Chickens!

Happy Thursday!  Tomorrow is the first day of May.  How many of you end your school year in May?  In my district we always end in June, though this year the date has been moved back further than usual to make up for the snow days we missed over the winter.  Poor Boston, I wonder how many days they have to make up??

I bet there are folks in Boston who never want to see another snowflake!!  If you live or teach in Boston, I would very much love to hear how your school system is handling all the snow days you had!

With me being out of work since the accident, I really don't have a whole lot of school stuff to blog about.  I know that the substitute is doing a great job with my Dragons, and that my team mates have been a big help to her and my kiddos.  I have gotten some super-sweet Get Well cards from my littles, and I have heard they keep asking when I'm coming back.  I missed all of their field trips, I missed having them work with their 5th Grade Buddies to catch sneaky leprechauns, I missed having them create encouraging notes to give to their Buddies while they took their Standardized Tests, and I missed getting to see their excitement when our chicken egg incubator arrived.  We work closely with the local university's 4H Program, and every year they deliver to each kindergarten classroom an incubator with 3 chicken eggs.  The kinders get to watch the eggs incubate and eventually hatch, and then they get to participate in the care of the chicks.  When the chicks get big enough, they are given to local farms and homes where they spend the rest of their lives laying eggs and enjoying life.  I don't have any pictures of the eggs and chicks that came to my classroom this year, but thanks to the awesomeness of TimeHop I was reminded of the very first chicks I had in my classroom two years ago.

Meet Salt and Pepper, our classroom chicks from two years ago.  The students I had then still talk about them, and whenever a new incubator shows up they stop in and check on the newest chicks. These chicks did not hatch from the clutch we were incubating.  Unfortunately, none of those eggs hatched.  Our super wonderful 4H lady, Victoria, purchased these little guys from our local Tractor Supply store. We didn't want the kiddos to be sad that none of the eggs had hatched, so we didn't tell them. One day these guys showed up and the unhatched eggs disappeared (Victoria disposed of them for us).  Salt and Pepper were much loved by our littles, who got to hold them and pet them and help take care of their little home.  I enjoyed watching my Dragons interact with the chicks so much, I made sure to have an incubator in our room every Spring from then on.  Salt and Pepper are happily living out their lives on a local farm, and they are MUCH bigger now!  I am so grateful for programs like the 4H Agriculture in the Classroom.  Does your school district have anything similar?  Our 4H lady has suggested we try duck or quail eggs in our incubator, though we haven't yet.  If you have Agriculture in the Classroom, have you hatched anything other than chickens?  i would love to hear from you, including any activities you did with your littles that focused around the chickens hatching. I'm stock-piling ideas for next year, when the incubator returns to the Dragon's Den!  Please leave some comments on activities you have done or would do with your kiddos that focus around having the incubator and chicks in your classroom!

It's a Chick!!

So sorry this post is late today, but we had some super exciting news in kindergarten!!  As part of our Embryology in the Classroom project, each of our three kindergarten classes received an incubator, and each incubator has three eggs.  We have been waiting and waiting for something to happen, and yesterday something finally did!!

My team mate, Danielle, had the first egg hatch.

This little guy had a rough start!  However, he has really perked up and is doing so very much better!  Her littles voted and his name is Muffin.  How cute is that!!  (Although many of the teachers in our building have taken to calling him 'Trooper' because of everything he went through during his first 24 hours!)  Danielle also had the SECOND egg to hatch!!

This tiny peeper got to move into the brooding house this morning and is now happily hanging out with Muffin.  Her littles named this one Raven, after our local football team!!  Love it!!! 

My other team mate, Heather, had the next chick hatch!

Isn't it crazy how different all the chicks look??  This little blondie was named Rosie by Heather's class. 








 My class was the last class to have an egg hatch.  Sometime last night we had our newest addition to Room 130!

Yesterday morning I noticed this tiny crack, and when I came in to school this morning, there was a chick waiting!

Our little baby has to stay in the incubator for 24 hours so he can dry off and get all of the fluid out of his little lungs.  Hatching out must be EXHAUSTING work, because our baby has been quiet and sleepy most of the day.  Trust me, you would HAVE to be exhausted to be able to fall asleep in this noisy room!!  We haven't gotten a whole lot done this morning due to all of the excitement, but my kinders did vote on a name for our baby.

These are the names they came up with.  After I listed them all on the SMART Board (and yes, it does make pretty much all handwriting look sloppy), I gave them each a number.  My littles then wrote the number of their choice on a 'secret ballot' (index card folded in half) and I tallied up their votes.

It was a close one, but our chick's name is Peep.  I'm really glad that one got the most votes, 'cause I thought it was a super cute name!!   I will be adding more pics of our 'chicklins' (one of our kiddos calls them that, how sweet!!) as they grow!  My kiddos are very proud chick mommies and daddies!!

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!!

Egg-citing News!

We had a very egg-citing delivery to our classroom today!  We partnered with our local 4-H program and they have delivered incubators to our classrooms with three eggs in each.  They cam to us well into their incubation process, and they should hatch sometime next week!!

The blue one in the middle is really interesting to my littles as they are DYING to know what hatches from the blue egg!!  4-H really hooked us up this year with the incubators!  They have a digital temperature display with a count down to the hatching date.  There is also a buzzer that lets me know when the incubator is running out of water.  This is my second year having an incubator in the classroom, but this is the first year we have the fancy incubators!

We have been learning all about the life cycle of a chicken and we will be observing the eggs until they hatch, and then we get to move the chicks into their 'brooding box', which will be their home until they are big enough to move to a local farm.  I have been working on a few activities to go with our awesome incubators.  So far, I have an Easy Reader to use during guided reading that contains an assessment on the life cycle.

I also have a few colorful signs to hand in the hallway and let the rest of the school know what's going on with our incubator and our chicks.

This one we use to let passerby know how long our eggs have been incubating for.  We learned that chicken eggs need to incubate for 21 days.

This sign helps with our countdown to the big day!

After they have hatched, we keep track of how many days old they are.  I also post a few pictures out in the hallway with these signs.

These products are not yet in my TPT store, but they will be by tomorrow night!  Until then, you have a chance to win them before you can buy them!  If you want to win a set of these materials before they go on sale, you will need to do three things.
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The first five people to follow all three steps are the lucky winners!  Good luck, and I hope you win!!