October in Kindergarten

October is my favorite month of the year!  I love pumpkins, fall colors, and Halloween.  I just celebrated my 11th wedding anniversary with my sweet husband.  We had a beautiful fall wedding during one of the most lovely times of year here in my little part of the world.

So, it's one of my favorite times of year in the classroom too!  This is a sweet Fall on the Farm bulletin board from last year...

It was done slowly over time during our farm unit.  The trees were done collaboratively using corks and tempera paint.  I drew the trunks ahead of time using pastels.  The kids painted the leaves and apples using the corks in small groups.

Fire Prevention Month is also super cool.  My kids love seeing firefighters get into their full gear.  They especially love the "Darth Vader" breathing of the oxygen tank.  It's cool to see the fire engine too.   We are sending kind thoughts to all the firefighters and those affected by the wildfires in California right now.  Keep reading to find a firefighter FREEBIE later in this post.

In my classroom we always learn about pumpkins and use Halloween themed materials to practice important literacy and math concepts being taught.  Learning is more FUN that way.  So I am super excited to show you a special new product I made...

This is the beginning letter sound match activity from my Kindergarten Centers for October.
I adore the watercolor graphics.  It's great literacy practice during anytime in October.  They are perfect for Halloween too.

These pumpkin letter cards are also super sweet watercolor graphics!  You can use them for letter sound practice.  Pulling them out of a plastic pumpkin like this is so fun.  We say the poem I heard from Miss Kindergarten to practice letter sounds...  "Pumpkin, Pumpkin, nice and round, grab a pumpkin, say the sound."  It's great practice AND formative assessment.  You can also use these cards to match uppercase and lowercase...

This activity also comes with a recording sheet for kids to practice writing the matching letter.  My kiddos NEED the handwriting practice... so it's a great activity.  It's split into two sheets, so you can do this as two separate activities on two different days.  It's a better plan to do it in two days for our little learners in kindergarten.

 I also adore these eyeball jars that we are using for number sense activities.  My kids just learned number words by making this Counting Bears Number Book.

So we will be using those eyeball jar numbers to practice number words, counting strategies, number order, and more.  The number cards and number word cards both work with this sweet activity too...

These cute candy corn numbers can be used in many of the same ways.  They also have star ten frames to match.  All these number activities will help make my hands-on lessons with my math curriculum much more fun.  All these number activities come with recording sheets so students can review and extend concepts with pencil and paper.  They make great homework for October as well.

I love to begin my number activities by having kids work collaboratively to put the numerals in order.  We do it forwards and backwards.  Then they can match the counting cards and other representations of the number to the numerals.

We are also working on decomposing numbers as we work on counting strategies and number order.   It sets students up for success with understanding addition and subtraction later in the year.  This mat is a fun way to decompose numbers.  Using candy corns for math manipulatives in October is a must.  Here you can see 6 decomposed as 4+2  and 3+3.

 You could also use little mini erasers, bears, or cubes from your classroom as well.   These simple mats will work with ANY counter manipulative. These decomposing numbers mats are in my Kindergarten Centers for October as well.

The understanding that larger numbers can be made with combinations of smaller numbers is a hugely important concept in kindergarten math.  So we practice this A LOT during the year.  These are a couple of other ways we practice...

This set of Roll, Count, Build Number Sense Activities has a mat for every month of the school year and some extras too.  It also has mats for both two dice and three.  This is a great way to differentiate and is actually great practice for first grade too.  It comes with recording sheets to write number sentences as well.

You can use the dice mats with dominoes too.  We LOVE dominoes in our classroom.  They are the original number bonds and help kids learn soooooo much about numbers.  So, I love this sweet little math product.  You can grab it right here: Number Sense Activities - Roll, Count, Build all year long!

This Roll, Count, Color All year long! is another way to practice these same concepts.  They also make easy homework for parents at home.  This set of recording sheets for dice also have images for the entire year.  They are made to use with one, two, or three dice.

You can grab these pages right here: Roll, Count, Color All year long!

Back to the October center activities...

This is another activity to practice decomposing numbers.  My students are going to pretend to be wizards or mad scientists making potions...

This fun math activity has pictures of fun potion bottles in different number combinations.  Here you can see 7 decomposed as 5+2, 3+4, and 1+6.  Students can make Potions with any combination that matches the total number (7).

There are cards included to record the number relationship like this or with full number sentences.  It has fun recording sheets too!

Here are some other fun activities in this set:

Practice for rhyming... this includes other materials and gives ideas for lots of ways to use these cards.

OK...  this is turning into the blog post that will never end.   This Kindergarten Centers for October set also includes activities to practice hearing and counting syllables and color words too.  It is going to help make my October fun for the kids and easy for me... now that all the cards are printed and laminated, Ha ha!

Thank you so much for reading this post.  I hope some of these activities gave you ideas for your kindergarten classroom in October.  If you want these activities for your classroom, you can find them right here: Kindergarten Centers for October.

I promised you a Fire Prevention freebie...

It's a labeling activity just perfect for little students who are learning to stretch words and listen for sounds to write them.  It only has five words, so it's not overwhelming for kiddos just starting to write.  I did this as a guided activity where we worked collaboratively to stretch and listen and I modeled the writing.  Don't you love the rainbow jacket in this one?

Here's what the page looks like blank:

There are two pages included with boy and girl firefighters.  It's in my TpT store. You can grab it right here:   FREEBIE-Label the Firefighter


I hope you have an amazing October with your class!  Thanks for stopping by my blog.
Happy teaching!

Favorite Books for FALL

I am so happy to be blogging with my friends to bring you some of our favorite fall books.  I have some super books to tell you about.  For your convenience, you can find these books on Amazon using my affiliate link by clicking on the cover image.  If you purchase through my link I get a teeny tiny percentage.  Just trying to make things easy for you.  I hope you love these books as much as I do!

The beginning of the school year is a time to get to know each other and begin building our classroom community.  It is the perfect time to teach about diversity and why we value it!  This is the perfect book to help teach this concept:

Ling Sung is the main character in this diverse pre-school classroom with students and teachers from many racial backgrounds.  He doesn't want to go to school because he thinks all the other kids can do special things and he can't.  One day he uses paint brushes to eat a cookie like they are chopsticks.   His teachers and classmates are so impressed!  He teaches them all how to do it.  The story shows us how we all have different strengths AND we can learn new things from each other.  It's a great message about why we value diversity.  I found this book years ago when I was teaching in an inner-city school in San Francisco.  It was one of the only books at that time that actually reflected the kids in my class.  I still read it every year because it touches on a universal theme of feeling "not good enough".  All my young students benefit from hearing this story and realizing that we all have something important to contribute in our classroom community.  I also love this book because I now teach in a school that is not very diverse.  I want my students to see images of kids from all different backgrounds.  It's crucial!  This is still in print and you can grab it by clicking on the picture above.


This is another book that I just adore.  It truly represents a diverse urban community that reflects my childhood memories of San Francisco.  One of the ideas it touches on is wanting things other people have that we don't.  There is a reason this book has won so many awards.

It's a great addition to your books for teaching diversity, but this book also has so much more to offer.  The wise grandmother in this story continues to remind CJ (and us ) to be grateful for what we have, to see beauty in the world around us even when it's not immediately apparent, and connection with people is the real treasure in life.  I LOVE the positive messages in this book.  I also love it because the images and story accurately represent the city life that so many children live.


OK, I am totally OBSESSED with this book.

I saw it a few times on Instagram and when I saw the last page, I knew I had to have it.  It's based on Wonder by the same author, R.J. Pelacio.  It is soooooooo good and it's perfect for young students.  I used this book to help teach about kindness this year.  That is another important beginning of the school year lesson.  Be kind.  It's our number one classroom rule.  It was hard for me to read this book without crying the first few times.  I even read it at Back to School Night for parents because it delivers a powerful message is a beautifully simple way.   It set the tone for the year...


Here are some of the other activities we did to learn about kindness in my classroom:

We talked about how we want to be treated and what the kids in the pictures are doing during the sorting activity.  We also talked about how it feels when we are kind to others.  I made an anchor chart for the kids to give ideas of how they can be kind.  We are going to do this activity later in the year when we need a refresher on kindness. 

After the sorting activity, the kiddos drew a picture of how they can be kind on a writing response paper.  Since it is early in the year for kindergarten, we took dictations for ours students' ideas.  This is my teacher example paper:

Some of my students are having trouble with sharing...  especially the marbles with our marble race building toy.  We are working on it.  If you would like these materials to do kindness activities with your class, you can grab them right here:  Kindness Activities - Social Emontional Learning


I LOVE fall so much!  It's my favorite season and it's officially here!  I hope you can use these books with your little learners this season.

This book is PERFECT for doing a geometry unit in the fall.  I always try to introduce shapes sometime in the fall so we can do review throughout the rest of the year.  It's also nice to take a break from the huge numbers 1-10 unit.  That unit always seems like it takes months to finish and this is a fun way to mix things up.

 

 

This book takes you on a trip to the farm at harvest time so you can find lots of shapes along with pumpkins and apples too!  The illustrations are lovely.  I think you and your students will enjoy it too!    

These fall trees are a fun art and math project you can do as an extension activity with the book.  They were made using pattern block die cuts in fall colors.   Students just used oil pastel to draw the trunks and branckes.  Then, they glued on the shapes for leaves.  You can use these trees to learn about shapes and you can also review attributes!  These trees can be graphed by color OR shape.  We graphed these by shape above.  You can grab those pattern block graphs here:  Graph for Pattern Blocks  

Now that fall is here, I am starting to think about Halloween.  Our little friends have already been thinking about it for weeks!  I love this book because it incorporates the fun of Halloween and the pumpkin lifecycle through the story of a young boy who loved his jack-o-lantern.

If you don't have Pumpkin Jack in your collection, make sure you grab it.  You can even read it after Halloween because that's when the story begins.  Here is a fun extension activity you can do with your students to learn about compost and garbage...

We used our kid made classroom jack-o-lanterns for this science experiment.

The day after Halloween, we  filled one up with garbage...

and buried it in the ground.

Then on Earth Day, we dug it up to see what happened.  If you do this with your class make sure you put in some trash that is compostable and some that isn't.  It makes a huge impact to see very little left except for plastic wrappers, baggies, etc.  I got this idea from Catherine Reed, The Brown Bag Teacher  on her Instagram feed.  I tried it with my students and it was a huge success!  

I made these recording sheets for students to make a prediction and then record the results from our experiment..

This activity and recording sheets were just added along with some other things to my Earth Day Activities - Conserving Natural Resources product.  If you already own this, go re-download.  If you don't you should go check it out.  It's a super helpful science resource you can use all year.

I know this seems like the blog post that will never end.  I'm just enjoying writing today and I am such a huge picture book addict, that when it comes to sharing books, I can go on a bit.  This is my last fall favorite for today:

This is an engaging tale told with rich language and beautiful illustrations.  The main character is an older woman living alone who HATES pumpkins.  When one simple action and a lot of ignoring causes a huge pumpkin patch to grow in her yard, she turns this seeming disaster into a festive celebration.  Our little students get to see a character change over time and decide for themselves how she feels about pumpkins at the end.  This is an older book that is still in print for good reason.  I don't see it out in the world much, but I own it and love this addition to my fall collection.  It's a great October read that isn't spooky or completely Halloween based.  

Thanks so much for stopping by!  Hope you found some books and ideas that will help you have a fabulous fall in your classroom.  Keep on reading for more great books over at Elaine's blog...  

Kitty Kitty Kindergarten~Favorite Books for Fall

Happy fall!

Happy teaching!

Happy Thanksgiving!

OK, so I thought October went by fast.  But, November has gone by even faster.  I can't believe Thanksgiving is next week.  I am thankful for so many things right now.  I am thankful that my parent teacher conference week went well and is now over.  I am thankful for ten hours of sleep last night.  (Should I be embarrassed about that?)  I am thankful that my mom is doing OK after her surgery.  I am thankful for the online teaching community and Teachers Pay Teachers!  I am thankful that I still love my job after 17 years and I get to work with some of the most amazing people in the world...  the five year old people in my class.  Life is good.


I am especially thankful for helpful fall resources for my classroom.  This Print and Go! Apples, Pumpkins, and Leaves is a great set of NO PREP printables that can take you from September to November in kindergarten.  I use it for independent practice, formative assessment, and homework.  This set also has a page that I use soooooooo much throughout the year.  It's a sweet recording sheet for addition with dominoes.  It's perfect for little learners!  You will have to go take a look at the product in my store to go check it out...

Here are a few of the time saving pages in this product:

Here is an example of student work using one of the pages.  You can go take a look at this helpful resource by clicking on this  link: Print and Go! Apples, Pumpkins, and Leaves or click on the image below.

I am also really excited because my Print & Go! Thanksgiving FREEBIE made it into the TpT newsletter this week.  Woo hoo!  If you haven't downloaded this yet, go grab it.  You can get it by clicking on the link above or the images below.

It has four pages of black and white printable activities for your K-1 kiddos.  There are two activities that are great for addition or decomposing numbers to ten.  It also has a sentence scramble and a writing sheet with an "I'm thankful for..." list.  The lists are half pages with two on the master.  It looks like this when you cut the pages in half:

Here is another one:

Those were written by kindergarten kids in November.  You can see they are working on stretching out words and writing the corresponding sounds.  This is great practice and I think they are doing really well so far.  I think the little darling above copied Leaves from a book cover - what a smartie!    You will often see things from nature on my students' thankful lists because I always read this book to them before we start.

 

Giving Thanks is a wonderful book if you are studying Native Americans or teaching about the first Thanksgiving in your classroom.  It is a message of gratitude written by Chief Jake Swamp and illustrated by a Native American artist, Erwin Printup Jr.  I will be honest, it is written like a prayer, but because it is from the Native American cultural perspective, it is OK to read in public school classrooms.  It is a great book for that reason when it is presented in the context of the studies I mentioned above.  It is a really beautiful message.

Those thankful lists were on a bulletin board that looked like this:

The Indian corn art was done with cotton swabs dipped in brown, yellow, orange, and red paints.  Then the kiddos attached the corn husks to make them look like Indian corn.  I had drawn out the cob shaped templates and made copies on card stock.  It was a successful little fall art project.  Here are a couple of them up close:

We also made turkeys from toilet paper rolls.  I am always looking for ways to up cycle tp rolls.  I wish I could use all the rolls we use in my household for art projects, but it is an uphill battle.  We use a lot of toilet paper and there are only so many art projects we can do in a school year.  But, these little turkeys were pretty darn cute!

First my little students painted a peice of thick paper with fall colors in whatever pattern or design they liked.  Then they traced both hands and cut them out.  Last, they glued on eyes, nose, and tissue paper waddle along with the hands on the tp roll.  Tadaaa!  Fun little turkeys for a Thanksgiving decoration at home.  We made those turkeys last year.

So I used the idea again for a variation on the theme this year.  For these turkeys on our November calendars, I used our Ellison die cut machine to make colorful leaves and the kiddos used them as tail feathers.  We used tp rolls again for the turkey body and students used markers to draw the eyes, beaks, and legs.  It was a simple and easy project for the calendars.  You can grab my Calendars for Number Writing in my TpT store by clicking on the link or the image above. 

We have also been learning about setting, characters, and beginning, middle,  and end of a story for retelling.  We used my favorite book for fall.  I have posted about it before, because it is absolutely adorable!!!

 

Fletcher and the Falling Leaves by Julia Rawlinson is a must for your K-1 library if you don't already have it.  You can go grab it at Amazon by clicking on the image above.  (If you buy it, I will get a teeny tiny bit of $ from them for going through my blog -thanks!)  That is true for any of the book covers on this post.  You can go get them with a click and if you do, thank YOU!

This is an example of how my kids do the beginning, middle, end re-telling in my classroom.

I take 12 X 18" drawing paper and cut it in half to 6 X 18".  Then I fold it in thirds and write beginning, middle, end on the corresponding sections.  It doesn't take long at all to prep that.  After reading and talking about the story, the kids draw pictures illustrating each part.  Then I take the dictation about what was happening in each part.   It works great for kindergarten kids.  When the activity is more about ideas, I use dictation, rather than writing, as a way for the kiddos to express themselves.  

Here are a few more books I LOVE to read this time of year with my class:

 

In November By Cynthia Rylant is beautifully written with rich language and images.  It is a classic!

 

Alligator Arrived with Apples - A Potluck Alphabet Feast is another great book for Thanksgiving time.  The creative use of alliteration will tickle your students ears.  There are lots of unusual foods to discuss as well.  It is also a classic and continues to be one of my favorites.

 

When Autumn Comes by Robert Maass is a wonderful book for studies about the season of fall.  It helps give kids lots of seasonal indicators other than leaves turning color and falling off trees.  It is a helpful book to use for answering the essential question "How do we know it's Fall?"

And this is another helpful resource for November in kindergarten or even older grades too...

Kids can answer that question...  How do you know it's Fall?,  they can start a gratitude journal, and write about so much more in this fun fall writing pack.  You can find it right here:  November Writing Activities - Pretty Papers and Prompts

I hope you have a well deserved Thanksgiving break.  Enjoy this special holiday with your family and friends.  May you have many gifts to be thankful for this season.

Thanks so much for stopping by.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy teaching!