I Love Chocolate

I am so excited!  I got to be a guest blogger today at Kreative in Kinder.  Crystal has wonderful kindergarten ideas to share so be sure to hop on over to her blog and check it out! 

We missed two days of school this week due to snow and missed our Valentine's Day parties.  :(  But we got to make up for that today!  Last week to get ready for Valentine's, we did a whole unit on a poem called I Love Chocolate.  Who doesn't love chocolate and especially around Valentine's Day??   First we practiced reading this short fun poem.  It has some of our sight words in it and we also found rhymes. 

Another fun activity that we like to do with poems is writing them on sentence strips and rebuilding them on the pocket chart.  Students can use the chart to help them rebuild the poem if they need to.  Then as they get more practice at it, you can then have them rebuild the poem with individual word cards.  I like for activities to be multi-leveled and differentiated so all students can succeed.

After having learned our poem, we made it individual by taking out the word chocolate and putting in a food that we like.  We colored a person cut out to look like us and put the food in our "tum".  The kids got very stylish and some even drew on earrings and necklaces.  This little one's favorite food is broccoli!!  I just adore that she picked that food!

Our miniature books of this poem and the individualized miniature books will go into our familiar read baskets so we can continue to enjoy reading them. 

Do your students enjoy the books they make even more than the regular books you place in the baskets? So much fun to see them enjoy their work and watch them read. It's what it's all about!! :)