K is for Kindness and the Animal Kingdom!

Well we finished up a very successful K week this week. Snow White really enjoyed our study of the Animal Kingdom which I had only planned on doing for 2 days but we spent 4 days on it! We began by reading the book "What is the Animal Kingdom?" By Bobbie Kalman. It was FULL of great facts and most of it was just at her level. Even Flower Picker joined in which she doesn't often do!

We talked about invertebrates and vertebrates and the different types of animals in each group. We then made a book for each group. The invertebrate book has pages for worms, arthropods, mollusks and simple animals (such as algae and amoebas). The book for the vertebrates group has birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish and mammals. We talked about what made each of these sub groups different from the others and Snow White drew and traced pictures of the animals in each category.



I got the idea for this type of book from Dinah Zikes Big Book of Books. I got this book when I was teaching and used it all the time in my classroom and I was excited to pull it out and begin to use it again! The link will take you to her web site so you can see her other products as well. You can see in this picture that underneath each tab has a place to add pictures or facts.



I was happy that the unit went over so well!

We also talked about Kindness this week. Snow White made a Kindness book (the format for making this book is also from Dinah Zikes book!)She drew pictures of ways to show kindness and I helped her to label them.



She and Flower Picker each colored a Kindness page that I got from Pondered in My Heart. We have been using one for each week and each of the girls have a binder with their virtue alphabet in it!



Finally our K week author was Ezra Jack Keats. We read several of his books including, Dreams, Hi Cat, Maggie and the Pirates, The Snowy Day and Peters Chair.



In the past we have also read Pet Show and Whistle for Wille. The girls were excited to see that some of the characters are in several of the books!



In addition to our K week activities we celebrated the feast of the Epiphany which I posted about a few days ago, Snow White is 2 pages from completing her 1st grade HWT handwriting book, we continued to add words to the her spelling notebook following the Writing Road to Reading, we worked on subtraction, the quadrilateral drawer from our geometric cabinet



reviewed fractions, and almost finished learning the poem "My Shadow" by Robert Louis Stevenson. Overall this was one of our most productive school weeks! See you for L week....L is for Landforms, Length and Love!

Katie