I could go on and on about all of his books... they are all wonderful options for teaching story elements and reading comprehension skills! What are some of your favorite Kevin Henkes books?

Making Our Way Through Kindergarten Journeys Curriculum.. with a FREEBIE included!

Good evening to my bloggy buddies! The beginning of this school year has been such a whirlwind that I have not had ANY time to take out for blogging. The good news is, I have been taking lots of pictures so that when I finally did have time to update my neglected blog, you'd forgive me because I'd have lots to share! Right....?

My kinder team and I have been painstakingly making our way through our first year using the HM Kindergarten Journeys curriculum. The teacher's guide contains a LOT of information, and we are just trying to figure it all out. Tough when we knew the last reading curriculum like the back of our hands -- I barely even had to look at the teacher's guide anymore because I knew it so well. We figured it would take awhile to get into the groove, but we have found it darn near impossible to fit every activity into our reading block, so we just pick and choose the most important parts. One thing I love about my amazing kinder team is that for years and years we've been making our own resources to go along with what we needed to teach. In fact, when I first arrived at my school 5 years ago, I thought I made good stuff until I saw what kinds of activities 2 veteran teachers on my team were making! I guess you could say they inspired me to start making more of my own stuff, which let to me opening a TPT store. We had SO many resources that we had made over the years to go with the old curriculum... and now it's totally obsolete!

I don't know about you, but the activity sheets/centers/etc. that came with Journeys leave a bit to be desired in that they are SO easy that it would literally take the kids about 2-5 minutes to complete... and that just won't cut it! So we've been slowly but surely supplementing the curriculum and creating projects and activities to go along with the different stories and themes. There's a lot of great stuff that came with Journeys... but it just needs a little boost to meet my students' needs! Here are a few of the activities we have done with various stories from the Kindergarten Journeys curriculum.

The first theme in Unit 1 is Families, and the main read aloud is What Makes a Family? A teammate and I brainstormed and came up with this cute little craftivity. She made the response sheet where the students had to draw a picture of their family. Then they used our family words poster to write and label each family member. My kids completed the labeling part surprisingly well for the 3rd week of school! Then they created themselves holding the paper. Didn't they turn out adorable? I love the mohawk in the second picture! Haha!

Here's a closer view of one of my student's labeling pages.

The next theme in Unit 1 is School, where the main read aloud is a story I love -- How Do Dinosaurs Go To School? We used the giant flip book page with the retelling pictures to choose a main event from the story and illustrate.

I gave each student a sentence strip to cut up and build that had the question, "How do dinosaurs go to school?" They cut it up and put it back together (with finger spaces)! Then I gave them a printout of a dinosaur (thanks to Little Red's Schoolhouse) and, for whatever scene they chose, had to color their dinosaur the same color as it had in one of the retelling photos. Then they drew the setting for their main event.

This week, our theme was Jobs/Community Helpers. One of the little fairy tales included in this lesson is The Elves and the Shoemaker. They were so fascinated with this story. While we were building background, I asked them what they knew about fairy tales and their responses were so fantastic! I think that conversation helped set the stage for them to be totally into the short story. After the read aloud, we had a great retelling discussion about how each character helped each other. As a story response, I gave my students a little questioning strip to glue into their interactive notebooks that asked the think aloud question, "Who helped the Shoemaker with his work?" Then they had to draw the characters and show what they did. I absolutely LOVE how their illustrations turned out! So cute! This friend below even drew their "tattered" clothing. :)

If you'd like even more story response strips to use with the Journeys series, check out my Journeys Comprehension Story Strips in my TPT store! There are multiple story response strips included for all of the stories in Kindergarten Journeys Unit 1. Click on the picture to check it out!

The first main read aloud in Unit 4 was a story called Pizza at Sally's. My kids really enjoyed this story - probably because it had to do with food! Ha! After we read the story, I created this little "How to Make a Pizza" craftivity to retell the story and do a little functional writing!

Here's the steps we took:

1. Copy/Print the sauce template on red and the crust template on brown paper.

2. Cut out the pieces and glue the "sauce" on top of the "crust".

3. Give students a strip of yellow construction paper and have them cut it into little pieces to make "cheese".

4. Do the writing piece and then put it all together!

Interested in doing this little "How To" activity with your students? I'm offering it as a freebie here on my blog just for you! Click on the picture below to download. Enjoy!! And feel free to post a comment below on how you are using Journeys in your classroom! I'd love to hear!

Every day is Earth Day!

Happy Earth Day! My kiddos were all about it today. We started off our Earth Day activities by watching the Earth Day video on one of our favorite websites, starfall.com. It has a cute little recycling game where the kids have to clean up a forest by sorting the recycled items by paper, cans, and plastic. As the forest gets cleaner, more animals begin popping back out to return to their home! It's so cute!

After that, we read "It's Earth Day!" by Mercer Mayer.

Then we created a web of ideas for how we could help clean up the earth. My kids kept wanting to add more great ideas but we ran out of space!

We then used our ideas to create this little craftivity, "I Can Help the Earth!" The kids wrote about what they would do to help clean the Earth. Then they traced their handprint and used it to create their own little Earth and then we put it all together! The one pictured below was my absolute favorite... created by one of my super smarty-pants little girls. First of all, she labeled each part of her Earth with various labels including "Arizona", "Tucson", "Asia", "Mali", "Togo", "Madagascar", and "Pirate Island". Oh and the little island with no name? She informed me that it was a "secret unnamed state". LOL! I love kindergarten so much! I loved her writing, too: I can save electricity so I can save energy for our house and our Earth.

Here's another sample. "I will help plant trees. I will pick up garbage."

Later on in the day we watched the Reduce, Reuse, Recycle video on Brainpop Jr. - it's the free video of the week if you don't have a subscription! To cap off the day, we went out to our playground to pick up all the trash we could find. They couldn't even get over it! Every time we walked past a piece of trash in the hallway or anything, they'd gasp and say "That's not Earth Day!" and then run to pick it up and throw it away. Love that my kinders care so much!