Winter, Penguins and Antarctica... HERE WE COME!

We LOVED our Winter Break SO MUCH! We spent quality time with family and friends…no travel this year for either of us meant more time to rest and renew! 

We literally integrate literacy into EVERYTHING we do in Our Smart Community. We are both very passionate about writing in kindergarten. This year, we have begun working with rubrics. We use a behavior rubric and we have been using project rubrics for several months with GREAT results. The visual examples of each level are key to the success. I have uploaded my rubrics to share with you here:

 I also created a fun little listening center extension for winter…also a freebie! Enjoy! 

Kelly and I worked about 10 hours AT SCHOOL (not including all of our behind the scenes work) over break. Our rooms were ready to welcome our students into Antarctica on Monday! We both enjoy this unit SO MUCH and our new word walls will enhance our students' literacy learning! 

Be Blessed this year!!

Rainforest Fun and... A FREEBIE! :0)

I am so behind on blogging…PLEASE FORGIVE ME! Settle in for lots of pics and some new ideas!

We have been hard at work in the rainforest!  We have been journaling in our Jungle Journals…

Working on learning lots of rainforest vocabulary…

Making projects and doing lots of writing too…

We write in our Jungle Journals daily but we LOVE it when our students write in their daily journals about the theme we are learning about! Justice did an AWESOME JOB! J

This is our Rainforest “Fact Chain” Project. Students choose 10 rainforest words from our thematic word wall, use the word in a fact-based sentence and do a mini illustration. We do these for thematic projects and will regular word wall words!

Patterns for all of these plus my jaguar and sloth are included in my rainforest unit! Visit my Tpt store to purchase!

On Friday, we got together with Our Smart Community and worked in small groups ((SYNERGIZED)) to make rainforest posters including all the layers and many animals we have learned about during our unit! It was a fun and exciting project! 

 

Click below for your FREEBIE of our project! J We will be working on Rainforest Insects over the next two weeks and then moving into our HUGE Ocean Unit until the end of the school year on May 23^rd!

Thanks for stopping by to visit us! Send your friends… when we reach 100 followers we will celebrate with goodies! Follow us on Facebook too... just click the Facebook button on this page! J

We received our first Blog Award!

Thank you Sarah @ Co-Kindering for this award! We are so honored! We have gained 5 followers in a day and are very excited! WOO HOO!!! I will be posting more Rainforest examples soon! When we reach 100 followers, we will celebrate with a FREEBIE for all !

Freebie and more from our Antarctica/ Penguin/Winter Unit!

How was your week? Why is it that 4 day weeks are always way crazier than 5 day weeks? Wowzers! It was a busy one! J

I worked really hard to finish my “Mini Unit on The Mitten”. I managed to post it Thursday night and made a freebie to share! I am a huge fan of graphic organizers… and I love Venns a bunch!

Mitten / Hat Venn Freebie!

We have been continuing our Penguin/Antarctica Unit. This week, students made a winter words book (from my unit). Here are a couple of student examples…

 

We worked in our Penguins Journals. We use them separate and apart from our “regular journals”. In our thematic journals, we write about our vocabulary word of the day. During this time, students are integrating science (or social studies, depending on the unit) with writing. We have been working a lot on conventions in writing. We are excited that our kiddos are beginning to make periods, finger spaces between words and starting sentences with an uppercase letter into writing habits.

Penguins keep warm in a crèche.

 Penguins toboggan fast.

Penguins can slide on their bellies.

I hope your weekend is off to a good start! I am taking a break from creating curriculum for the rest of the weekend. I love it but I love my family more. J Hug those you love and tell them how much you love them. Kelly and I both received several reminders this week about how fragile life is. It is truly a BLINK.