Veterans Day Activities

November has arrived... and I think we all can agree that this is the first official start of the holiday season! From now until December, teachers everywhere will be attempting to fit holiday themes into their teaching including Thanksgiving, Winter, and holidays around the world... and it's tough to fit it all in! However, I will be kicking off the month of November by teaching about a holiday that is often overlooked amidst all the hubbub of the last two months of the year: Veterans Day!

I usually don't have more than a day or two to devote to teaching my students about Veterans Day, so in the past, I've tried to find quick, low-prep activities that are still engaging for my students to learn about this important day.

The easiest place to start is by finding some great books that tell the history of Veterans Day in kid-friendly language. Here are some fantastic books to start your collection:

My two favorites pictured above are H is for Honor and the Rookie Read About Holidays: Veterans Day. 

Videos are also a great way to get students interested in new topics. I found this great little video on Youtube that tells about Veterans Day in a way that young students will understand. I'll definitely be showing this one to my first graders this year!

  I also love implementing fun little songs and creating movements to go along with them. My students love them and end up singing them all day long! I sang this adorable song last year, courtesy of this freebie from First Grade Wow! I wanted my students to have access to a version that they would be able to use and read themselves, so I added a little Melonheadz clipart and turned it into a poster that the kids could refer to. Love it!   

After researching facts about Veterans Day together, we usually do a fun little activity together. I used this coloring sheet with my kindergarten kiddos last year and had a sentence for them to trace and tell about the meaning of the holiday.  

We also made a Veterans Day hat with three badges on it to tell about the importance of the day.

You can download the hat for FREE by clicking on the picture below!

Plants and Living Things {plus freebies!}

Spring is just around the corner! With the sunshine and warmer weather, it makes it the perfect time of year to begin a study on plants and living things.

 

To gain some background knowledge, I always start off by creating some sort of anchor chart or schema chart of all the things we think we know about plants. It's always interesting to see what the students come up with. A lot of times, they surprise me with how much they know!
 

After creating our schema chart, I always tell my students that they are going to become scientists so that we can find out everything we want to know about plants and living things! I talk about all the things that good scientists have to do with this little anchor chart, which you can download for FREE by clicking on the photo below!

The perfect way to implement all three of these things is to have students create a journal. They can use this to draw and write observations, record facts, and more! The first thing we do at the beginning of the unit is practice making observations. We go outside for a walk and draw a picture of EVERYTHING we can observe. 

I remind them to include details about everything they can see. Then, we come back inside and share our observations with a partner!

The next day, we learned about the difference between living and nonliving things. We used some real pictures of objects and sorted them between living and non-living. I got the pictures here for free from the blog Chalk Talk! 

I made up our own little version of the picture sort for students to work on independently. You can download it for free by clicking the picture below!

We then went on another observation walk outside and recorded our observations of all the living and non-living things we saw.

Once we had a little background knowledge on living things, it was time to observe and inspect the seeds we would be planting. I gave each student a magnifying glass and we observed our seed using our five senses in our plant journals. They had SO much fun looking at the seed up close!

Now we are ready to plant our seeds! I called kids up 4-5 at a time and let them pour soil in a cup, observe and feel the soil, and plant their seed in the middle.

Once we planted seeds, it was time to find out what plants need to thrive and grow! We watched one of my favorite songs about the Needs of a Plant from Harry Kindergarten:

And then we used our plants and living things journals to record our learning!

We planted our seeds, watered them, and then put them outside everyday to get some sunshine! I just used a big paper box lid to put all of our plant cups in to make it easier to carry it in and out of the classroom. As they started to grow, we learned about and labeled all the parts of a plant in our journals next!

Day by day, we checked in on our plants and used the observation pages of our journals to record what our plants looked like every couple of days!

You can print as many of the observation journal pages as you need for however many days you plan on letting the kids observe their plants before taking them home.

Once the plants grew enough to see the stem and leaves pop out, I let my students take their plants home! They were so excited! I had more than one student tell me that they went home and planted their flowers in their yard at home.

You can find all of these activities and more (including plant vocabulary cards) in my Plants and Living Things Observation Journal in my TPT store. Just click on the picture below and it will take you right there!

Spider Study!

For the past week and a half, we have been up to our ears studying everything we can about spiders! I've never had the time to do a spider study before, so I was so excited to gather up as many spider-related resources as I could in reading, science, and math. I truly feel that cross-curricular studies are the most meaningful ones for students.

First, I began by collecting as many non-fiction books as I could find about spiders. Here are some options if you are looking for some great ones to use with your K-2 spider study.

I am blessed to have a smartboard in my classroom, so instead of using a bunch of chart paper to make various anchor charts and posters, I decided to streamline it and keep them all in digital form. It ended up working out SO nicely! We could easily go back and refer to our schema chart and add new notes pages for each topic we were learning about. Not to mention, I didn't have to worry about finding a place to hang up a million posters/anchor charts. Here's a few of our digital anchor charts we made:

Even if you don't have a smartboard in your room, you could easily create every single one of these anchor charts on big paper, powerpoint, etc.! We ended up making a separate page for each topic that we learned and studied about spiders.

I also got by with a little help from my TPT friends! I used A Year of Many Firsts' AMAZING non-fiction spider unit, which you can find here! She has gorgeous pictures and so many creative resources to use. We ended up referring to her spiders digital fact book, printable student readers, and spider fact book to record all of the facts we found. 

Lyndsey included 3 differentiated student read aloud books. I chose the middle leveled one for my first graders and we spent time reading and highlighting important details we found in the text.

Then we used the books to write our own facts in their student fact books, which we used all week to record facts about spiders.

Each book page had a different topic to write and draw about. My students loved filling it all out; and their writing turned out amazing! I'm so glad that there are amazing TPT sellers that help me teach wonderful units in my classroom! Thanks, Lyndsey!

Here are a few other fact-finding activities we did:

Parts of a Spider Labeling Anchor Chart

Then we used the anchor chart to label it using another resource from A Year of Many Firsts' spider unit. 

I also implemented many spider themed activities for whole group math, reading, and literacy centers. It's amazing what a little themed activity will do to increase my students' excitement and engagement in a learning activity. Since they were loving learning about spiders, they were all in on these fun activities! 

For our ELA time, I create this little Smartboard interactive Spider Sentence sort. The students had to move the spider's legs to the side of the body that it belonged to (sentence or not a sentence).

My students absolutely loved reading the Spider poem from Deedee Wills' October Poetry Unit. I gave them a giant plastic spider to act out the poem with each other's names and they couldn't even get over it! We'll be adding the poem to our reading interactive notebooks later this week and my kids will partner read it to practice fluency.

I also implemented our spider theme into many math activities we did last week. We've been working on addition concepts for the last few weeks, including decomposing numbers, so this adorable little freebie craftivity from Wild About Firsties was the perfect activity!

You can download the freebie here!

I hung them all up on a bulletin board in my classroom for some festive student decor!

We also did a little graphing activity: Do You Think Spiders are Cool or Creepy? Needless to say, I did NOT agree with the majority of my kids! Ha!

One of my teammates came up with this little data analysis sheet and we compared our results!

In math tubs, we've been working on fun themed activities like my Spidery Roll and Cover:

...Which can be found here along with other Halloween math tubs in my Trick or Treat! Math is Sweet! Math Stations Pack (click on the picture below to find out more!)

To add a little fun to literacy centers, I made this little Spider Digraph Spinner game that my students loved! They spun the spinner, and based on whatever digraph they landed on (ch, th, sh), they had to find a word that began or ended with the digraph and color it by the color code till they filled up the entire spider web!

You can download this game for FREE by clicking on the picture below!

So, with all the fun we had learning about spiders, I must admit I am sad to see it go! However, that will be short-lived because this week we are going to begin our BAT unit... always one of my faves!

Sharin' a Little Sunshine {for Spring}!

Happy Monday, everyone! As happy as a Monday can be, anyways, right? Okay, so the truth is, we all dread Monday mornings, but I've got something to share with you that will hopefully brighten your day with a few ideas and freebies for Earth Day this week!

I'm linking up with my Arizona blogger friends over at our new collaborative blog, Hello Sunshine, for our brand spankin' new "Sharin' a Little Sunshine" linky!

This linky will occur once a month, each with a specific theme! This month we will be sharing ideas and resources with a Spring theme. If you join us, each month you will find a frame like this...

Click on the image above to open a Google Doc where you can click on the two links at the bottom!

...Where you can fill it in with book suggestions, activities, ideas, products, freebies... ANYTHING that fits with the Hello Sunshine linky theme!

Here's the scoop on all of my Earth Day themed activities pictured above:

To kick off our Earth Day activities, I choose one of the books pictured above and read it to my students to provide a little bit of background knowledge. Then we create a web of ideas on how we can help the Earth.

Once we finish brainstorming, my students can refer to our web to complete their Earth Day writing craftivity and choose 1-2 ways they would help the Earth. After completing the writing portion, we create the Earth! First, the students draw a big circle on blue paper, cut it out, and glue it at the top of a piece of big construction paper. Then they'll trace their handprint, cut it out, and glue it in the middle of their world. Then, they cut their own random pieces out of green to make it complete!

You can grab the writing prompt freebie by clicking on the image in the "Links" section of the Sharin' a Little Sunshine frame at the top of this post! It will take you to a PDF in Google Docs where you can download it for free!

In keeping with the Earth Day theme, I love when I can integrate multiple subjects into one activity... I am always trying to come up with various ways for my students to practice their sight words, and one activity my kids absolutely LOVE doing is Sight Word Sentence Builders. They complete this in small groups during literacy center time and they have gotten so good at building the mixed-up sentences in order! In each set, there are 3-4 different sentence cards provided. Each sentence has a different colored border so they know which words go in each sentence - that way there is no confusion. The students build the sentences together in a pocket chart and then read them all together using pointers to see if they make sense - this also helps them practice reading fluency and sentence structure along with mastering their sight words!

Once they build each sentence correctly, students have a recording sheet to write all of their sentences in blank boxes as a check for understanding. This allows me to see if the group built the sentences correctly as well as if they were able to write the sight words correctly.

These Earth Day sentence building activities - and MUCH more - can be found in my "Hoppin' Into April {Sentence Building Activities} pack in my TPT store. You'll also find themed sentence builders for baseball, spring, and plants in this pack! You can click on the picture in the linky frame in the "Links" box at the bottom to check it out!

Are you interested in linking up with us for our Sharin' a Little Sunshine linky over at Hello Sunshine? Click on the button below to grab the empty frame and link up with us to share your ideas and activities for Spring! We'd love to have you!