Ms. Kerri's Busy Kindergarten was sooo busy this week!

For a four day week, we packed a lot in. I'm not even sure how we had time to do all we did. In our reading series, we read the book Duck on a Bike by David Shannon. I love this book and so did my kids. We read it Monday and Tuesday and practice retelling. This was the first time we've done retelling with partners. I was really proud of how well they did. I modeled it using the document camera and one of the students helped me. We then wrote our own sentences about other vehicles duck could be on and the sentence I see duck on a __________.

Here are some of the student's work. (I remembered to take pictures this week.)

We continued with our David Shannon author study by reading No, David and David Goes to School. Then we talked about character and did a character map of David. Mostly my students came up with all the negative behaviors of David and decided that they didn't want to be like David at all. I had planned on having them draw their own pictures of David and writing a sentence to describe his character but we just ran out of time.

Here's our chart we made. My drawing skills are definitely improving. :)

Inspired by the mentors, Fran at Kindergarten Crayons is doing in her class, I talked to one of my friends in fourth grade. She and I decided to give it a try. So Wednesday was our first try at reading buddies. They came in to read to my kids and then my students picked a book that they wanted to read. It was really neat because several of the fourth graders were students from my first loop. It was so cool to see how far they've come with their reading. My first loop, I had a Hispanic girl who really didn't make a ton of progress but most of it was due to language issues. She's super sweet and she's always come back and told me how she was doing. Well I have a student this year who reminds me of this former student. They were paired up together and it was so neat to see my former student teaching. To me it was definitely worth the effort. I'm hoping that my fourth grade teacher friend thought the same thing. We haven't had a chance to talk about it and where we see it going.

I had originally planned on reading the book Alice the Fairy by David Shannon and comparing the characters but I decided at the last minute (Wednesday afternoon) to do some Veteran's Day activities. I bought Kim Adsit's pack and went to town planning some activities for Thursday since we had inservice on Friday. I couldn't find any books for such a short notice but I did find a video on United Streaming that did the job. We watched that and talked a little bit about the military and Veteran's day. Then we labeled a hero, did a brace map on the American Flag and made our own flag. I had planned to have the kids write thank you letters and to do a tree map about soldiers. But we had a program and ran out of time. I'm still going to have them write thank you notes and draw pictures. The teacher next door to me has 4 daughters and 2 are serving overseas and 1 just recently got out of the military. She plans to send a package to her daughter in Kuwait and we're going to send our letters with her. If you haven't checked out Kim Adsit's packet, you should. It was well worth the $4 or so that I spent. I still have a few activities I want to do this week with them. The ordinal numbers and spinner activity look good. We'll see if I can find time to do them. We're also starting our farm unit this week. It fits well with our reading series theme for the week about food and where it comes from. I bought DeAnna Jump's unit and I'm super excited about doing some of the activities.

We were very busy this week and I don't see it slowing down anytime soon. I haven't even thought about what Thanksgiving activities I want to do. There are so many good ideas out there and packs I'm interested in. I don't even know where to start. What's your got to do Thanksgiving activity you're planning? Maybe that will give me some ideas.