Spring Ducks

Last week we read one of my favorite stories - Make Way for Ducklings, by Robert McCloskey. The kids loved it too, as most of them gave it a 5 on our rating scale of 1-5! Our week consisted of all sorts of ducky things, including this word family center game I'm offering to you for free!

Print, laminate and cut out the cards. Place them in a bag or can and provide students with response sheet. They take turns drawing a card out of the bag and blending the sound with the ending "ack." If it makes a word, they record it on a duck. If not, they put the card back. The kiddos keep going until all their ducks have words. Here it is: 

Quack

We also made some cute ducky art --

The mama duck is made from a handprint, and the little ducklings are thumbprints. The kids then used a finger to paint a head and for mama duck and some decided to make heads for the ducklings too. After drying, they added the scene using crayons. 

These little ducklings were made from mini paper plates cut in half. You could have the kiddos paint or color the plates yellow first... mine covered them with yellow tissue paper. After that, they covered them with yellow cotton balls. I used regular cotton balls and shook them with yellow powder paint. Then I had the kids cut out a head, beak and feet from paper. I gave them a pattern for the head, but some like to do their own! I made Mr. and Mrs. Mallard. These ducks are inspired by a cute mallard I pinned: 

Source: 1.bp.blogspot.com via Sarah on Pinterest

Another great pinterest find from Mrs. Ricca's Kindergarten 

Source: mrsriccaskindergarten.blogspot.com via Sarah on Pinterest

After reading Eric Carle's 10 Little Rubber Ducks, the kiddos practiced ordinal numbers using the activities described by Mrs. Ricca. Go see her post and download the free page for creating the class book. Here's a couple examples of pages from our class book: 

Hope you found something you think is quack-tastic! 
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Free Easter Unit!

I have just completed my Easter Math and Literacy Unit and I'm so excited to use it! 

It includes: addition and subtractiongraphingmeasuring teen numbersa dice-roll board gamesight wordssh/ch/wh wordsshort vowel soundswriting prompts
I hope you all can find something you want to use too! Remember, the best thanks you can give is to follow me, pin it or leave some love if you download!

Easter Unit

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We love mice!

We just adore mice in our classroom! This passion is ignited by our darling class pet, Taffy. Here she is getting her daily exercise:

Because my children are interested in mice, I like to take opportunities to do mousey stuff. Last week we did a mini author study, and it was the perfect opportunity to incorporate mice and one of my favorite children's book authors, Leo Lionni.

His lovely, poetic story Frederick, lent itself to some fun art and math activities. We wrote mice story problems, and you can download the page we used for free here.

colorful mice

Her mice were hungry! 

All of his mice were named and labeled... and there was an elaborate story as to why some got lost. 

How cute would these story problems be with fingerprint mice? 

We also tried our hand at Lionni's torn paper art by creating our own Fredericks. 

The kiddos tore the paper for everything except the ears, tail and legs, because after we carefully examined Lionni's illustrations, that is what the children determined was his method! 

Our poem for the week was about mice. Here is a free activity sheet you can use to go along with it if you'd like! 

We just love our pet Taffy! Do you have a class pet? 

St. Patrick's and The Lorax

Just a couple of simple activities I wanted to share, because the results were so precious...

I had the children trace a shamrock on green paper and write a sentence about why they are lucky. I say this a lot, but seriously, I melted.

....because I get to snuggle with mom

...because I have friends/...because I have God

....because my Dad protects me

...because I have my Miss Brown (biiiig smile from me)!

Moving on to our Lorax art!

For these paintings, we looked at a page from the book and taked about the landscape. Then, we used oil pastels to make the truffula tree trunks, stripes on the trunks and tree tops. Then, students used liquid water color to paint the sky, ground, and lake.

To make the little truffula trees, students cut out a trunk from construction paper and again used oil pastels. They then cut out a circle and glued it to the trunk. They chose one color of feathers to create the tops of the truffula trees.







This is the adorable way the kinder teacher next door to me put together her Lorax bulletin board using the truffula trees described above. Isn't it the cutest thing you've ever seen!?