Five for Friday - Native Americans

I am so happy it is Friday and time for another wonderful Five for Friday from Doodle Bugs Teaching!

 This week began our first ever grade level Project Based Learning unit on Thanksgiving. 

 This week we began our unit with our essential question: Is it better to be a kid today; or, a kid during the time of the first Thanksgiving long ago? I then asked who they thought participated in the first Thanksgiving. I was shocked that they had NO clue. So I turned to my trusty friend Discovery Education and found an image and a short video clip about the first Thanksgiving. 

Answers in green were from before watching the clip, answers in red were after.

We then made our schema chart about Native Americans. Before showing them the chart I asked what they knew about Native Americans. I was very worried when no one had anything to say until I showed them the chart and they made the connection that Native Americans are Indians. So the first thing they added to the chart was that Native Americans were called Indians. 

Native American Legends

There are so so so many amazing Native American legends that it was really hard to narrow it down to two. In the end I went with the projects I liked the most! 

We watched The Legend of the Indian Paintbrush on Discovery Education and made these cute Native American vase and flowers.

We also read Arrow to the Sun and made dream catchers.

Here are links to the books on Amazon if you are interested. 

Part of a PBL is to have driving questions that you ask to drive your instruction. We decided to focus on four main parts of Native American and Pilgrim life. Homes, Transportation/Communication, Food, and clothing. Here are two of our driving questions and how we worked to answer them.

Driving Question for homes – How can we, as illustrators, draw a picture that shows the types of homes Native Americans lived in at the time of the first Thanksgiving compared to the types of homes people live in today? 

One of my Kindergarten team members made a really great and basic Promethean flipchart about Native American homes. They could not believe that all Native Americans did not live in teepees! We did make teepees from cone shaped water cups - I forgot to take a picture before sending them home but there are pictures from my other classes at the bottom of this post.

Driving Question for transportation – How did Native Americans travel from one place to another compared to the types of transportation we use today?

We looked at many different and images (from DE of course) about different methods of transportation Native Americans used. We made a venn to compare means of transportation from today with means of transportation from the time of the first Thanksgiving. And because we love art projects, we made these really cute canoes - and kiddos!

 Here are some of the cute projects my amazing teacher friends did with their classes!

Have any of you ever taught a PBL unit in Kindergarten? I would love to see your examples!!!!

Leave a comment and head over to check out more Five for Friday posts at Doodle Bugs Teaching.

Five for Friday

Here we are again! Another Five for Friday with Doodle Bugs Teaching and another week closer to Thanksgiving and Christmas. Time is flying by this year. I know I sure have been busy with starting a TPT store and starting this blog. I have also been working on implementing my AMSTI (Alabama Math, Science, and Technology Initiative) training into my curriculum. This has meant a lot of video and audio recordings of my teaching and my students learning. So for #1...

AMSTI Math

 Roll and Record
Working on one to one correspondence, subtilizing, writing numbers, counting, composing numbers and more!!

Pattern Block Scarecrows

 Build It - number recognition, counting, composing numbers, ten frames

I have loved using the Terc Investigations math series along with my AMSTI training. It is all about being hands on and the kids taking ownership of their learning. We have learned a lot of different math games and the kiddos don't even realize how much learning is going on. 

AMSTI Science

Weather Unit: Thermometers & Temperature

Math and Science have always been my favorite subjects! So being able to get AMSTI science kits this year has been a dream come true. I was amazed at the learning that went on in my class during our weather kit. The work my kiddos did with thermometers blew my mind! Using talk moves during my lessons has made a huge difference. I was astounded to watch them work together sharing ideas until they figured out what a thermometer was and what it did. 

 My Last Post About Mamma Mia (at least for a year)!

WE WON!!! We took home first place in our food category and we were part of a three way tie for overall Mamma Mia Spirit!

 The theme for the entire night was Rificolona - a Paper Lantern Festival in Florence Italy where farmers and peasants sold their goods.

 Under the Tuscan Moon
Our team took that theme and ran with it! We decorated our booth as a booth at a 17th Century farmer's market and dressed the part! We cook Tuscan Pasta and Chickpea Soup and made Caprese salad bites (displayed on a head of lettuce).

Luckily we live in south Alabama where there are a lot of farming families! One of our teammates found the wagon, butter churn, and even an old scale (not in the picture) in her in-laws barn! 

 iCurio + Discovery Education = Learning in the Digital Renaissance

I know I have mentioned Discovery Education here before and shared with you how absolutely fabulous a resource it has been for me. If you don't know about DE check it out here! It has an array of wonderful multimedia resources and lessons.

Another great resource has been iCurio. This is another subscription site that our county has purchased for us. It is amazing. It is a resource where you can gather multimedia rich content aligned to both state and common core standards. From their website:

• Over 330,000 digital resources for all K-12 curriculum areas aligned with state and Common Core standards.
• Supports the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework.
• Flexible, dynamic content can easily be targeted to differentiate instruction for all students.
• Address learning outcomes for every class, every lesson, every student.
• Improve student engagement with videos, text, learning games, images, simulations, and more.

As a Kindergarten teacher and being new to this site, I use it to plan my lessons. There are links to amazing resources for everything. You can even save pages you find and share them with your grade level, school, or district. This week I found an entire unit on Pilgrims. We started with a Pilgrim scheme sheet (they love learning "5th grade" words), made a list of things we would pack if we moved to a new home, sorted those items into what the pilgrims could have brought on the Mayflower, and wrote about what it would have been like on the Mayflower. We are also going to create an ONLINE venn diagram comparing pilgrim children and children today. Next week we will focus on the first Thanksgiving. 

Click on Picture to visit ReadWriteThink.org to create your own online venn!

 On a personal note:

I LOVE Christmas. Christmas is my favorite holiday. I love everything about Christmas!!!!! I love the wonderful church services reminding us of the Reason for The Season. I love the time spent with my family and friends. I love buying presents, especially for my two beautiful nieces. And I am absolutely giddy just thinking about decorating my home and classroom. I have a tradition, the day after Thanksgiving or that weekend, Christmas music plays, hot chocolate is drank, and the house is trimmed out in red and green!  I cannot wait for our class elf to arrive when we get back from Thanksgiving Break. I say all of this so you know I am not a scrooge when I say: Christmas in October and November has gone too far! What is going on????  In October,  I was looking for Halloween decorations but I couldn't find them for all the Christmas decorations. I lost most of my Thanksgiving decorations in a horrible attic accident (pic below) and could not find replacements because Christmas had invaded all of the shelves. I just think each holiday should be given the appropriate attention and not be used as a marketing tool. Each holiday has a special meaning to someone and should not be overlooked just to make a few extra dollars. 

Exiting soap box now! 

What have you been up to this week? Any great Thanksgiving or multimedia lessons to share?

Link up with Doodle Bugs Teaching and share!

Five for Friday!

 Wooo Hooo! It is finally Friday! I am linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching to share 5 random things from my week!

 This week we began talking about Thanksgiving. To begin our unit we made a KWL chart.
I was surprised by what the kiddos did and did not know. I love to see how their minds work.

 Directed art alert!!! If you have read my previous posts, you probably have realized that I LOVE directed art. When planning this lesson on Native Americans I worried the kids would not be happy to be doing directed art again.  However, when I started the lesson Thursday, one of my kids said, "Oh wow! I love directed art. I wondered when we were going to do that again." The rest of my class seemed to concur which is good because there is still a lot more directed art in their future! We did two different activities. First Native Americans using our fingers.

Then we read the book 10 Fat Turkeys and learned how to draw a turkey using directed art. We then decomposed the number 10. We put some turkeys on the fence and some turkeys on the ground. This was a lot of fun and they did really well! You can pick up my writing template for free here!

 Mamma Mia Cook Off is tomorrow!!! A few of the team members and their spouses are coming to my house tonight to begin cooking our soup. We are going to cook some extra for our dinner to taste test and to take to share with the faculty on Monday. I am excited to have some grown up time with my teacher friends I never get to see!

 Because Mamma Mia is tomorrow, I made aprons and bandanas for a few of us. I have not sewn in a while, but I think they turned out cute. We are dressing as 18th century Italian farmers! I will have to add pictures after tomorrow night!

The Mr. and I have been trying to be a little healthier lately so I have been trying to cook dinner every night and have leftovers for lunches. I have been using Rachel Ray's cookbook, Just In Time. We have had some amazing dinners this week and I have not spent a lot of time in the kitchen. Our favorite was Hoppin' John Soup with rice!! We have had 3 meals from this book this week and they have been excellent! If you are looking for a good cookbook with fast easy dinners, check this out.

This has been a crazy busy week and tomorrow is going to be more of the same but I know it is going to be a lot of fun! What crazy fun things have you done this week? Link up with Doodle Bugs Teaching  or comment below and let us know!