Seuss-tastic!

It is Dr. Seuss week! Everything has been going really well, and I wanted to share some pictures of the things we are doing!

Pocket Chart: Finding word wall words

Making -at words

Fish Venn Diagram

Real and Nonsense words

Princess Pat -at lesson (lesson plan posted in a previous post!)

Monday Morning Message

Tuesday Morning Message

I crocheted a lorax!

School has already announced that we will have a half day due to impending snow storms. That's great and everything, but I just want it to be spring!!

Princess Pat Lesson Plan

Writing lesson plans is so tedious. They are completely impractical. But we have to write formal plans for all the lessons we teach during student teaching. I have tons to write this break, and I have barely started. (How is it already Wednesday?)
But I just finished my Princess Pat -at word family/rhyming lesson plan, and I thought I'd share it. I already explained it a little in a previous post, but I figured someone might want to see the actual plan!
Here it is! Princess Pat

One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish

For one of my workboard centers children will be sorting red, blue, and red with blue fish into a venn diagram. I wanted to share the worksheet I made!
I made it in black and white since I don't have access to a free colored printer, and I am going to just color everything in with crayon probably! I'm also going to color over the words "red" and "blue" in those colors, and I will color the two circles with the corresponding color.

I uploaded the worksheet to scribed. I hope this works! Venn Diagram

How long were the dinosaurs?

While I'm posting about my dinosaur unit, I might as well share this too!

In my previous post, I mentioned that I did a short dinosaur unit two summers ago with 3 and 4 year olds. At the time I was really trying to figure out good math activities to do that were fun (as it was the summer program) as well as educational. Here's what I came up with:

I decided that it may interest my students to see how long a dinosaur was. And what is every child's favorite dinosaur? A t-rex, of course! So, I researched how long a t-rex was (note: dinosaurs are not measured by their height because they walked hunched over: they are measured from head to tail) and discovered they were up to 40 feet long.

My classroom was not 40 feet long, so I decided to do my lesson out on the playground. I used a long extension cord and measured forty feet with my students (with a tape measure), stretching it out across the playground. Then I used some receipt paper (that came in a large roll) and used it to measure the heights of my students as well as myself. They loved being measured and then being able to hold the piece of paper that was the same size they were. We placed all of our paper heights on top of the extension cord one next to the other and found that all of our combined heights did not even come close to the length of the t-rex.

There were mixed reactions to this activity. My four year olds LOVED it. They were all really interested in dinosaurs and thought it was sooo cool that our heights didn't reach the end of the dinosaur height. My three year olds were not so thrilled. They were too distracted by the fact that we were on the playground, and they didn't really care about their height. So, I would definitely do this again with ages four and up. With younger students, the teacher mostly does all the work, but with older students, they can do the measuring and comparing. I would say this activity could go up to third or fourth grade and still keep the interests of students. If you do not have enough space to do a forty foot dinosaur, you can measure feet compared to a dinosaur foot instead.

Happy Measuring!

Graphs

I'm posting way more than I'm actually going to because it's vacation and because I have lots of old things I want to talk about! But generally there is no way I will post this much.

One thing I would like to implement in my classroom everyday is the use of graphs (even in preschool!). As a part of the morning routine, I want students enter the classroom, read or be told what the daily question is, and then mark their answer on whatever type of graph I am using that day. Let's say I am using a bar graph. You can buy a good bar graph here (graph) or you can make your own. I made a reusable bar graph two summers ago by drawing lines on a poster board, covering it with contact paper, and adding pieces of velcro so that students could stick a colored piece of paper (laminated and with velcro on the back) with their answer to the graph's question.

Here is an example: In a preschool class of 3 and 4 year olds, I made a graph titled "Would a dinosaur make a good pet?" to go along with our dinosaur unit. I velcro-ed the title of the graph to the top of my homemade graph and put the words "yes" in green and "no" in red on the x-axis (the bottom of the graph). Then students could choose either a green piece or a red piece to velcro to the graph to mark their opinion. When students had all put their vote on the graph, we talked about why they voted the way they did and which answer had the most and the least votes.

My plan is to have a different question every day. The question itself is not really important; what is important is that students are exposed to graphing. I will also do a variety of graphs, charts, and data collecting strategies. One thing I may do is to have children put a tally mark under their choice. Another option is to use legos by giving each student a lego and having them build towers based on their choices (sort of like a 3-D bar graph). Furthermore, I may have students make a paper chain to represent their answers to the question of the day. There are infinite possibilities!

Some people may question whether graphing is too complicated for preschoolers, but I would disagree. Students should not be taught about the x and y axis or the mechanics of making a graph, but they will understand how it basically works and what it means, especially if teachers use it in their every day routines. They will enjoy making and displaying their opinions and choices, and they will be excited to see the class results. I think a lot of times we underestimate what early childhood students can really do, but they can really surprise us!

Parents

Hello again :)

I was thinking about all the things I needed to do, and I wanted to share what I've been doing to form a connection with parents in my student teaching placement. Every day I try to take pictures of my students in the classroom (like while they are doing workboard or sharing their writing pieces or eating snack with their friends). Then on the weekends I email parents a few pictures of their child. I usually say something in the email about what we did during the week too.
Parents love it! Most parents are not able to come into the classroom, and they love seeing what their children are doing. I did this when I was working in a preschool this summer, and it worked great there too. It is pretty simple, it connects parents to the classroom, and it connects parents to you!

So if you are looking for a way to be better connected to the families in your classroom, I definitely recommend trying this! Just make sure you have permission for children to be photographed.

Dr. Seuss

After vacation, I will be implementing a unit on Dr. Seuss! I have not written up my lesson plans yet (they take so much time and thought!), but I have planned out my workboard centers and at least two whole class lessons.

On Monday I am getting observed by my supervisor (yikes!), so I needed to do a whole class lesson that would introduce the unit. The teacher I am working with and I came up with this idea for a rhyming lesson:
I am going to start by reading Hop on Pop, which is filled with rhymes. Then I am going to read my students a little story I wrote that is filled with -at word family words. I will have the story written on a piece of chart paper, but the -at words will be blank. I will talk to my students about how we could figure out how to spell those words, since at is a word wall word that they know. I will have students write in the missing words (I will tell them what the word should be, they just need to figure out how to spell it).

When we are finished working on the story, I will give each student a picture, and they will need to go to their tables to find the picture that rhymes (there will be four pictures on their table). They will glue their pictures on a Cat in the Hat hat that they decorate!

My other whole class activity will be based on The Foot Book. Students will measure their shoes with different objects, such as paper clips, pencils, and math cubes.

This is my plan for some of the workboard centers:

• In art we are making Lorax's
• At writing, students are filling in and illustrating the prompt, "Oh me! Oh my! Oh me! Oh my! What a lot of funny things go by! I saw ___” 
• At math, students will making funny feet patterns
• At science we are making oobleck
• At one pocket chart students are matching opposites (pictures below)
• At the other pocket chart, students are finding word wall words in the poem  “Doctor Seuss, we love you, Doctor Seuss, we really do, Doctor Seuss, we love you. We like ‘Yertle the Turtle,’ We like ‘Sam I Am.’ Like the ‘Grinch’ and ‘Lorax,’ and ‘Green Eggs and Ham.’” 
• Students are illustrating the poem at poetry notebooks
• Students will sort red, blue, and red with blue fish into a venn diagram at star (which is basically teacher choice)
• At games they will play the game Topple (just like the cat in the hat balances a lot of objects)

We are also having Wacky Wednesday, Silly Sock Day on Thursday, and we are seeing The Lorax in theaters on Friday (Dr. Seuss' birthday)!

On Monday, my morning message will be:

Good morning!

We will talk about Dr. Seuss today.

We are going to rhyme all day.

Let's get started, I cannot wait!

Dr. Seuss is really great!

Love, Ms. Coughlan

This is a very large and disorganized post, but I wanted to share my ideas!

Please ask if you want any clarifications on any of my lessons or centers.

Hello!

Hello bloggers! :)
I'm new to the whole blog craze, but I wanted to have a way to connect to other teachers. I have been following a few blogs and getting lesson ideas from them, and I wanted to be able to share my ideas too. It's only fair, right?

So! Since it's February vacation, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to start figuring this out.

A little about myself: I'm Kristen, and I am a senior in college right now studying early childhood education. I'm currently student teaching in a kindergarten class, and in the middle of March I will switch to a first grade class. I love it! It is extremely tiring, especially with the added activities of college life, but I'm really enjoying it. I'm not sure what else I could share with you exactly, but feel free to ask if you are dying to know things about me :)

Right now a lot of my lessons are adapted from other's lessons, and I don't want to post things that are other people's ideas. So I will sort through what I have and post soon!