Literacy, Art, and Shapes - Oh My!

As you may recall, we recently read the book The Legend of Spookley the Square Pumpkin by Joe Toriano. At the end of the story, the farmer finds that Spookley was an unusually special pumpkin who not only saved his pumpkin patch, but was a new wonderful shape - square! The farm then decides to plant Spookley's seeds the next year and ends up with a pumpkin patch that is nothing short of amazing with many different shaped and colored pumpkins from triangular pumpkins to rainbow colored pumpkins. (CCSS RL.K.10) To practice identifying our shapes, we chose one shape to trace and create our own special Spookley pumpkin (CCSS K.G.A.2, K.G.A.3) and identified our shape by writing the correct shape word on our papers. 

Students chose their shapes!

And were asked to write the shape word on their paper that says "My pumpkin is a ______"

The best part of our activity? Using oil pastels to color and decorate our pumpkins!

The students had so much fun decorating their pumpkin shapes in all different ways.

Here are some of our finished products!

Here is our pumpkin patch! The students did amazing work!

Spookley Story Retelling

One of our goals in kindergarten is to have each student be able to retell a story using these five areas:
*What is the setting?
*Who are the characters?
*What happening in the beginning/middle/end of the story?
*What was the problem in the story?
*What was the solution?
(RL.K.2 and RL.K.3)

This week, we read the book Spookley the Square Pumpkin by Joe Troiano. We discussed the story using our above questions. The students worked together in small groups on one of the above areas of story retelling. Right now, we're focusing on characters, setting, problem and solution.

The students worked together to draw pictures for their part of the story retelling.

We talked about adding the right type of details to their drawings - like making sure they only added the farm, scarecrow and pumpkin patch to the setting drawing.

The groups worked really well together to create their drawings.

The characters were...the farmer, Spookley and the pumpkins.

The setting was the farm.

The problem in the story was that there was a storm that blew a hole in the fence and the pumpkins were rolling out into the sea!

But in the end (or the solution to the story), Spookley the Square Pumpkin saved the day by plugging up the whole in the fence. The farmer was so impressed by Spookley's square shape saving the day, he planted seeds the next year that turned out to be all different shapes, sizes and colors!

Go Away Big Green Monster!

Today we read the book, Go Away Big Green Monster!, by Ed Emberley and discussed how the author carefully chose his descriptive words like sharp, squiggly, and scraggly. We talked about how those descriptive words add lots of details to the story.

The students created their own Big Green Monsters and wrote about their favorite part of their monster using descriptive or color words.

I hope that you can find your student's Big Green Monster in the photos below and ask them to tell you about what they chose to write about. Then, I'd love for you and your student to comment back to me about what they liked best about their monster!

The students loved creating their Big Green Monsters!

Here are the final products! Try to find your student's Big Green Monster!

Have you found yours yet?

Tomorrow's Field Trip

Hello parents!

I've been trying to check our email to be sure that you all know our field trip for tomorrow has been postponed, but the email server is still down. I'm hoping that most of you will have received Mrs. Costa's email, but wanted to be doubly sure you all knew!

Our email should be up and running by tomorrow morning, so please feel free to email me with any questions about the rain date for next Thursday.

Thank you and have a wonderful evening!

Mrs. I.