Pocket Chart Activities

It's HUMP DAY!!  Thank goodness we are halfway through the week!  It's been such a crazy winter, I'm not used to these full weeks of school!!  :-)

St. Patrick's Day is Monday, and I am finishing up some last minute activities.  I wanted to focus on some Pocket Chart Activities, since I haven't had anything new at that center in a while.  I have made three activities, two for language arts and one for math.  Each activity will be offered separately for $2.00 an activity, or you can get the MEGA PACK of all three for $4.00 and save $2.00!!  My littles have been LOVING the new activities!

For this activity, students are reading CVC words from various word families.  When setting up the activity, they will choose a type of  'gold coin' which they will be searching for.  I have included some coins in the packet, or you can use two different colored chips or counters.  I found a package of multi-colored coins in the Mardis Gras section of The Dollar Tree.  Students take turns reading a word, and if they read it correctly they can check behind that card to see if a coin is there.  If it is one of 'their' coins, they can keep it.  If it belongs to the other player, they are to leave it there and the other player can try to get that coin on their turn.

Yesterday I posted about the other two pocket chart activities I made for St. Patrick's Day.  I have put all three activities into one MEGA PACK that you can purchase for $4.00, or you can get the activities separately for $2.00 a piece.  Buying the MEGA PACK saves you money!!

Make sure to snap up this great deal before St. Patrick's Day is over!

Finally, I'd like to talk to you about a rhyming activity I made to go along with St. Patrick's Day.  In our district, kindergarteners complete the ELS (Emerging Literacy Survey) Assessment, which measures their phonics skills as well as their ability to recognize and produce letter sounds, and to read words by sight.  We take this test three times a year, and after the Winter Session we noticed that, as a whole grade, kindergarteners were struggling with recognizing and reproducing rhyming words.  We as a team have been trying to throw as many rhyming activities at them as we can think of!  I came up with an activity that could be used as a Concentration/Memory-type game and/or a Go Fish! game.

There is a set of cards with a rainbow background and a set with a pot of gold background.  They rhyming words are in pairs, so 'hug' would be on a rainbow card and 'jug' would be on a pot of gold card.  This is a way for students to self-check at a glance. If they flip over two cards with rainbow backgrounds, that should tell them those words won't rhyme.  You need one of each to make a rhyming pair.  The activity also has differentiated cards.  There is a set of cards with rhyming buddies as pictures and another set with them as words.  There are also several different recording sheets.  Some are for students who still need to cut and paste to match rhyming buddies, and there are others for those students who are ready to move on to making sentences.

This assessment sheet students can cut and glue rhyming picture words next to their rhyming buddy.  This activity is easier than the second assessment sheet.

This assessment sheet is for students who are ready to make sentences.  They choose two of the rhyming buddies from the box, sound out the words, and write them on the lines.  They then must illustrate their sentence.  This part got a lot of my littles today, they did not draw the sentence, they drew other things.  So we'll keep working on remembering to make your picture match your words.  In my room, we have been learning all about the 5 parts of a sentence as well as how to code them.  My littles will be coding their sentences to find the capital letter, ending punctuation, subject, verb, and if it makes sense.  They are getting REALLY awesome at coding their sentences, so I KNOW the first grade teachers are going to be super-impressed with their sentence skills!!

I hope you stop by my store and grab a few of these activities for yourself.  While you're there, please become a follower.  I'm almost at 100!!  Have a super-duper rest of the week!!

What Crazy Weather We're Having!!

Happy Purple Friday everyone!!  In my little corner of the world, this week has been FULL of snow, ice, and freezing temperatures.  Due to the weather, our district had three days off this week!  Yesterday was our first day back with a 2 hour delay, and today there is another 2 hour delay.  I love snow days as much as the next teacher, but I am ready for some warmer weather!!  Since our area has been a Winter Wonderland lately, and since we're very close to switching marking periods, my very Pinteresting team mate Heather found some awesome Center ideas themed around winter.  So for the next few weeks, until we switch themes, there will be some really cute and fun winter centers in my room.
  At the Sensory Table, my Pinteresting team mate found an awesome idea to fill it full of 'snow'.  More specifically, Diaper Snow!!

I bought some generic diapers (when did diapers get so expensive??) and then took about ten of them out of the package put them into a dish pan.

I filled the dish pan full of water and let the diapers soak for a while so they could absorb all the water.  Then, I used scissors to cut each one open and dump out the gel-like snow into the sensory table.

This is a very sensory-based activity, as the wet gel feels a lot like snow.  It kinda grossed me out a little bit when I was filling up the Sensory Table, which meant my littles would LOVE it! 

After I had emptied all of the diapers, I threw in some small toys and some cups and spoons.  So far, my kinders have been OBSESSED with the 'snow'...I haven't told them yet where it came from!!  Oh, and we did have to have a class chit-chat about how this isn't real snow so we DON'T eat it!!

Another center in my room that has been visited by Jack Frost is the Dramatic Play area.  Soon I'll turn it into a farm, but for now it has become a Winter Wonderland.  This was another awesome idea my Pinteresting team mate Heather found, that took a little prep work but the kiddos are IN LOVE!  First, I took a large piece of white bulletin board paper, cut it into fourths so it would fit in the laminator, then reassembled it when it was laminated.  I taped this down to the floor, and it became  an 'ice rink'.

The students take off their shoes and they can 'ice skate' in their socks.  It has been SO FUNNY to watch them 'skate' and then pretend to slip and fall, just like they would on a real ice rink! 

Next, I had our totally awesome Cafeteria Manager save me three boxes of varying sizes.  I covered the boxes with white bulletin board paper and made some pieces out of craft foam.  Using this, the students can build a snowman.

The foam pieces include an orange carrot nose, two black coal eyes, a red mouth, and three green buttons.  My team mate Heather used Velcro to attach her pieces to her snowman, but she said that the paper rips when trying to take the pieces off.  So I thought about it, and remembered I had some 'ticky-tack' (I don't know it's real name, but it's that sticky putty stuff that resembles gum), and if you look closely in this picture you can see the tiny blue-blob of it.  The students put the ticky-tack on the craft pieces and can then stick them on the snowman once they've built him, and then they can remove them easily for the next group.

By far the most favorite part of this center was definitely the easiest to make!

I crumpled up some of the extra white bulletin board into 'balls' and the students can use them to have a snowball fight.  This part of the center can be tricky to manage because they get SO EXCITED that they can migrate out of the center and all of a sudden there is an all-out snowball war going on in the classroom.  So we had to have a class chit-chat about the best way to have a snowball fight inside. 

Changing centers takes a lot of prep work and we spend a lot of time changing them around, but the students totally love getting to go somewhere new.  What are some Pinteresting ideas for center activities that you have found?  I would LOVE to hear about them (and probably copy some of them too!!)