Farm activities, a FREEBIE, and a little plural noun fun!

We are closing up the final week of our farm theme and we've got tons of fun stuff going on! Whenever the final week of our reading theme rolls around (we use Houghton Mifflin), we usually use that time to read supplemental fiction and non-fiction stories that are not included in the reading series. Some of the stories we will be reading this week include Rosie's Walk, Click Clack Moo Cows That Type, and The Little Red Hen. I'll share more about the activities we'll be completing with those books later on in the week!

We began to create our farm book craftivity - a teacher on my team came up with this rhyming book as a way to describe things found on the farm! Here's a sneak peek of the front cover the kids made - I'll share the entire book when it's all complete! It always turns out so cute!

Today I re-introduced plural nouns (we had learned a bit about word endings earlier in the year). My kids love watching videos, singing songs, and dancing to their learning, so I showed this video from an amazing website, havefunteaching.com! It's completely free!

We followed it up with a little plural noun video from another favorite site, Brainpop Jr. We are lucky enough to have a subscription to that website and my kids love learning from Moby and Annie! After reviewing with the videos, we did a little activity where the kids had to change farm animal names from the singular to the plural version of the word. They were pointing out plural names for the rest of the day! Love when they apply their learning on their own!

Last week we were reviewing rhyming words, so I made up a little farm animal rhyming word picture sort. You can download it for FREE by clicking on the picture below!

Animal Fun

My kids just wrapped up their unit on animals and they could not even get over finding all the facts they could about each one we studied. I used a few fabulous ideas from Ms. Deanna Jump's Zoo Unit from TPT and the kids loved every activity, especially the Alligator Pie poem activities. Every time kids finished with their work early, they BEGGED me to let them get pointers and read the poem aloud to each other. Before we actually made and ate the alligator pie, the kids added the poem to their interactive notebooks, rewrote it, and circled sight words they could read in the poem. Then, they had to draw a picture of what they thought the alligator pie was going to look like. Some of their ideas cracked me up!

We also learned about elephants by creating a schema chart. I love this idea because it really gets the kids thinking about facts and non-fiction concepts. They love to find out if their idea was true or not!

We also did a rhyming word sort activity right before reading The Three Little Pigs. Each student had a card with a word that they had to find around the room, read, and sort into the correct part of the chart:

We finished up the unit with a field trip to the zoo! So fun to see my kinder babies all excited to see everything. I can't believe we are winding down the end of the year so soon.. is it just me, or does every year fly by?

The Wind Blew

Last week was my final week using the reading theme "Spring is Here" with my kiddos. Usually during the 3rd week of the unit theme, my team and I create our own reading activities/stories to do that go along with the theme simply because we get tired of reading the same stories over and over again!

We read the story The Wind Blew by Pat Hutchins (classic!) and focused on the rhyming words in the story, so I came up with a Rhyming Word Kite for my kids to make and record all the rhyming words we heard in the story. They loved making the kites and were so getting into all the rhyming words they found!

Here are the templates for your downloading happiness :D -- The Wind Blew rhyming kites (Google Doc)

This week we launch head on into our World of Animals theme. Should be fun! We take our first field trip to the zoo on Friday...