Gobble 'Til You Wobble

Hi everyone!  I know this may be late, but we ran into some time constraints when making our Thanksgiving Unit for Teacher's Pay Teachers.  It's called "Gobble 'Til You Wobble," Sandra came up with the name, I thought it was really cute.  Go check it out, if you don't use it this year you can keep it and use it next year.  Here is a copy of a turkey hand print poem that has been around for years.  We translated it and added it to our unit in both languages, just click on the link for a free copy.  I usually add a picture of each student and glue it by their name.

Turkey Hand Print Poem in English and Spanish

 

I also just wanted to post a picture of a couple of Thanksgiving charts that I made for the morning message.  I had a sub on Friday and she did a very good job on my Thanksgiving KWL chart.  The other one is a thinking map, they tend to get a little boring so I decided to make a Turkey out of my circle map.  Check them out!

   

Hope you still have time to use some of these ideas.  Don't forget about our "Gobble 'Til You Wobble" unit on TPT!  We hope you enjoy your break and have a very Happy Thanksgiving!

-<3 Cindy

Election Day!

Hello everyone!  Election day at our school was really exciting and a lot of fun.  To kick it off we made a KWL chart to see what they knew about election day.  Most of the kids didn't really know much about it, but after a really good book, we think they got the basics down.  It's in the shape of an eagle just to make it more interesting, sorry if he's just a tad bit on the "thick" side.

We had a waiver day on Monday so the students came back to school on Tuesday.  Elections were held at our school which really added to the excitement for them.  Sandra found some really cute election day Pinterest ideas, We love Pinterest!  The first one is this really cute voter registration card.

Some of the signatures were hilarious.  They were walking around acting very grown up and official when they finished and definately ready for Election Day!  These are the two books we focused on and where we got our candidates.

   

On election day, I googled CNN and showed them pictures of people waiting in long lines to vote.  We also peeked through the gym doors so that they could see what a real election precinct looked like.  Finally the candidates, Duck and Teacher, were presented to them.

I had my students make two lines with their voter registration cards in hand and wait their turn to cast their vote.  Other teachers had them go a few at a time throughout the day.  They had two pictures on the ballot and they circled their choice. 

After a very close race these were the results.  I used stars to make a graph and Sandra had each student write their name in.  Teacher was the winner in my classroom and Duck won in Sandra's.  I told her it was because my kids love me more, lol.

 

The day after election day the students came to school very excited to let me know who won the real election.  There were some really interesting conversations going on that morning.  I was excited to see how much they picked up and how interested they were, one of those moments that makes me love my job. <3  I showed them a section of President Obama's  speech after he won.  We discussed what makes a great president.  For our writing activity, I had the prompt that said, "If I were president..." and Sandra asked them, "How would you be if you were president...".  Some how I managed to delete the picture of mine and I'll have to add it when I get back to school, but here is Sandra's, an awesome activity found on Pinterest.

We had a great time with our election day activities now, time for Thanksgiving! 

<3 Cindy

Go Away Big Green Monster

Hey Friends - this is going to be a really quick post about activities we do with the book Go Away Big Green Monster. Also, I think I figured out how to add a downloadable document to our blog and wanted to practice :-).

After reading the book and discussing the adjectives Ed Emberly uses to describe his monster we use sticky notes to label the monster. Then we make a brace map to label the parts of the monster. Note: all of the activities below are in Spanish because we teach in a dual language classroom and teach literacy in Spanish.

Next I have the students create a monster of their own and then they make a brace map to label the parts of their monster. I think the monsters came out awesome!! And they did a great job with the brace map. It drives me nuts that the pictures upload in all directions though. I really need to figure out why it does this:-(.

Finally my kiddos make a book of their monster and have to use 2 adjectives to complete the sentence.

In case you can't read in Spanish the book is called My Monster.

Click here to download the book in Spanish

 The next 2 pages say My monster has a round and blue head.

My monster has round and yellow eyes. 

All the rest of the pages of the book label the parts of their monster (nose, ears, mouth, hair etc...).

The last page says Go away monster! and they draw a self portrait.

I have been trying to add a download link to the Monster book, but I haven't been able to get it to work. If you have a blog and can help please leave a comment below. 

Thanks - Sandra

Story Book Parade

Hey friends - I know it's been a few weeks since we have posted anything and we promise to do better. Thanks Martha for calling us out on our blogging - or lack of blogging lol!

We had a FABULOUS storybook parade this year!  All of the teachers did an awesome job with the costumes. At our school each class selects a book and then the teacher and the parent volunteers make ALL of the costumes for their class. I wish I could post all of the great costumes the kiddos were wearing but unfortunately I cannot :-(. I will post pictures of the teachers and a few pics of kids wearing masks so that you can't see their faces. Above is a picture of Cindy as Jo-Jo the jellybean maker.  Her students were bags of jellybeans.

This is Ms. Aguayo as Cruella Deville and her class were the dalmations.

Ms. Barajas was the octopus from Rainbow Fish

Ms. Salinas and her class were Pete The Cat

Ms. Guzman's class did Ten Apples Up On Top. This was my favorite!!

Ms. Perez was a box of crayons and her kids were the crayons.

My class was Skippy Jon Jones

Doesn't everyone look awesome? There were so many more great costumes like The Magic School Bus, David Goes To School, Where is Spot, Stellaluna, The Grouchy Ladybug, The Cat and the Hat and Brown Bear.

Hope everyone had a safe and fun HALLOWEEN!!

Sandra :-)