I'm Baaackkk!

Whew, I can't believe that I've been neglecting my poor blog so badly. What are my excuses? Nothing really, except that Spring has sprung about a month early and I have been hurrying home from school to get outside and run every afternoon. We have been grilling out and I have gotten to catch up some friends and family lately. I feel good about that, but it is always a struggle to balance exercise and healthy eating, work, personal relationships, and extra things like blogging!

Anyway, I am excited to share what my kindergarteners have been up to over the past week. Our bears unit has been a huge success. The kids LOVE reading nonfiction books about bears. Here are some graphic organizers we made as a class.
Our introductory brainstorming activity-kind of a KWL chart minus the "L". They had SO many great questions about bears!
We compared different species of bears.
We read about the life cycle of bears (see previous post) and made a graphic organizer about it. We practiced shortening up our phrases since we were taking notes. This made the students feel very grown up!

We have also enjoyed watching Jewel and her two cubs on a webcam from the North American Bear Center' website. The kids seriously go gaga over their every move!

This week, we are shifting the focus from "real" bears to teddy bears and folk tales. Today, we read two versions of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. We made stick puppets to reenact the story. Wealso illustrated a "Comic Strip Story" from I Love 2 Teach. Click the picture to go to her blog.

I thought this would be a difficult activity for some of my kiddos, but they ended up doing very well with it (it helped that we did it during our shared reading/writing time and not as a center activity so I was able to monitor their work better).

I also made a Three Bears House dramatic play area complete with three sizes of bowls, chairs and beds for the students to use during Choice Time. It's not the cutest thing I've ever made, but they enjoyed playing in it today.

The table with bowls.
The three beds (a little rough looking, but it was after choice time).
A view inside the Three Bear's cottage.

Sorry for the long post. It's great to be back and hope to be back again tomorrow or Wednesday with a poetry journal post and a new TpT item!