Farm Animals! (I, 6, Heart)

Sorry I'm a little behind on posts, life has a tendency of getting in the way every once and a while. =]

Our theme for the first week of November was "Farm Animals" and we focused on the letter Ii, the number 6 the heart shape.

We read this week: Humphrey's Farm Adventure by Igloo Books
                               Duck for President by Doreen Cronin
                               Little Oink by Amy Krouse Rosenthal
                               The Very Busy Spider by Eric Carle
                               Barnyard Banter by Denise Fleming

Our question of the week was "What would you grow on your farm?"

For our theme of the week, we danced the chicken dance, sang "Old MacDonald" and pretended to be different farm animals with a game of charades.

I painted a picture of a farm scene with no animals and hung it up on the wall. The kids were all very intrigued as to what we would be doing with it. Well, we turned their hand prints into farm animals. I love this craft. They get to choose what animal they want to make, we paint their hand and with some eyes, ears and a mouth we have a farm animal! The kids and the parents love when this mural is hanging on the wall. =]

We talked a lot this week about the shape heart. To the tune of "I'm a Little Teapot" we sang,

I found it here! 

I drew hearts, triangles and circles and asked the kids to color each shape it's own color. They did a great job with it!

When we worked on our number activities, we practiced writing the number and word for the number 6.

I made these worksheets that reinforces the one to one concept. The kids practice writing the number and have to color a square for each picture that they see. (I forgot to take a picture =[)

For our letter activities, we used our handwriting sheet for the letter Ii from this book,  and the sheet that helps work on letter recognition that I got from this book,  The students also wrote in their journals for the letter I.

We turned an I into an Insect! This book is great.

I found this worksheet that has words with different vowel sounds. The kids have to color the pictures that have the short i sound in them to make the fish. I did this in small groups and gave each child a choice between a word that did or didn't have the short i, then the group would color the short i word that was picked.

We watched a short video that I found of a young boy learning how to make an igloo. The kids really love this one. Then I gave them a blue piece of paper, white squares that I cut out ahead of time and a glues stick. We talked about how the boy built the igloo, how he layered it from the bottom, how it has a door, a curved roof, and then set them free to create their own.

We played a category game and sat in a circle naming different ice cream flavors. Next time I do a category game I'll write down all of the things we come up with so that they can see it.

We practice cutting with "The Insects are In" The kids had to color the insects, cut them out and put them "in" the right container.

For our alphabet wall we made fingerprint insects.

And with the I addition, our wall now looks like...

Here are the words we came up with this week!

We had a special visitor come this week. A local girl scout made display boxes for our school nature trail and came to talk to my class about the different things that we could put in them. She gave us deer bones, tree cookies and we even got to meet a baby box turtle! She talked to us about worms, foxes, chipmunks and different kinds of trees.

Another teacher and I went out to the nature trail the next day and put some of the things she donated in the displays. (We also added some things that we found in the woods :])

Up next week: The letter Jj, the number 7, star and "The Harvest".