Integrating Spring

"Hopper Hunts for Spring" Book Cover

I'd like to start by thanking Linda at Primary Inspiration for hosting her Primary Math Linky Party.  What a terrific idea!  My contribution to the linky party is this integrated post featuring several freebies including addition bunnies.

I love using the book Hopper Hunts for Spring because it can tie in math, science, language arts, and writing all in one beautiful spring package.  The story itself focuses on a young bunny's confusion about who "Spring" is.  I think this book is fabulous for starting discussions with your class about the spring season.  I try really hard to encourage higher-level thinking by asking open-ended questions such as "What do you think Hopper is thinking?", "What kinds of things do you like to do in the spring?", and "What would you see, hear, smell, and taste in the spring if you were a bunny?".

For writing and art, I'm going to have my students use these differentiated spring cut-up sentences that they can also illustrate.

Spring Sentence Worksheets With Drawing by Sharon A Blachowicz Dudley

I've taken a few classes this year that say it's really important to use sentence starters for ESOL children.  Since my class is almost entirely ESOL, I've really embraced sentence starters throughout this school year.  Here is an example of one of them, with a picture word bank.

Spring Writing Prompt by Sharon A Blachowicz Dudley


Even though Common Core has taken time and money out of kindergarten, I still think that a short calendar time is important.  I still use my calendar and I use different songs to represent special times of the year.  Some songs that I will use in April are:

"Five Little Bunnies" by Mar Harmon
"5 Little Bunnies" by Joanie Calem
"Celebrate the Spring" by Jack Hartmann
"It's Spring" by Tiana

I feel that my children focus much better when we sing and dance to bring us all together on the carpet and to transition between subjects.  I think all four of these songs give details about spring that some five-year-olds aren't yet familiar with.  They also provide a nice baseline to make connections between the book, what they're writing about, and what they're hearing.  The bunny songs are nice fingerplays for those students who still don't have one-to-one correspondence - I still have two in my kindergarten class who are having trouble with this.  It's still good for the other children in my class because they can focus on the rhyming parts of the song.

I'm going to cut up these addition bunnies, laminate them, and put them in my math center for further practice.  My children are going to use manipulatives of their choice from the center to check their answers.

Addition Bunnies by Sharon A Blachowicz Dudley

Please let me know which ideas you like from this post.  Your feedback really helps me to decide what to write about next.

Autumn Activities

I can't believe it's October 1st!  Fall is my favorite season, and I think it's really important to celebrate the change of the seasons with my students.  So I read all of the books in the carousel above, plus Fall, Leaves, Fall which is a great large-size book, but Amazon did not have a picture of it.  I want to share what I did for Leaf Man, because some of my children who normally don't like to do seat work were really motivated by this activity.  We read Leaf Man, of course.  Then I had little pieces of paper cut out in red, yellow, orange, green and brown so that the students could make their own leaf man pictures.  I hung the originals in the hallway, but I also wanted to make a class book so that students could practice reading the sentence frame "My leaf man is a ______," and so that they could see their own writing.  If you're interested, take a peek:
Our Leaf Man Book

I've been working a lot on math plans lately, to match the Common Core standards.  I came up with this idea to have the children count leaves, identify numerals, and then color the squares on the ten frames.  Since Common Core wants us to recognize up to 20, I made twenty different Velcro spots for leaves, and 20 different numeral cards.  There are also two ten-frames on the tree so that children can color the appropriate amount of squares up to 20.

This week, we started working on number lines, so I designed a leaf number line paper to keep with the theme:

Number Fill in the Gap Leaves

I feel that my posts are never complete unless I share some of the songs that I've been using.  There's a fabulous song by Jack Hartmann called "Follow Me to the Apple Tree," which has the kids actively hopping, paddling, skipping, walking, etc. to an apple tree and then picking the apples.  After they pick the apples, they hurry back through the same motions, sort of like the song "Goin' on a Bear Hunt."  I also really like the song "Seasons" by Dr. Jean, because the kids can easily picture different activities for each of the four seasons.  Both of these songs go really nicely if you're discussing and making connections between the books and the real world.

I also recently put up Four Seasons Writing Folders on TPT, and I think they could be really useful in any writing center throughout the year, especially when you're focusing on seasons.

Season Songs

This post was inspired by one of my favorite kindergarten teacher friends, who is working on a unit for seasons.  These three songs are excellent for learning about what people do during each season, what they wear, and what the season looks like.

I like all of these songs for different reasons.  "The Four Seasons" by Newbridge Songs For Learning is really nice because the children repeat after you, and it can be used very simply with gestures that are obvious when you listen to the song.

"If You Know All The Seasons" by Kidzup Music is sung to the tune of "If You're Happy And You Know It."  The children are very active during this song, and I particulary like music where the students are standing up and moving.

"Seasons" by Dr. Jean is packed with facts about each season.  I remember on one of my tests about the seasons in kindergarten, one of my students started singing this Dr. Jean song quietly to herself to help her with one of the questions (and she got the right answer!).

Here is a graphic organizer that I used in kindergarten to assess whether the children had a basic concept of what each season looks like:

Season Graphic Organizer

Great songs to use in the winter

Currently I'm working on a theme called "Weather & Seasons."  I didn't choose this theme - it's part of the pre-k curriculum chosen by my county.  I've been trying desperately to find concrete activities that my students could participate in, to help them understand what they would experience during the different seasons.  These two snowflake songs are excellent for getting little ones up and moving while learning about weather, natural phenomena, personal space, and how to move in a creative fashion:


"Swirl, Twirl, Melt and Pop Up" by Kate Kuper and Neal Robinson
"Snowflake Dance" by Surie Levilev

A friend, who is a performer herself, found out that I really wanted white dance scarves.  I've searched the internet for two years trying to find such a product.  I can't say how pleased I was when my friend presented me with a bag of them!  The children use the scarves to represent snowflakes, and it really allows them to feel the lightness and delicacy of how a snowflake would move.  It often seems to me that if young children are given completely open-ended time for dancing, they become slightly wild.  I have observed that the scarves allows children to exercise their creativity but also gives them an object to focus on so they do not get out of control.