The Very Hungry Caterpillar

Today we were working on retelling stories.  We had read The Very Hungry Caterpillar earlier in the year, but I thought that we could revisit it.  Last year I made felt pieces to go with the story.  We used them to retell the story.  Each child picked a piece or two.  When we got to their spot in the story, I had them put their piece into the middle.  The students all helped saying the words in the story that were repeated over and over.

I loved all the details that this boy put into his work!

After we were done telling the story, I had them respond to the story through pictures or words.  Each student got a blank piece of paper and retold the story on it.
The students did a very good job at remembering lots of details.  I was very impressed!  Here are a couple of samples of their work.





I loved how this girl organized all her thoughts!



Similarities and Differences

Today we were looking at physical similarities and differences amount the students in our class.  We had worked with this outcome before and we came up with hand signals to show same (clasping hands together and then pressing inside out) and different (one hand in a fist and the other open). We use these hand signals as visual clues when we talk about same and different. So, today we just began with a short review. The kids did a good job of remembering and were able to give me examples of how they could sort the kids in the class ( boys/girls, glasses/no glasses, etc). Every student got a picture of themselves, plus they picked a picture of a classmate. They then glued them on a paper and they wrote one way that they were the same and one way they were different from their classmate. They did a great job of finding a similarity and a difference!

Responding to Dance

One of our Kindergarten outcomes is to respond to arts expressions verbally and non-verbally.  I am not much of an artsy person, so I'm always looking for new ideas to help the Kindergarten students love art.  I was looking for an activity for the day after Halloween.  I knew my kids would still be wound up and would need something exciting to get their attention.  I decided to look on youtube to see if I could find some kind of Halloween dance video that they could respond to.  I came across last year's dancing with the starts Halloween dance.  It was a pretty neat video and I thought the kids would be interested.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-Ws3rBVaoo

After watching the video, the kids discussed the video . . .

What did you see?
What did you like?
What didn't you like?
How did the dance make you feel?
How do you think the dancers wanted you to feel?


I then gave them a sheet of paper to respond to the video through pictures or words. Here's a sample of their work.

The kids had a great time!  All of their pictures were very creative, with people drawn upside down to show how they were standing on their heads, some had movement lines, etc.  My daughter (who is in my class) told me that was the best part of her day!