Five for Friday: April 15th

Hi guys! I’m linking up with Kacey at Doodle Bugs Teaching for Five for Friday to share 5 things from my week!

1. Building Shapes & Figures with Sight Words

I got this activity from Coffee Cups & Crayons.

I printed sight words on popsicle sticks and set them out with brown clay.

I encouraged the kids to read the sight words as they built their shapes and figures. I still have lots of kids who need fine motor development and the clay has great resistance and is fantastic for building stronger finger muscles!

2. No Sew Button Snakes

Here is another fun, easy & cheap math + fine motor centre! I found this idea on Twitches.

All you need to do is thread a pipe cleaner through a button and then secure it by twisting the pipe cleaner. Then cut felt pieces into squares (or any shapes really) and cut a small slit in the middle of the felt.

Students are encouraged to make a pattern with the felt by threading the felt through the button and on to the pipe cleaner. This one was another great one for fine motor and the kids loved it too!

3. Building Learning Goal, Success Criteria, Set-up & Examples

We have been encouraging the kids to make plans when building and introduced a new area to display our learning.

First we introduced the learning goal and success criteria.

Our teammates lent us these awesome wooden blocks so we set them out with some photos of famous structures and some books about building.

The pictures and books give them a great visual and a starting point for making a plan for their structure.

The Picture History of Great Buildings
Look at That Building!
Iggy Peck Architect

Here are some more books that I picked up and plan to swap in to spark new ideas.

When I Build With Blocks

Dreaming Up: A Celebration of Building

I have these clipboards hanging near the building area so that the kids can draw and write about their structure if they want.

Then I display them on the building board. This motivates them to draw and write about their structure.

When I can I snap a picture of their structure and we print and glue it onto their sheet as well.

So far the addition of the learning goal, success criteria, visual supports and the option to write has made this area a lot more purposeful which we are so happy about!

You can find similar building writing templates in my “Play-Based Learning Writing Templates” pack on TPT. Click here or on the image below if you are interested in grabbing them!

4. Addition & Subtraction BB

We wrapped up subtraction this week and I put up some more work on our addition & subtraction bulletin board after school tonight.

I always have the kids make the title of our bulletin boards.

I have our learning goal and success criteria on the right hand side, followed by our addition and subtraction strategy posters.

Under that I displayed some pictures of the kids working at some of the addition & subtraction centres and documentation of the math talk/thinking they displayed there.

On the right hand side I also displayed some of the addition & subtraction story problems the kids made with descriptive feedback.

I have full blog posts on both teaching addition and subtraction in Kindergarten.

You can check those out by clicking on the links below:

Teaching Addition in FDK

Teaching Subtraction in FDK

5. Listening, Thinking and Writing Board

In February we started to display our writing on one of our bulletin boards and the kids love it.
They like to look at their friend’s work and find their own too.
I think knowing that their work will be up on display motivates them to do their best too.

We originally titled our board just “Writing” but we changed it this month to “Listening, Thinking and Writing”. As a division we have started to focus on writing responses to readalouds so I thought this title would be more reflective about how our writing is evolving.

This month we are focusing on making and writing predictions. We used the text Emeraldalicious and tied it into talking about Earth Day and taking care of the Earth as well.

We stopped before the page that Peter makes his wish and we asked the kids “Pinkalicious wished for a throne, flowers and birds. What do you think Peter will wish for?”

Here is one example of what they wrote: