Gingerbread Fun!

There are so many great teaching themes to use during the month of December. One of my favorites to do every year is a gingerbread theme! There are some really wonderful read aloud books that can be used in a variety of ways in all subject areas.

One story I read to my students every year is Gingerbread Baby by Jan Brett. In this twist on the original tale, the gingerbread baby runs away and is lured back to the house when the boy who created him traps him by creating a gingerbread house.

For a fun activity, read the story to your students and, once the story ends, tell your students that you brought them some gingerbread cookies to eat. Then, grab a fancy Christmas bag, bring it over to your kids, and look inside. Newsflash: There's nothing inside! Then play it up BIG TIME: Looking inside the bag, looking confused, looking under your chair, around the classroom... and tell your students that, shockingly, the cookies are no longer in the bag! They always gasp and offer their suggestions on what happened to the gingerbread men. Of course, eventually, at least one student predicts that they must have run away! To relate it to the story, ask your students to recall how the boy got the gingerbread man to come back at the end of the book. The boy creates a fancy gingerbread house in order to entice the gingerbread cookie to come back; so your students will do the same thing to try and get their own cookies to return.

Give each student a gingerbread house traced onto construction paper with an open door cut into it. You can have them decorate it with any supplies you wish, but I usually take the quick route and just have them decorate it by coloring, cutting out, and gluing pictures of candy to the front of the house. I then glue it to a piece of red construction paper to add a little more stability.

I always plan this activity right before my students are about to leave the classroom, such as during specials or lunch time. This way, it gives me an opportunity to leave a gingerbread cookie on each of their houses when they least expect it!

Then your students will return to a surprise - a gingerbread man in the door! It always warms my heart when they come back in and exclaim, "It really worked!!!".

I also love to integrate the theme into our centers as well, such as with this Bakin' Up Sight Words activity from my Deck the Halls {Math and Literacy Centers} pack. Students choose a cookie and write the sight word on the matching space in the recording sheet.

A gingerbread theme is also a great little way to teach adjectives and descriptive writing. I picked up a foam sticker gingerbread decorating kit from Michael's (they have 24 to a pack!) that came with foam gingerbread men and all the components to decorate the front of it. Each student decorated their own.

Then, each student described their gingerbread man by creating a tree map to organize their thinking.

...Which they then used to write a story to describe their gingerbread creation. The tree map really helped them create coherent compound sentences and their writing turned out wonderful!

We always culminate our gingerbread unit with a big class gingerbread house building party. The day before the party, we have little elves (aka parent helpers) come in and build real houses out of graham crackers and royal icing. No milk cartons here! Then, the next day, each student gets to decorate their own gingerbread house. They absolutely love it!

What is your favorite gingerbread story to read during the month of December? Leave a comment telling us which one you love reading to your students and why!

Veterans Day Activities

November has arrived... and I think we all can agree that this is the first official start of the holiday season! From now until December, teachers everywhere will be attempting to fit holiday themes into their teaching including Thanksgiving, Winter, and holidays around the world... and it's tough to fit it all in! However, I will be kicking off the month of November by teaching about a holiday that is often overlooked amidst all the hubbub of the last two months of the year: Veterans Day!

I usually don't have more than a day or two to devote to teaching my students about Veterans Day, so in the past, I've tried to find quick, low-prep activities that are still engaging for my students to learn about this important day.

The easiest place to start is by finding some great books that tell the history of Veterans Day in kid-friendly language. Here are some fantastic books to start your collection:

My two favorites pictured above are H is for Honor and the Rookie Read About Holidays: Veterans Day. 

Videos are also a great way to get students interested in new topics. I found this great little video on Youtube that tells about Veterans Day in a way that young students will understand. I'll definitely be showing this one to my first graders this year!

  I also love implementing fun little songs and creating movements to go along with them. My students love them and end up singing them all day long! I sang this adorable song last year, courtesy of this freebie from First Grade Wow! I wanted my students to have access to a version that they would be able to use and read themselves, so I added a little Melonheadz clipart and turned it into a poster that the kids could refer to. Love it!   

 

After researching facts about Veterans Day together, we usually do a fun little activity together. I used this coloring sheet with my kindergarten kiddos last year and had a sentence for them to trace and tell about the meaning of the holiday.  

 

We also made a Veterans Day hat with three badges on it to tell about the importance of the day.

You can download the hat for FREE by clicking on the picture below!

Be sure to check back on the blog all month long for more freebies, resources, and teaching ideas for November's theme: Sensational Science and Social Studies from all of your favorite Hello Sunshine bloggers!

Ways to Help Young Writers Feel Successful

For whatever reason, writing always seems to be one of the most daunting concepts to tackle in the mind of a student. I don't think I have heard the phrase, "I don't know how" or, "I can't" more than when a student is tasked with a writing activity. This is especially true with our little learners who are just starting out with the most basic writing concepts. I've put together just a few simple strategies you can use to help your early writers feel successful and make huge growth in their writing.

The key to student writing success is to start with the basics. For me, this is introducing sentence writing using predictable charts. Predictable charts are a great way to introduce writing concepts such as capital letters, spaces between words, and punctuation at the end. It's also a great way to practice sight words and sentence fluency -- bonus!

The first thing you do to set up a predictable chart is come up with a sentence stem that uses familiar words or phrases. The three I usually like to choose from begin with "I like...", "I see...", or "I can...". Then students will create their own sentence using the stem and complete it with the word of their choosing and then I'll put their name in parenthesis at the end so we know they wrote it.

The thing I love about this part of the predictable chart is the students feel proud of the sentence they created - it's something they did, with their name on it. It may seem like a simple thing, but this really does help them become excited about writing!

You can also have pre-made sentence stems on a big chart paper for the students to actually write a sight word themselves. I used this predictable chart during our apple week last year and they filled in a sentence stem using the word "see" and a number - again, combining multiple concepts in one easy strategy!

After your predictable chart is completed, you can turn it into an independent writing activity for your students to accomplish. First, I'll type up the students' sentences and give it to them in a strip.

Next, they'll cut out each word and glue it to a piece of writing paper, being sure to put the words in order, use spaces between the words, and have the word with the period at the end of their sentence.

After that, they will draw a picture to match the sentence and practice writing the actual sentence themselves.

Having their sentence as a visual model helps with handwriting, sentence structure, and even confidence!

Another way to help young writers feel successful is to have pictures and labels for more difficult words. One activity I love using with my students is pocket chart sight word sentence builders. In this picture, students are building predictable sentences similar to the ones they created with me during shared writing. Only, instead of having the actual word at the end, there is a picture representation.

Then, based on my students' levels of writing, I have differentiated writing recording sheets for them to complete and show their work. Differentiating work this way allows every student to feel successful because they will have completed the activity that best fits the writing level they are at. Some are only ready to trace the words; others are ready to write all of the words on their own.

Another way to help young writers feel successful is to break down reading/writing sentences into separate tasks. I love using my Read It! Write It! Build It! Draw It! printables from my monthly sight word sentence builder packs. They provide students the opportunity to read a sentence before they write it; thus providing a model for them to reference as they are writing their sentences with the proper structure. I noticed a huge improvement in my students' ability to remember to include spaces and capital letters in their sentences. They loved being able to illustrate - another HUGE part of early writing - the sentences they built. This helped them work on adding details to their pictures as well.

This activity can be found in Spooky Sentence Building!

This activity can be found in Snow Many Sentences!

All of these pocket chart activities and printables can be found in my Sight Word Sentence Builders for the Year {The Bundle}. You can get there by clicking the picture below! There are also links to each individual monthly pack so your students can practice these in the pocket chart or writing center all year long!