{The blog hop is over so this item is no longer free
but it is available from my TeachersPayTeachers store!}
Welcome to your next freebie! I hope you've gotten a lot of goodies along the way. If you've missed any, you can go back to the beginning & start collecting again. There are 27 participating blogs! :)
The freebie I have for you is Easter themed but you could use it any time in the spring. It's a Spill & Spell activity that you can use for Word Work, a writing center or reading skill practice.
Print the letter tiles, laminate them for longer use and put them in plastic eggs. Mine are color coded for each of my 4 groups but otherwise the color doesn't matter.
{Store them as is when you're finished and you'll NEVER have to "set up" this activity again!!} :)
It's differentiated into 4 levels so you can choose the one that's appropriate for your grade level...or do like I do and use all 4 sets to meet the needs of your diverse learners! :)
{Levels 1 & 2 focus on CVC words and simple blending.}
Level 3 lets your students practice double vowels and silent e spelling patterns. {When 2 vowels go walking, the first one does the talking!!}
Level 4 incorporates blends, longer words and gives them the option to make 2 words from each egg!
Click on any of the above pictures to get your download. Then hop on down the bunny trail to your next freebie at SOS Supply. Have a happy Easter!
This little man had to go in to be fixed today. :(
It left me lonely, but also completely free to do whatever needs to be done without worrying about what was laying around or on the floor! {read: time to fix the living room!} When we moved into our house last summer I wanted to bring in some color but hubs wasn't so sure about my bright choices. I decided to tone it down a little...
...aaaaand have hated it ever since. I am not a pastel person. {gut instincts, ladies. stick with 'em.} So today while hubs was at work I went a shade darker than our kitchen/dining room and can sit happily again. I love it!
Now for what you really came for. ;) I realized I never shared the fun activities we did last week on the day of our Spring Party and if you're in school this week, these are some great finds!
This jelly bean data sheet from Vickie at {Mrs. Plant's Press} is actually two pages but we combined to print them on one.
It has a graph, tally chart, asks for most and least and has a blank box for students to write any sentence about their data. It was challenging, but in a good way!
Because I need to make a crown for every occasion {or just a random Thursday} we took this ancient coloring sheet and added numerals and number words. The kids cut the bottom half of the egg {word} from a strip on the bottom and could color after the numbers were all matched up.
Ta-da! Fabulous Easter crown...created during math. :)
I don't have the original sheet to share, but you could use either of these to match numerals and number words, addition sentences and sums, capital and lowercase letters, etc. Just print any Easter picture to add on!
{from printables4kids}
{from fambee.org}
This idea I can't take any credit for at all but I still had to share because it just ah-DOR-able. {Don't you love fabulous student teachers who bring new ideas? So refreshing!!} I think the original idea came from Mailbox Magazine but {i heart crafty things} will walk you through it step by step. This is so cute for a follow-up to hatching chicks. I guess I'll have to do it next year!
You can't go the week before spring break without creating some sort of Easter egg can you?! I certainly can't!
We dyed eggs this year using Kool-Aid {so much nicer to smell than vinegar!} thanks to Jen Renee.
And we made these cute little chickies with construction paper. They're similar to the ones we made last year but I added a writing piece. We've been talking about descriptive language and how it can be like a clue to explain what you're thinking of without really saying it directly so I figured we'd play a little guessing game with people walking by!
Instead of hanging writing and artwork together, I mixed them all up and hug it willy-nilly like. So if you're looking for a particular child's chick, you'll just have to read their clues to find it! ;)
Tip: use a loofah to paint feather-esque prints.
Here's your copy!
P.S. I left with 18 babies today {ah!} but have a feeling there will only be 17 when I go in tomorrow. Is it bad to pray for a quick release or healing for a chicken?!
We have chick babies!!!! :) I was so fearful of them hatching over the weekend because I wasn't there to make sure everything was ok. I literally had nightmares of coming back and finding that they'd suffocated in the incubator. I know...so morbid...but they are just fine!
I went in to 5 and by the end of the day we had 13...with 3 or 4 more trying to poke out!! I wish you could've seen the kids. They were so pumped! Ok...so was I. :)
To wrap up our unit, the chick journal is ready to go! I had a little hiccup with getting the eggs when I originally planned so we didn't have time to do all 17 pages but the good news about the unit is that you can totally pick and choose which pages you want to use!
{and remember to redeem your credits for purchases now!}
Here's a free sample page for you, my loyal lovelies! Even if you aren't hatching chickies, put some candy or a manipulative in a plastic egg and let your kids use this page to figure out what's inside!
P.S. If you go check it out at my TPT store, there's a bonus preview page from the packet. ;)
Attempt #2. I got my eggs again and am ready to hatch!
After last year's debacle you probably thought I'd give up {and almost did} but I'm ready to roll again with a full-on official incubator!
In the movement of making everything better, I'm putting together an egg hatching observation journal. Since I'm using the oh-so-talented Jessica Weible's designs, I will have to charge for it {not to worry} so I want to make sure it's something you can all use!
{here's what I have so far}
*living vs. non-living & oviparous vs. viviparous
*prediction page - what animal is in the egg?
*how to care for the eggs/chicks
*calendar to chart 21 days of growth
*candling observation page
*writing about "the birth"
*voting for a chick name graph
*writing about the chicks
*thank you letter for the person/place we received the eggs
*vocabulary page
What else do you want me to include? What other aspects of the chicken world am I missing?? :)
Happy Monday! And don't forget to watch my {friend of a} friend Tony Lucca {but who's counting?!} on The Voice tonight!! ;) Yes...from the original Mickey Mouse Club, where he was friends with Christina! Yeah 80's childhood!!
Since the incubator didn't seem to be an ideal situation for us {full story here} I went on down to the hardware store and picked up a few little friends. As far as the kids know, the brown one is Miracle - who they actually saw hatch - and the others were also from their eggs. I can't wait to see how excited they'll be on Monday to see who's come for a visit! :)
My husband, the videographer, is clearly not as enthused as I am {"mm-hmmm..."} but he's definitely been a good sport about me getting them, sitting and watching them all afternoon, and listening to them chirp for the next couple of days. Oh the sacrifices of a teacher's spouse. ;)
We've had a very hard week this week anticipating the birth of our chicks. In a nutshell, they didn't come out when expected and we were all quite bummed. {Most of all me, who feels incredibly guilty about their demise.} 5 days late...by which it's practically impossible for them to hatch...I went in to the classroom to throw the eggs away. They were starting to smell, had been completely still for a couple of days and Farmer Heather told us at that point it was too late. When I went in yesterday to get rid of them before the kids arrived, I could NOT believe that there was a tiny hole in one egg. And it was peeping!
We watched the hole grow all day and to be perfectly honest, did not get much of our planned activities done. We listened to her peep, watched her move and all took turns huddling around the incubator.
Right before lunch, as we were inviting the other kindergarten classes to come down to see how the hole had grown, she karate chopped through and was out! The kids were buzzing with excitement, all the adults were "oooooh" and "oh my goodness!"ing and our admins even came down to check her out. I {of course} got teared up, having previously given up hope that we would have any babies. Hence, her name, Miracle.
She flopped around for a bit, taking good breaths and sleeping in different positions. She was the buzz of the school for the rest of the day. {And encouraged my kids to do some amazing impromptu writing!} I was SO relieved.
Until I came in this morning. Our precious little one didn't make it through the night. I cried {again} and hid the entire incubator outside, telling the kids that she had gone back to the farm the night before. I was so torn on what to do and felt a serious moral dilemma about telling them truth or feeding them a lie. We had done an entire unit on oviparous animals, candled the eggs and learned about their stages of development, watched them grow from the inside and were already quite connected to them. Then after watching her "birth" and having such a truly incredible experience, I just couldn't leave it at that. I was devastated finding her this morning and I just couldn't bear to see it on their little faces. So I told them that she was lonely being the only one in there and that she'd gone back to the farm that night to be with her mommy. I said we'd see if she could come back to visit us after spring break...knowing full well that I will be purchasing live chicks next weekend to take in as "their" hatchlings.
I still feel somewhat bad about misleading the kids because death is a part of life and sometimes things like that happen. I know there are teachers, maybe even parents, who don't agree with me on this decision. But the more I think about it, I just think...why? My favorite thing about kids this age is their naivety and innocence. I pride myself on protecting them from the big bad world and all of the scary things they'll eventually be forced to encounter. I just don't feel like I need to be a part of putting that on them.
I thought of the following poem that I read at our year end celebration every June. It was a little different this time around. And while I agree with most of it, this was a lesson I thought they just didn't need to learn yet:
All I really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten
by Robert Fulghum
All I really need to know about how to live and what to do and how to be, I learned in kindergarten. Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate school mountain, but there in the sand pile at school.
These are the things I learned: share everything. play fair. don't hit people. put things back where you found them. clean up your own mess. don't take things that aren't yours. say you're sorry when you hurt somebody. wash your hands before you eat. flush. warm cookies and milk are good for you. live a balanced life - learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some. take a nap every afternoon. when you go out in the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands and stick together. be aware of wonder. remember the little seed in the styrofoam cup - the roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that. goldfish and hamsters and white mice {and chicks} and even the little seed in the styrofoam cup all die. so do we. then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned, the biggest word of all...look.
Everything you need to know is in there somewhere. The Golden Rule and love and basic sanitation. Ecology and politics and equality and sane living. Take any of those items and extrapolate it into sophisticated adult terms and apply it to your family life or your work or government or your world and it holds true and clear and firm. Thick what a better world it would be if we all - the whole world - had cookies and milk at about 3 o'clock in the afternoon then lay down with our blankies for a nap. Or if all governments had as a basic policy to always put things back where they found them and to clean up their own mess. And it is still true, no matter how old you are, when you go out into the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.
While visiting my husband's sister in the mountains this weekend I wore my winter coat one day and got a sunburn the next...spring has definitely hit the south!
We're talking a lot about spring in class, too. Some fun to share:
We created a spring vocabulary chart as I tend to do with most {ok, all!} of our science and social studies units. Instead of having the kids write in their journals this time, I hung our charts in the science center and they wrote sentences in flower booklets that are oh, so cute.
{I usually staple these to the wall above my counter but I moved my Word Wall back there this year so I had to improvise our garden area!}
Since our chicks will be hatching soon we made these presh crafts in anticipation...only 3 days left to go!!! We talked about the fact that chicks don't really hatch from Easter eggs or come out with colorful feathers, but the fancy decorations did make for great detailed writing!!
"My egg is awesome and he has blue eyes and decorations on his shell. He has a cool star on it's egg."
"My chick is named Sandra. Her egg has polkadots and stars and swirlies and zigzags."
Besides having chicks hatching in the next few days, we also received a LARGE shipment of over 30 caterpillars!! We read the recipe, measured the ingredients to make their food and put them in individual cups {with a few roommate pairs}. As one student said "We better keep those worms away from our chicks so they don't think it's here for breakfast!"
After we were familiar with signs of spring, we used this sheet from The Teacher's Guide to organize what we'd learned. I'll adapt it for next time because it only touched on four senses and we had to write "I taste" on the back. You can get the sheet here until I get around to it. ;)
Then the students picked their favorite sentences and wrote them on rain drops. Recognize the rainbows?? I just replaced the pots of gold with raindrops and voila! New work display. :)
After reading an acrostic poem in our literacy unit the students wanted to do their own so we filled our windows {for a better view!} with our own acrostic poems of SPRING. "Sunny day, Poppies of spring, Rainbow, Ice Melting, Nest, Grass growing."
One even got my most favorite spring phrase...Spring Break! :)
I have big news, people. Big news! I am hatching chicks!! Ok, so maybe some of you do this every year but I've been trying and trying with no avail and have finally found someone to make my farm dreams come true. :)
Miss Heather - our new farmer friend - said a few of them probably won't hatch because they were late from the previous batch, but that's all part of the lesson of life, right?
This is our big display...complete with a couple of shout outs:
I got these fantastic pictures from April at Chalk Talk. Check out the amazing things she has going on with her animal units including a {living vs. non-living sort} and these {egg photographs}.
I found a 21 day chart on a 4H website and gave one to each of my students. Then I blew it up to poster size for our display. {I couldn't find the original site but Enchanted Learning has a really similar one!} The kids cut out and glue down each day's egg for morning work when they first come in and we keep track of the count each day. It's been great for helping them practice counting backwards and the symbols of the embryo are really helpful when candling.
Shannon at Kinder-Pond also has a FABulous unit on {hatching chicks}. I love that Shannon always incorporates her content themes into literacy, math and independent centers because that's how I love to teach...it just doesn't always seem to work out that way. I made this recording sheet to go with her Chicken & Egg Syllable Sort game that I'll be putting in a literacy center this week. Her game is fab but I've realized that if my kids don't have something to hold them accountable...they don't always do what's expected when they're sitting on their own. {shocking...I know!}
