Balloon Painting & Farm Sensory Table

We finished up our Farm theme last week, although our chicken eggs won't be hatching until May 11th (cross your fingers for us!). I took some pictures of two of our favorite activities last week:

Balloon Painting:

This was inspired by this pin, and I was happily surprised that a) this was a Pinterest craft that worked exactly like it was supposed to and b) my kids did such different things with it!

 I filled each of the paint trays with one main color and then several drops of the other colors. Note: don't over inflate the balloons or it will be hard to fit them into the paint!

 Some kiddos were just random with the paint and colors and just piled it all on top of each other.

 Some chose to do rows of splotches so that the colors didn't mix.

 This little guy figured out how to make huge balloon splotches rather than the smaller ones his classmates were making.

 The results were all unique - on some pictures you could see each individual paint splotch, while others had an almost tie-dyed effect!

The kids loved the novelty of painting with a balloon, and the pictures came out so beautifully that this is definitely a must-repeat activity! I'd call this a Pinterest-Win lol.

My kiddos also loved our Farm Sensory Table:

A little bit of Easter grass, a pizza pan painted blue for the water, a container of dirt and another of corn and beans made this just the right home for our Farm Animals!

About halfway through the week one of my little guys came to me and said "Where's the farm guy?" Once I clued in that he was thinking the table should have a farmer, I was able to go and grab the farmer figure from Block Center to put in the table. It's amazing what the kids think of that as a teacher you say "Duh! Why didn't I think of that!" And really, why DOESN'T the farm animals set come with a farmer or two??

As a final note, look how stinking cute my neighbor's hallway display is!

Those are handprint caterpillars and handprint butterflies - adorable!

This week we're doing an Ocean Theme - wait till you see what's in our Sensory Table for that! Plus we're taking down all our Spring crafts to do an Ocean hallway display - which will be a great preview for next year since our school theme with be "Seas the Day! Children arrrghh special!" at our school! Its a combo Ocean/Pirate theme! Does your school do a school-wide theme? Do you know what your theme will be for next year? Rustle up a response below and tell me your theme (or what you wish it would be!)

Rhyming Farm Books & Crafts!

I'm back from Vegas! I have to say, I was a bit disappointed because Sullivan did not seem to miss me at all. Seriously! He was asleep when I got home early Saturday morning so I waited anxiously for him to wake up. He cracked his eyes open, I cooed at him, and he just smiled and flipped over, ready to get his day started - like I hadn't even been gone! Don't get me wrong, I'm happy my husband and older children took such good care of him while I was away, but I'm thinking that maybe they could've fallen down on the job just a little, so Sullivan would have been relieved to see me - "Here's the woman that feeds me!" or "Finally, my butt will get changed in a timely fashion!" or "Well thank goodness you're back, I'm about to pass out from my own stench!" but noooo, he was fed, bathed, changed and played with so well that he could have cared less that I was gone...sigh....

 This is one of the pics my hubby texted me while I was away - that boy is g-o-n-e,  gone!

Today I'm joining up with Mrs. Jump's Class again for Book Talk Tuesday!

At the beginning of the year I always do a Farm Unit because we have a County Fair the first week of September and my students can go and see the free petting zoo with all sorts of farm animals. I like to try to tie our units to events that are happening in our community that they can access at little or no cost. At the beginning of the year I'm also focusing on the phonemic awareness skill of rhyming. Today I'm going to share several books that combine the Farm theme with predictable rhyming text and fun illustrations:

 

1st up: Sheep Out to Eat. This is a very simple book with a cute story about sheep who go out to eat, only to find that the lawn is what they want for lunch. With only a line or two of text per page, its also great for teaching one-to-one correspondence and directionality. Since there are 5 other rhyming Sheep stories by the same author, we usually read them all and make this paper plate sheep!

2nd:When Cows Come Home. This one has fun illustrations and a silly story about cows riding bikes and pulling sleighs. Each page has 4 lines and every other line rhymes. Here's a free paper plate cow craft that goes perfectly!

3rd:Big Red Barn. This book is also great for learning "big" and "little" and we always do a lot of counting of the eggs, the kittens, and the puppies! There's a free barn template here for a fun painting craft.

4th: Barnyard Banter . I think this book has my favorite illustrations! It goes through both common barn animals and more exotic ones like peacocks, all in the quest to find Goose, who is chasing a butterfly through the pages. This paper plate goose craft is simple and quick!

5th: Mrs. Wishy-Washy's Farm. Who hasn't heard of Mrs. Wishy-Washy?! I love how the animals go from not liking Mrs. Wishy-Washy to being happy to see her. The text is more complex than some of the other books, but there are solid rhymes on each page. Here's a cute Mrs. Wishy-Washy paper plate craft too!

6th:Pigs Aplenty, Pigs Galore! This book isn't actually set on a farm, instead the pigs invade a normal home, coming by boat, plane, bus and train. Be warned, while some pigs are from France, others are just in their underpants! Cue the hysterical laughter from students! This piggy craft is simple enough for young students, although I usually trace them myself.

7th:There's a Cow in the Cabbage Patch. I love the collage art in this book! All of the animals are in the wrong place "There's a cow in the cabbage patch, moo moo moo! She should be in the dairy, what shall we do?" and so on down through horses, pigs, roosters, sheep even doves and an owl! To go with this story, this handprint horse craft is adorable!

8th:Sixteen Cows. This is the story of two farms, each with 8 cows. One day a tornado destroys the fence seperating them and the sixteen cows get mixed up. Cowboy Gene and Cowgirl Sue each try to sing their cows home, to no avail. Luckily they fall in love and combine their herds! Since we live in Tornado Alley, this is a non-scary way to bring up tornado safety. Here's a tornado craft we do too.

9th: Barnyard Song. In this rhyming book, all of the animals catch the barnyard flu thanks to a bee and the farmer has to feed them all soup! This footprint bee goes very well with this story!

10th:Barn Dance! . The skinny kid can't sleep, so he goes to investigate "music honeyed up by the ol' scarecrow". He ends up dancing with the scarecrow and all of the farm animals in the barn, wearing a hole in the toe of his sock! This one has more text and more advanced language, so its a good idea to pull out some words ahead of time for a vocabulary study. Since the dancing is started by the scarecrow with a fiddle, this paper bag scarecrow craft is a must-do!

There you have it! 10 awesome rhyming books for a Farm theme! I'll be blogging more about our crafts and activities for Farm in September, so be on the look out for that! I'm also working on a freebie - looks like I might get it done for tomorrow so check back! Have a great week and don't check the calendar - summer is speeding by way too quickly!

Aaaarrrr Mateys! Talk Like a Pirate Day in review plus a farm freebie!

Oh my word I had fun today! AND there was not a single worksheet in sight all day! This is good, because I am way behind on grading. We are required to keep 3 grades a week for math and reading and I am drowning. In kindergarten we kept anecdotal records and used our Title I math test and Literacy 1st assessments for report cards, so I didn't actually keep weekly grades. I really, really hate worksheets, but I obviously have to have at least some each week, just so I can grade. I am going to try to keep worksheets to a minimum and have more "fun" days like today.

Here's a picture of the super cute shirt I made - I was a Pink Pirate for International Talk Like a Pirate Day. One of our stations this afternoon was playing the "ar" memory game I shared yesterday. The kids loved it! I had about 5 students who were really ready to learn r controlled vowels, another 6 or 7 that seemed to benefit form the exposure and the other 6 just had fun playing the game and commenting on the rhyming words.

At the end of the day we followed the directions on our pirate map - mostly to reinforce left and right since some of my firsties still don't know those. At the very end we came to our classroom closet and inside was my "treasure chest" with mini chocolate bars. Needless to say, the kids were so excited. I am sure they are going to be talking about this for days!

I realized that I had not yet made a dice/graph set for my farm unit so I remedied that very quickly and I'm sharing it today. I really like these because the kids can do them independently, and they enjoy them! I included a recording sheet this time, just in case you want to have some accountability for your station.
Farm Unit Die

Consonant Blends Farm Freebie

I am up to my eyeballs in paperwork, still trying to finish my lesson plans and progress reports, but I just wanted to pop on to wish everyone a Happy Sunday! I'm still working with my firsties on consonant blends, so I created a farm themed game to reinforce them. Check it out!
Farmer Blends

I just finished making the t shirts for tomorrow, I think they're super cute! I'll post pictures tomorrow after work so you can see how our International Talk Like a Pirate Day went!

ABC order and Behavior Woes

 Today felt like a Monday lol! We had a little bit of trouble keeping our noise level within acceptable limits, we were spotted running in the hall by another teacher (as they rounded the corner out of my line of sight), AND when I left the room for a moment to grab the snack for our kindergarten neighbors, we apparently had a dispute which the principal had to mitigate. In my defense, kindergarten teacher has 28 kiddos whereas I only have 19 so it made more sense for me to run down and grab the snacks while she watched both our classes.  Unfortunately, a parent chose that time to come up and wanted to talk her (in the middle of the afternoon?!) and my friend got sidetracked. This, of course, was when the principal decided to pop her head into my room to find my usual suspect having a hissy fit about something silly. Also in my defense, I could leave 18 of my 19 kids alone in the room at any given point and come back to find them voluntarily playing the quiet game or working in complete silence in order to surprise me. Of course, #19 is a different story altogether, a fact I will keep in mind next time lol!

Aside from that, we did get most of our paper plate horses completed today (this is a huge accomplishment considering that craft time apparently equals "turn off your listening ears so Mrs. Knopf has to repeat everything at least 3 times")! We also completed all of our math and did some great writing in the morning. I introduced alphabetical order this afternoon and about 1/2 my kiddos picked it up quite easily! We used the Human Timeline cards from Heather's Heart to practice in whole group first. Then we completed a Farm  ABC order worksheet together and then tried to do one on our own using our spelling words. I think with a little more practice we should be able to do these without too much difficulty!

Farm ABC Order

All in all, not a bad day, but I am truly hoping for some better behavior tomorrow. We've got the learning down pat, I may just have to take up back to day 1 behavior wise! If you like this freebie please let me know, I could use some nice comments after today!

I did find some neat giveaways that are worth passing on:

Queen of the First Grade Jungle is giving away this neat addition centered book:

Also, check out the giveaway at Kreative in Kinder, everyone wins!