I'm Back and ready to blog!

Completed book

Okie dokie!  I've been MIA for almost two months!  It wasn't on purpose, just a super busy time of year.  November is the month of birthdays in my family.  December was an all around busy month with a huge home tile project, our daughter's first birthday, and Christmas.  Now the craziness is over I'm able to catch up on blogging.  I have so many great things to share!  I hope you can use or tweak some of my ideas to help in your classroom.  The pictures below are of a leaf book we did for the fall.  We will do a snowman one for winter when we return from break.  Basically, I created a tracer for the children to trace on construction paper for the front/back covers.  They used the same tracer on white copy paper for the pages of the book.  The students created leaf books by writing poems about the fall.  I gave them a choice of poem templates to choose from and they took it from there.  When I was a K-2 teacher I did the same thing, but we brainstormed seasonal words.  The children illustrated pictures of the word in kindergarten.  In 1st and 2nd grades the children illustrated pictures of the words and then used them to write sentences.  Basically, the themed seasonal books are versatile for any grade level.  If you want the tracer template or poem templates just leave me a comment with your contact info and I will email it over to you.  Enjoy!  :-)

                                                 

 Page Examples Above and Below

                                         

Seasonal Vocabulary

I borrowed this idea from littlemissglamourgoestokindergarten.blogspot.com.  She has fantastic ideas and I will be extending this idea for next year.  The long and short of it is, when the season is changing have students brainstorm a list of words that remind them of the season.  Next, a group of children can create illustrations for each word to help even the non-reader understand what the words mean.  Then, have some sort of cut out construction book to match the season at a Science table for students.  After that, have students take turns visiting the station and choosing a handful of words to use in sentences and create illustrations to match the words on the page.  Finally, create an in class bulletin board for decoration to display student work.  The differentiation is in student choice.  You could also provide sentence starters for struggling students.  Enjoy!