We've been busy this month!

Happy Earth Day!!

We made these cute little owls out of scrapbook paper today...
"Give a Hoot, Don't Pollute!" 
They look so cute hanging in the window of our classroom.  Tomorrow we're going to do some writing about how we can help take care of our Planet Earth.  The kids will be tearing blue and green paper and creating their own little earths.



We've spent the last few weeks reviewing the many strategies that good readers use to help them with their comprehension.  These posters include thinking stems to help the kids remember what kinds of things good thinkers may be thinking as they're reading.  Each student has a baggie of color-coded bookmarks (cut from construction paper) to go along with these posters.  The bookmark can be written on, much like a sticky note, without having to spend all the money on sticky notes. 
For example, if a student is at independent reading and has a question about their book, they take out a green bookmark and write their question on that bookmark, then place it in the page where they had the question.  This is done for any of the other thinking stems as well:  orange/visualizing, yellow/connections, purple/characters, blue/feelings, red/predicting.



These "Adjectives About Me" were so cute, I had to hang them in the room and take a picture of them all together.  Since we've been talking about adjectives, they helped each other think of good describing words for each other and then wrote them down and glued them around their little cutie pie self-portraits.









These are the adorable giraffes the kids made after we went to the zoo.  I got the cute pattern from Mrs. Jump's Class.

Early this month, we returned to "Features of Nonfiction".  I've done various anchor charts for this over the past few years, but I really liked this idea I got from this fabulous website:  www.julieballew.com.









This is another awesome idea I got thanks to pinterest and the various blogs I follow!  I just love how this retelling ribbon turned out!  After hearing a story, we bring the retelling ribbon down and go over how to retell the parts of the story. 

Castle:  Where the story takes place
Sun:  When the story takes place
Owl:  "Whoo" is the story about  :)
Boot:  What kicked off the story
3 Star Buttons:  3 main events
Bow:  What tied up the story

See these blogs for more info:
Castles and Crayons
Spotlight on Kindergarten

Coins...Determining Importance

Each of these coin webs was made by 5-6 students that met with me in small math groups.  First, I passed out real coins to each of them to touch, compare and look at closely.  They each took a turn sharing one thing they knew or noticed about their specific coin.  They then wrote their observations on the chart.

Once we had all of the coin webs finished and hanging in the window (the only place left in my classroom to hang anchor charts...lol), we discussed how some of the information was really more important for us to remember than other information.  We had just finished a reading comprehension lesson on determining importance titled "What's in My Teacher's Purse".  In that lesson, they had to determine and sort whether the items I pulled out of my purse were "Important" or just "Interesting".  They got pretty good at this, so I thought it would be a good comprehension lesson to pull over to math.

I asked the students to tell me which things they thought would be the most important to remember when they are trying to tell the different coins apart.  Then I circled what we felt were the most important differences.

Math Strategy Posters

These are some strategies we've been working on when solving story problems in math.  I may have to repost if/when I make them cuter.  ;o)

Math Problem Solving Posters

Reading Genres

Here is the reading genre bulletin board I made last week.  When the kids are at independent reading, they take a sticky note and a pen with them to write down one of the books they worked on that day.  When literacy stations are over, they put their sticky note on the right "cloud".  The genre choices are "Fantasy", "Nonfiction", or "Realistic Fiction".  I plan to add more genres in the future...for sure "poetry".

Here is a close-up photo of the "Realistic Fiction" cloud with a few sticky notes attached.  In order to avoid "overcrowding" with stickies, I told them that when they put a new sticky up, they have to take their old one down.  That way each student has one book represented on the board at  a time.