The Biggest Best Snowman!

This week we did a mini-unit on Snowmen. I don't know who had more fun, me or the kiddos!! We started the week off by brainstorming materials needed to build a snowman. Here is the list that my kinders came up with:

 

The next day I read the book The Biggest Best Snowman by Margery Cuyler. I really do love this book...for several reasons. But if you haven't read it, be sure to pick it up and check it out.

 After reading the book, I asked students to tell me what steps we would take to build a snowman. As I called on the students, I wrote down each step in turn. They were pretty detailed in their directions.

 After building the list, I noticed that they had used the same words throughout their directions, so we went through and circled the reoccurring words that were new to us. These words then became our new sight words for the week and the directions became our new poem for the week. The best part about it, the kiddos WROTE this POEM!!! They were so proud to take ownership. They wanted to change the title though. Instead of "How to Build a Snowman"...they changed it to "I Made a Snowman".

On Wednesday, we did a following directions activity. I gave each student a white piece of paper and students drew a snowman based on the directions I gave. Step by step, just like the students had told me the day before, I gave them directions. I also talked about using all of the space that they are given, meaning, don't make a teensy tiny snowman when they have a whole sheet of paper. This is how some of their snowmen turned out:

Thursday, I had students work together with a partner to make a snowman on a large piece of poster board. Again, I stressed the importance of an artist using the whole canvas to make their masterpiece, not just a tiny corner. When assigning partners, I pulled names out of our pick-sticks and the two names that I pulled out at the same time were partners. This was probably my favorite activity of the whole week. I watched them work so well together to design very unique snowmen/snowwomen!

When they were finished, I had the pairs stand up and talk about the snowman/woman that they drew. The one on the left has Santa in his sleigh being pulled by two reindeer. Very creative and they must be missing Christmas ;)

 Then today, Friday, students worked by themselves to build their own snowman with construction paper. The only materials they could use were scissors, glue and construction paper.

 Then lastly, I typed up the poem that the students wrote, and we illustrated them to help us remember the words. We also highlighted the new sight words that were learned this week. Then students glued the poems in their PIG (Poetry Is Great) folders and took home to read to their family.

And to top it all off, we ended our week with snowfall and more in the forcast for tomorrow! So, hopefully students will be able to go out and build their own REAL snowman with the freshly fallen snow this long three day weekend!

 Carie is a kindergarten teacher from Illinois who writes on the 17th of each month. She shares her experiences and ideas from her classroom, reading, writing, math, Art, and several other fun and exciting things!

Carie also writes her own blog: 

Kindergarten Hugs

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Poem of Kindergarten Encouragement & Inspiration

Dear  Rainbow Debbie and our Family of Friends who love and care for and teach our children,

One of my favorite (and I don't know the source, sorry) quotes is,

"The best way to send an idea is to wrap it up in a person."
 I could spend my lifetime writing about the incredible persons I
know who have given their lives to teaching, to children. Today
Deb, I want to write about Sylvia Ann Walton Jackson, who recently-
retired after decades of teaching at the Indianola Informal K-8
School in Columbus, Ohio. Many of those years were spent with
kindergartners , often in mixed groups like K-1 or K-2 .

Sylvia embodies the ideas of caring, kindness, gentleness, creativity
and fun. Marlene Robbins, a colleague of Sylvia's at Indianola for over
twenty five years, describes Sylvia as THE kindergarten teacher who
"sees the light in every child, who makes school a magic place to come to."

When Sylvia retired, she was filled with the passion of teaching, the
joy of the children, concern for the directions early childhood education
was steering, the admiration and appreciation of her fellow teachers
trying to keep the light and love in this stressful, test=driven time. Her
commitments to teaching and children took form in a collection of
deeply felt and thoughtful poems . Her collection is called, 
Discussion On School Reform - One Poem At A Time. 
The collection includes over one hundred poems for teachers, 
for families, for any person caring about our children and their education.

She gave me permission to share one of the poems with your
wonderful readers who are also the best ideas wrapped in themselves
and all they DO!

                                           Teacher Power

                                                      

                             You are a source of energy

Wind power                  

Solar power                    

Electrical  power                   

Teacher power.                    

You generate energy                   

Teach what you love and you will generate                    

Enthusiasm                    

Excitement                    

Intrigue                    

An atmosphere of discovery                    

You are the power                    

That drives                   

Interest                    

Teach who you are                    

Teach what you love                    

You generate energy                    

You turn on lights                    

And make brains work                     

    One of a hundred good messages in Sylvia Jackson's poems.
                         Keep the lights glowing! Love and Peace,

                                      Mimi Brodsky Chenfeld

Making Little Poets

April: Poetry Month!! 

April is one month that I have a love/hate relationship with :) It is such a wonderful month to teach because I do my Egg unit and my Poetry/Riddle unit...which I truly enjoy teaching both. But Hate it because it is such a busy month as we are near the end of the school year. There are tons of meetings, testing, class lists, schedules become full again and it seems that there is just not enough time to get it all done!  

Each week of the school year, I teach my students a new poem. Many times the poem will help teach them new sight words. At the end of the week, we highlight sight words and put our poem in our P.I.G. (poetry is great) folders. Then the students take their folders home over the weekend and read their new poems (and old ones too) to their parents. 

 But this week...we are doing something different! 

We are in the process of working together, as a class, to write our very own poem. I like my students to understand what authors and/or poets go through when they write a story/poem and to understand that it isn't something that is done by just sitting down and writing something and then it's done. There is so much more to getting a book/poem published. So we talk about the steps that they take to do this.

I let my students know that they are the ones making the decisions on what our poem will be about and what our poem says. The only time I get to choose, is if they can't agree on something. 

 

Day 1: Brainstorming

I began by having the students brainstorm topics that they wanted our class poem to be about.They came up with several topics and then they voted to see which topics were the most popular. I took the top 3 topics and had them vote again to decide what we were going to write our poem about. Then we talked about how some poems rhyme and how some poems do not rhyme. I read an example of both types and then had my students vote again. (I have 21 students in my class and as you can see, not all of them voted. I told them that if they didn't vote, then their voice wouldn't be heard, so if they want a say what the poem is going to be about, they must vote.) 

 

Finally, we had a topic to write about! 

Kindergarten Friends

The next thing we did was turn our brains back on high and brainstormed again. This time we came up with things that we knew about our kindergarten friends, things we do with them, and things that describe our kindergarten friends. 

 

Day 2: Getting Started 

We reviewed what we had talked about yesterday and how we came to our topic. Then we went back over our brainstorming to decide how we wanted to start our poem out. 

What would the first line of our poem be? What can we do to hook our readers? Do we we want to start with a question? Do we want to start with something excited?

These are all questions I asked my students and had them give me their ideas and opinions and then we voted...

The first sentence: I like my kindergarten friends. 

Hmmm, where do we go from here...again, since it is a poem written by my students I gave them the freedom to discuss their options as I guided them. 

Sentence number 2: We see each other at school.

Now that we had two sententces, we needed to start thinking about words that rhyme, so that we can write a poem that rhymes. I asked students to come up with words that rhymed with school and I wrote down what they came up with.

   

Then my students had to decide what word they wanted to use to rhyme with school in the poem about Kindergarten Friends. And so, we came up with four lines of our poem today.

Kindergarten Friends

I like my kindergarten friends.

We see each other at school

We play together outside

My friends are really cool!

Just before we were finishing up, one of my students said that we should start our poem out with "My friends are really cool"  because then people will really want to read our poem. So, we did some editing (a day ahead of schedule :) I love teaching in the moment!)

Now it reads:

Kindergarten Friends

My friends are really cool!

We play together outside

We see each other at school

 

                               

  Day 3: Continue/finish writing rough draft and begin editing 

Tomorrow we will come together again and continue to write our poem. As a rule of thumb, I like to keep the poems to 10 lines or less (mainly because I want it to fit in a pocket chart once it is written out on sentence strips but also because I want to wrap it up in 5 days). I will repeat the process of thinking about words that rhyme, so that we can write a poem that rhymes. We will continue with the the theme of every other line rhyming.  We will also continue to edit as we go. 

Day 4: Edit and re-write

Thursday, we will read the poem and decide what changes need to be made. Is there a better choice of words that we can use? How does the ending sound? Do we have the lines in an order that makes sense? Are we happy with way the poems sounds? Does it rhyme? We will make the changes necessary to make a rhyming poem that our class agrees upon! (Majority rules). Then I will re-write the poem and we will re-read it again to make sure it is just how we want it :) If changes need to be made, we will make them accordingly. 

 Day 5: Final Copy to be put in our P.I.G. Folders

Thursday night, I will type up the final copy to put in the students P.I.G. folders. On Friday, I will hand out the final copy of the poem and we will read through it as a group being sure to use our "magic reading fingers" while reading.. Then students will draw a picture to go with the poem. They will then put it in their  P.I.G. folder and take it home to share with their families. 

 

Presentation Day:

Next week, I will have their poem written on sentence strips and in the pocket chart. We will read through it each day and highlight any sight words we may have used. By the end of the week, they should know the poem word for word. Then on Friday, we will have our Poetry Celebration Assembly and my students will be able to recite a poem, written by them, in front of their peers! 

Want to see the final product???

To read their final copy, please visit my personal blog, Kindergarten Hugs this weekend. I will share it with you :) and hopefully I will remember to take pictutures of some of their illustrations too!

To see what we did last year for poetry month click here and  here!

Carie Ramirez

Kindergarten Hugs