Saturday, August 27, 2011

Week 2 Colors! Orange, Purple, Pink, Black/White/Gray, and Brown

We continued our Color Day Fun theme and finished up with all the colors. It was a week filled with literature, writing, art, and color day snacks! Monday was orange day. We started our day with our color poem: “Orange is a carrot an the orange I eat. Orange are the new socks I wear upon my feet!”  And color monster: Orange, Orange, squished and orange! The two stories that we read for orange day are Cat’s Colors by Jane Cabrera and Chrysanthemum by Kevin Henkes. After reading Chrysanthemum we learned a very good lesson about not making fun of others and we then did some fun “name” activities with graphing the number of letters in our name, adding the letters in our first name and last name…I didn’t get pictures of this as I was running around helping them count and add and getting the graph filled in!

orangeAfter reading the story Cat’s Colors we created these very cute cat books filled with things that are orange like the cat’s favorite color. Then we got to “pick, pair, share” with a friend and read what was written in their books.

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Next was purple day! “Purple is a grape. Purple is a plum. Purple is my favorite juice, shall I get you some?” and our color monster: “Purple, purple, had to burple”. Lots of giggles after that one!

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We enjoyed another book by Kevin Henkes called Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse. We made these cute purple (paper) purses and inside is the story events that we sequenced after listening to the story. 

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In the story Lilly wants to be a teacher when she grows up. We made a class book showing what they want to be when they grow up!

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Then we read Harold’s Purple Crayon and made our own Purple Crayon Adventures. They were very creative!

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Now that we have done all the primary and secondary colors we finished our afternoon with an activity called “We See Colors”. We used the story Purple, Green, and Orange by Robert Munsch (crazy story writer!) We worked on using our sight words and color words and made these books:

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Wednesday was pink day! The boys didn’t really like the idea of wearing pink and reading stories about Pinkalicious, but they sure loved the pink cupcakes I made for them! We learned the poem “Pink is cotton candy. Pink is a flower. Pink is a grapefruit that tastes really sour!” Our monster said, “Pink, pink, sat in the sink”.

pinkWe made these cute cupcake “pink” books using our sight words and creative writing and then got to enjoy these yummy cupcakes!

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Thursday was opposites day with black and white. Our poem for black is “Black is the night and a witch’s hat. Black is licorice and that witch’s cat!” The monster said, “Black, black, plays quarterback". For white the poem is “White, white you are so bright!”

black and whiteWe spent a lot of time brainstorming opposites after reading the story Black Cat, White Cat. They loved this pop up book! Then we created our own opposites book to share at home.

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After making our opposites book we read Harry the Dirty Dog and saw how he changed from a white dog with black spots to a black dog with white spots. The kids made these cute black and white dogs after we read that story.

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Another activity we did was read the story Ten Black Dots by Donald Crews. We saw how things were created with one black dot, two black dots, etc…We used this story to do an activity where we used “one black line” and created something out of that line and made a class book to share.

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Friday we finished up with the color brown. Our poem is “Brown is the mud. Brown is a bear. Brown is the color of my teacher’s hair!” And our crazy color monster was “Brown, brown, your jeans fell down!” Yes, the room went crazy on that one! Our story for brown was perfect to combine all of our color words and sight words into lots of activities. We used Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? by Bill Martin, Jr.

brownWe made our own class book with a page written by each child. Here are a few samples:

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Each child also got to take home a version of the story that they completed using their color words.

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Then we finished up the day making these cute brown bears!DSC00988DSC00986

It was a fun filled colorful week! Thanks to all the parents that sent yummy snacks to match our color days! Next week we will combine all our sight words and color words to complete “rainbow” activities!

Sunday, August 21, 2011

First Week of School! Colors: Red, Yellow, Blue, & Green

We started our first week of school with the introduction of our Color Unit. Each day we learn a poem and color a “monster” the color of the day. We also do a sentence scramble using our “word of the day” which is the color word we are working on that day. Students unscramble words to create a complete sentence then write it with correct mechanics. Our first day was Red Day! Our poem we learned was: “Red is an apple. Red is a rose. Red is the color of my icy frozen nose!”  and our color monster said, “Red, Red, forgot his head!”

Red Day

We also use literature to go with each color. We read the story The Little Red Hen and did a sequencing activity about the story events. After reading The Little Red Hen we read The Little Red Hen Makes Pizza and did a Venn Diagram to compare and contrast the 2 stories.

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We finished our red day with a favorite character “Clifford”! We also made these cute Clifford puppets.

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Blue Day

We started our blue day with our blue color monster: “Blue, blue, is sick with flu!” and our poem: “Blue is the ocean. Blue are my eyes. Blue is the sky where the lonely eagle flies.'” We read a classic story to go with our blue day, Blueberries for Sal. We then did a story map showing the story details of who? what? and where? After reading the story we did some blueberry counting and worked on ordering numbers 1-10 playing a game with our number cards.

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We finished the day with a fun story called Dear Mr. Blueberry about a girl that writes letters to her teacher about the whale she finds in her pond. We then made these cute whales to go with the story.

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Yellow Day

Yellow, Yellow, sat in jello! That was the start to our color day with the monster poem we colored and then learned our yellow poem: “Yellow is a lemon. Yellow is a star. Yellow is the sun in the sky so far!” Our literature for yellow day was Gus the Bus. We learned about a bus that got new tires and didn’t act himself and got into trouble. We also read the story Dandelion and learned the lesson to always be yourself. We did 2 art jobs to go with these stories. We made these cute buses and they did some descriptive writing about writing on a bus to school. I was quite impressed with their writing skills already!

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Here are the cute “Dandelion” puppets we also made. We have some creative kids in our class!

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Green, green is a dancing queen!” and our green poem is “Green is the grass under both my feet. Green is the broccoli my mother makes me eat!”

Green Day

After learning our 3 primary colors of red, blue, and yellow we introduced the color green with two fun stories. Our first story we read was The Aminal…about a little boy named Patrick that is playing outside and he finds an “aminal”. He tells all of his friends about finding the “aminal” and they all start to imagine what the “aminal” could really be. As a class we did some predicting what the “aminal” was by the clues given in the story. Then we drew what we thought the “aminal” was. At the end we find out that the “aminal” is actually a small round turtle!

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Our final story was Little Blue and Little Yellow about two color friends that love to play together and they were so happy to see each other one day that they “hugged” and they turned green! We used this story as an art lesson of how the 3 primary colors make our secondary colors. We had a lot of fun using “little red, little blue, and little yellow” to mix and make the colors. We used frosting to do this activity. It was a BIG hit and yummy to eat with our “aminal” crackers.

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