These farm animal activities will make learning about farm animals fun and engaging! This unit is packed full of close reading activities, directed drawings, writing, a craft, and more! Farm Animal Activities Learning about farm animals is so much fun! Students learn about the different animals they may find on a farm with these farm animal activities. Students become farm animal experts through close reading passages, discussions, and investigations. Close Reading Passages/Chit ... continue reading...
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Easy Mother’s Day Book Gift with a FREE file
Mother's Day Book Gift and Keepsake from Kindergarten or 1st Grade FREE Sample! Easy classroom project for your kids to make! Mother's Day Book It is time to start working on Mother's Day gifts! These sweet gift books are perfect for moms, grandmas, and aunts! They are so STINKIN' cute! Seriously! I love how great the picture and writing turn out and mommies are sure to love them, too! This is such a simple gift to make but it is a keepsake that the mommies will want to ... continue reading...
La Princesa and the Pea | Reading Lesson Plans
La Princesa and the Pea lesson plans for kindergarten, first, and second grade! Fun reading lesson plans with reading comprehension activities and a craft. La Princesa and the Pea La Princesa and the Pea is a classic story with a Latino twist. It is such a sweet story about a Prince's plan to marry a maiden, no matter what the Queen says or does. This five-day lesson plan comes from our new Engaging Readers Fairytale and Folktales Unit for K-2. Through the daily lessons, students build ... continue reading...
How to teach phonological awareness
Phonological awareness activities that teach rhyming. Your kindergarten and first-grade students will love these fun lessons ideas to reinforce rhymes. These phonological awareness activities are great to use for reading intervention during your small group RTI time. Teaching Phonological Awareness Activities As teachers, we all understand the importance of creating strong phonological awareness in students. It is the foundation in which we build upon to create independent readers and ... continue reading...
Tacky and the Winter Games Lesson Plans (Free File)
Winter Games Lesson Plans for kindergarten and first grade. These are perfect to use during the Winter Olympics. Tacky and the Winter Games Don't you just love Tacky the Penguin? My class has always enjoyed this character, so when I saw Helen Lester's book, Tacky and the Winter Games, I knew I had to add it to our Engaging Readers Series. The version of the Engaging Readers one comes with 5 days of close reading comprehension activities: Visualization Retelling Connections ... continue reading...
Scarecrow Read Aloud Lesson Plans and More!
Scarecrow themed lesson plans are just perfect for fall! We love the book, Scarecrow by Cynthia Rylant (affiliate link) and your class will too! Scarecrow Read Aloud This book is flat-out adorable!  Students fall in love with his gentle nature! This is a book they beg to hear again and again, which makes it perfect for our close reading lessons. We start the book on a Monday and read it each day to grasp more meaning from the text. I will share a few of the activities for the ... continue reading...
Fun with Owls!
The kids had so much fun learning about owls this week. Their excitement was so contagious that when I was observed this week (we don't know ahead of time when our administrators are coming they just pop in and do our formal observations unnanounced) my assistant principal didn't want to leave! The kids were teaching him lots of cool facts about owls! Here are two of our charts that we made this week. They say... Owls have....  and Owls are.... we also made one that said Owls can...  We ... continue reading...
Thanksgiving Fun!
Thanksgiving classroom activities for kindergarten and first grade with free files. Turkey in Disguise activity, pilgrims, and other crafts to make Thanksgiving the best EVER! Do you ever have one of those weeks where you feel like you haven't accomplished a lot? Well.. this has been one of those weeks for me! Here are some of the things we've done so far. Thanksgiving classroom activities: Read Aloud We read, If I Sailed on the Mayflower in 1620.  Then we used this book to work ... continue reading...
All About Penguins Unit!
All about penguin lesson plan ideas for kindergarten and first grade. Reading, math, crafts, and anchor charts to help teach your students about penguins! Free file included too! All About Penguins! We love to learn about penguins each winter. It provides a great opportunity to teach your young learners using both fiction and nonfiction! All About Penguins: Charts Here are a few of the ways we organize our thinking! Penguin Chit Chats Chit Chats are a daily routine that we use to review ... continue reading...
RAWR! Dinosaur Dig Day! Dinosaur Unit
My Dinosaur unit has been posted to TPT... Click on the T-Rex picture above to view my dino unit on Teachers pay teachers. We made Paleontologists using our pictures. The book inside tells about what we did during our Dinosaur Dig Day. Sorry... It's hard to see how adorable these are since I had to blur out the faces. Our shirts that we made for our Dinosaur Dig Day. On our Dinosaur Dig day the kids got to see ... continue reading...
Insect Learning Fun, Freebies and a Sale!
We read lots of Eric Carle books and created our own papers to use in his style. No patterns, please! The kids use rectangles and squared to create their own unique insects. I LOVE the results.  Much better than if I had given them patterns to trace. Building insects with pattern blocks. The unit includes a sheet for them to tally, graph and add the pattern blocks  they used to build their insect. We always start out by charting what we think ... continue reading...
Aliens Love Underpants!
We love the book, Aliens Love Underpants! We made aliens and wrote about what we would do if an alien came to visit. The kids had some cute answers.  This is a song I wrote. We put it together in the pocket chart and at literacy centers they put the poem in order and drew an illustration to go with it. This is one of our math journal prompts. Alien Bubble Map A mixed up sentence using some of the words from ... continue reading...
Pirate Fun! Ahoy Mateys!
Oh, my word y'all we get out of school in two weeks and the kids are CRAZY ready!  I am trying my best to keep them engaged in learning and not pull my hair out. :) We started our pirate unit last week and I was amazed at the change in behavior. They LOVED this unit and their behavior was AWESOME! This has by far been my favorite unit! The kids have been so excited about reading and writing stories about Pirate adventures.  There are so many great children's books to read with this ... continue reading...
Walruses, Literacy Centers and Guided Reading, oh, my!
We made these adorable walruses from my Arctic Animals unit today. I love how they all turned out so unique. Our penguins are still fishing on our bulletin board so the herd of walruses won't be hung up until next week when we use them to decorate our polar bears and walruses venn diagram. I will post a pic next week when they are all hanging. So, I've had some questions about how I do Literacy Centers.This is a picture of my Literacy Center board. The pirates on ... continue reading...
America Unit Part One
I love how cute the bald eagles turned out! This is a picture of our Chit-Chit message. These messages are how I teach and review phonics, reading and language skills. There is no better way to teach letter sounds and sound chunks than in the context of authentic reading and writing. We read a sentence just as it is written and then use our schema and other context clues to help us figure out what would make sense in the sentence. Once we think we have it figured ... continue reading...