Five for Friday: April 29

Hi everyone!

I'm back today to link up with Kacey at Doodle Bugs Teaching for Five for Friday and share 5 things from my week.

1. Earth Day Art

My teammate shared this awesome idea with us and the kids loved it! To tie in with the reduce-reuse-recycle vocabulary we have been talking about in connection to Earth Day, we used old dried up markers and put them tip down in cups with water in them and left them overnight.  This gave us beautiful water colour paints! (Reducing by not buying paints and instead making them out of something we already have!)

Then we used the paint on newspaper to reduce the amount of copy paper we are using too.  We haven't had painting out much this year so the kids have been loving this area!

2. Actual Size Measurement Centre

The book above "Actual Size" by Steve Jenkins was recommended to me at a workshop a couple of weeks ago so I borrowed it from the library and let me tell you it is one of the coolest books I have found recently! 

The book is about animals and has interesting facts about each animal and a picture of the animal on each page.  The best part is the picture is the ACTUAL SIZE of the real animal! The kids had fun looking at the book, comparing sizes etc.  I photocopied a couple of the pictures from the books and set them out with some measuring tools so the kids could practice measuring the different animals.

3. How Tall Are You in Cubes?

This was another big hit.  I saw this a couple weeks ago when I got to visit another Kindergarten classroom in my board.  Every 10 snap cubes is a different colour and is marked with the number (10, 20, 30 etc.) to support skip-counting and counting on.  I also put some sentence starters and hang them beside it to support writing here.

The sign says 

"How Tall Are You in Cubes?"

and the prompts say:

"I am ___ cubes tall."

and

"_____ is _____ cubes tall."

(for when they are writing about a friend's height).

4. My Book of Earth Day Words

I throw these thematic word booklets in the writing centre near holidays and special days to increase their vocabulary and help the students practice spelling and printing.

The kids love them and this Earth Day version was a hit as usual :)

You can grab this mini book in my TPT store by clicking on the image below!

5. Letter/Word Rock Open-Ended Writing Invitation

I got this idea to set out letter and sight word rocks with paper, pencil and letter stamps from a teacher in our district a few weeks ago.  I couldn't find anywhere to buy wood slabs around me and didn't want to bother cutting and treating real wood myself (I'm not very handy if you couldn't tell.. lol) so I just bought these on eBay.

You can check out the one I bought here.  It comes from Latvia but only took about 10 business days!

I got the rocks from Dollar Tree and used Sharpie paint pens to write the sight words and letters on them.

I was happily surprised to see kids of all literacy abilities enjoying this centre.  Some kids just looked and matched and stamped letters, some kids made sight words, some kids wrote them down etc.

I'm looking forward to swapping out the alphabet elements weekly and keeping this centre around for the month of May!

That's it from me this week!

Click on the image below to link up with Kacey too or share your Five for Friday in the comments below!