Five for Friday - End of a Crazy Week!

I cannot believe it is already Friday! Don't get me wrong, I am not complaining but this week flew by and now we are only one week (and two days) away from Thanksgiving Break! Thank you so much to Kacey at Doodle Bugs Teaching for hosting such a fun way to share!

 Last week we talked about Native Americans and I shared with you some of the cute projects my class and the other K teachers did. However, I left off my favorite project. Our directed art Native Americans. I have done this for years and got it from another teacher friend that has now retired. I am unsure of its origins so if you know, PLEASE let me know where to give the credit!

 This is a directed art lesson my teacher neighbor did, she found it on Learning with Mrs. Parker's Blog.

This week we talked about Pilgrims. We had a lot of fun learning about the Mayflower. We decided we would not have wanted to travel on such a crowded ship for 66 day!

Pilgrim Anchor Chart - in progress

Mayflower Anchor Chart

My across the hall neighbor made this super cute graph!

 Love these directed art pilgrims (also from Learning with Mrs. Parker). I think they turned out super cute!

 Liebster Linky

Have you received a Leibster Award? Would you like to check out some amazing teacher blogs that have?  The super sweet Kathleen Wright from Kidspeople Classroom has created a place to link up with other Liebster Award blogs. Check out the linky {here}!

Thank you Kathleen for doing such a great service to help connect more bloggers and teachers.

On a personal note:

 I just have to take a minute to share what is going on in my personal life. Previously I mentioned that we are selling our house so that we can build a new one. I have been hesitant to say anything on here before for fear of things not working out but I feel led to share. We are getting custody of my beautiful nieces in December!!! My little family of 5 (me, hubs, and 3 fur babies) is growing by two! As much as I love my house and our neighborhood we are going to need more space. I said it before, this is definitely a God thing. Our house has been listed for a little over a week. We had asked our realtor to give us two weeks to spruce things up and get it ready. Well less than 24 hours after we listed the house someone wanted to see it. I was very disappointed when that showing fell through. BUT Tuesday when I was off (and painting a bedroom I should say) we got a call that someone wanted to see the house that day! I had four hours to get my house clean and back together. And although that family picked a different neighborhood, my realtor called the next day to say that she has someone wanting to see the house today. I love how things just keep working themselves out! I am ecstatic! I have never sold a house before so maybe two showing week one is not as great as I think it is but considering we were thinking it would be a much slower start, I couldn't be more pleased. Please continue to pray and/or send positive thoughts our way - every little bit helps!
Also, any house selling tips are appreciated - just leave a comment below!

What has been going on in your classroom / life this week? Leave a comment and head over to Doodle Bugs Teaching to link up and read about other amazing teachers!

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.

Down on the Farm - Five for Friday

I love Five for Friday from Doodle Bugs Teaching and am excited to share with you my five!

Last week again started out amazing. My sweet nieces came down to visit. We went to my school's Fall Festival on Friday night and on Saturday we went to the Shrimp Festival at the beach (We didn't last long. It was way too hot to have forgotten our swimsuits!), and then to Wales West Pumpkin Patch Express in Silverhill. If you live around the Gulf Coast and you have kiddos of your own, Wales West is worth a trip. I found out about this place when we started taking our Kinders  to the Polar Arctic Express at Christmas and fell in love. The Pumpkin Express did not disappoint. The girls loved riding the two different trains and going on a hay ride and horse/pony ride. We all had a great time going through the haunted house to get to pick our pumpkins and decorate them. I just wish it wasn't 90 degrees with 90% humidity in OCTOBER!!!

 This week at school we started wrapping up our farm unit with a lot of directed art! We made pigs, hens, chicks, sheep, and my favorite - cows!

We survived our first skating trip yesterday!

Last Thursday, Friday, and Saturday I spent time with my beautiful friend Haley (and my other bestest friends) as we celebrated Haley's wedding! It was an amazing weekend. Kind of sad it is over. Already missing spending so much time with friends from all over!

 I met the beautiful bride in middle school band. We both played the flute!

What a tough life, drinking coffee, overlooking the gulf in our supper cute matching robes while we get hair and makeup done for the big day!

NOTHING

 So maybe this is cheating on my #5 but it is a big deal to me! I am happy to say after two months of back to back full weekends, the sweet hubby and I are spending a nice quiet weekend cleaning and grocery shopping! Doesn't sound like a ton of fun but not having to be anywhere by any certain until church Sunday is going to be AMAZING!

How are you spending this weekend?

Don't forget to leave some love in the comments and then head over to Doodle Bugs Teaching to see what has been going on in different classrooms across the blogosphere!