February recap

Happy Sunday friends :) I wanted to play catch up and share some things we have been working on for the last few weeks. Lots of pictures and ideas here but stick with me, there's a freebie at the end :)

I'm reaching way back to Valentine's Day first.

On the day AFTER Valentine's Day we had a TON of candy left over that I decided to put to good use. We did Hershey Kiss bingo. We are way past straight up abc bingo at this point but I didn't have any other boards handy so I just called out words and told them to find different sounds "what's the ending sound in cat?"  "what's the middle sound in box" ect.

 Then we moved on to using missing letters in words. They love these kinds of games and it's so good for making them think about the structure of words and where the sounds are.  And who doesn't love a game where you get to eat your bingo markers :)

Some fun with my February math books . For the first one we used MORE kisses to count up the first number and then count on to find the other number to make 10. Stay tuned for more seasonal math books coming soon :)

These kisses were inspired by the fabulous Julie Lee. We decided to add some tin foil on top of the brown paper. I also cut up rectangles of parchment paper and let the kids add their names (make sure you use sharpies or the ink will not stick!) ALSO, I recently discovered the idea of using small circle paper punchers to make white and black circles for eyes instead of googly eyes. OH MY GOODNESS I am obsessed with how cute they are making my crafts! :)

We made these giant Valentine's for our parents. They were HUGE and so fun to make. I have no idea where this idea came from originally.

Moving on to president fun, have I mentioned how much I am in LOVE with Maria Manore's interactive sight word readers?? They are only $1 each and I am still going to go broke in my quest to own them ALL.  The ones about George Washington and Abe Lincoln were perfect for introducing the presidents this week.

Kim Adsit is just brilliant. We have been loving her Presdients Unit. These Washington flap books were so cute and my kids did really really awesome with them :)

Some president fact writing with a directed drawing freebie I found here.

We have been working on base ten concepts with teen numbers. It's so easy to get confused with the difference between writing the teens "1 and 5" and MAKING them "10 and 5".  We used my teen number ten frame practice cards in our whole group lesson every day this week and that really helped them become more fluent with the vocabulary and concepts.  Then I gave the kids all a set of their own ten frames. After years ago our school printed and laminated class sets of these ten frames on different colors. I use these babies all the time, they are great. Each kid got a ten (I made this bigger and a different color than all the other cards to make it easy to distinguish) and then a set of 1-9 ten frames. On their write boards I had them build a teen number, tell me how they made it, and then write the number. It was a great concrete way for them to understand the concept of ten and ____  and the way that is different than the way we write the numbers.

Then we did this president book. Each page needed a number sentence and a set of ten frames. You can grab this freebie by clicking on the picture below. User tip: you MIGHT want to cut up the ten frame and number sentence pages in half (1-5 is on top). Give them 1-5 of ten frames and number sentences and then give them the other numbers. Some of my littles got overwhemled with 2 pages and 20 squares to look at and keep track of :)

Click on the picture to grab this book!

Congrats for making it through all that. Have a great week :)