Snowmen and Mittens

Today was another frosty day outside! We continued on with some winter themed activities, but first we had gym. We're practicing our manipulative skills and today we were focused on throwing. Students rotated through 3 activities: tossing bean bags into hula hoops, throwing soft balls at pylons, and trying to get basketballs into the baskets (or a milk crate).

 

During our calendar meeting, we talked about another jolly phonics sound: /h/. We reviewed the story, action, song, and then tried to sound out a few words.

I came across some posters that go with each of the jolly sounds and students started practicing their sounds as soon as I hung them up!

 

We read another snowman story:

This story is great for discussing the seasons and what we do for activities in the summer vs. the winter. Students then worked on a 'name snow man', where they had to cut out the same number of circles as the number of letters in their name, plus one more for the snowman's head. Then, they had to write their name on the snowman's body and decorate them with scarves and hats (some chose to give them legs as well!). It was a great activity to combine Science, Math, and English Language Arts. I also had students complete the sentence, "I have ____ letters in my name."

 

Here are the finished products:

 

 

As students finished, they had a choice of some winter themed activities or they could explore anything in our writing or art center. Many of them liked trying out the mitten lacing activity that I set out this morning.

 

 

 

We also read the story, One Mitten. We discussed how a prediction is a guess about something that will happen and students offered their prediction as to where the girl's other mitten was!

Here are their predictions:

While reading the story, we discovered that the other mitten was underneath a sleeping cat! :)

 

We also tried out something new today- the Go Noodle website. Everyone loved it! So far they are a fan of the track star activities. With each activity, a real life Olympian athlete comes on the screen to help us warm up and prepare us for the track activity. Then students get to move through the actions as the character acts it out on the screen. We tried the hammer throw, hurdles, 200M sprint, and the high jump! We will definitely be using the Go Noodle activities in the future.

 

We rounded off our day with a talking circle and then it was time to get ready for home! We'll be back on Wednesday with more Kindergarten adventures. :)