Gingerbread Poems and Thinking Maps

This post will share with you some of the gingerbread things

I plan to do this week with my students this week. 

Gingerbread poems for shared reading time this week.

Click here for Poems
Click here for Poems 

Reading Gingerbread Books 

 Gingerbread Thinking Maps

On this Bubble Map students will brainstorm adjectives to describe the gingerbread boy and the gingerbread girl. Students will write a sentence about the gingerbread boy or girl at the bottom of the page. I plan to make one at a large group time with the class first before I send them off to do this on their own. 

 

Click Here for download 

Double Bubble Thinking Map

I plan to compare different versions of this book using a Double Bubble. The download has a blank template. 

Click Here 

Kevin Henkes Bubble Maps

Here are some Bubble Maps we made for Kevin Henkes characters.

If you love Kevin Henkes like we do, you can find some other blog posts here:

Making movie trailers with Kevin Henke's books 

Writing Nonfiction Personal Narratives

I have shared a few lessons this week about writing nonfiction personal narratives with my class. 

I assigned students a classmate to write about. We used a Flow Map to interview our friends right here. We drew pictures from the information we gathered into the flow map. 

Next, we started our stories below.
This is the template I gave students.

here for download

Revising and Editing Their Work
At the end of the writing time, I would have a few students share. I would say ALL of them wrote. 

Child: First, Mary eats her breakfast.
Teacher: I would say, "What did Mary eat for breakfast?" 
Child: She had cereal.
Teacher: You need to find out what kind of cereal. Readers can make a better picture in their mind if you give specific information. 

Here is our anchor chart this lesson below.

Here is a sample of a Day in the Life of... simplebooklet.com

Thinking Maps Thursday

Today I am going to share with you some Thinking Maps we are working on in kindergarten. 


In math, today I gave the students a Brace Map with the number 5. They had to draw some red leaves and yellow leaves. They had to have five altogether.

Bridge Map

We went back to a Bridge Map to show Phonemic relationships. We worked on this Thinking Map for many days.

 On the white board, I wrote the letters of the alphabet. We came up with fall words (that we are still working on). I read the Dr. Seuss book. 

We went back to our alphabet words and tried to add another word with the same beginning sound. 

 We attempted to make the words connect to fall and make sense.  We are still  working on some letters. I went to the first-grade classroom to see if they could help us.

 The kids outlined with a sharpie and colored in with a crayon or colored pencil. They had to shade the background. 

Math Notebooks 

Circle Map for Ways to Make 5

 Our Favorite October Books

 The students worked together in small groups. They had to record the characters and events that happened in the story. Before sending students off, we took a picture walk of each story.

Thinking Maps Thursday

This post will share two different ways I used Thinking Maps in my class this week. Below is a class bulletin board that shows all of the Thinking Maps we have learned. 

Using a Flow map to show the steps in writing letters

 I have been on the lookout for a Halloween book loaded with rhyming words, and I found it!! We read the story, One Witch, we illustrated the rhyming words in this story. We learned about the Bridge Map below. 

Tomorrow we plan to read our map and look at the spelling patterns of the rhyming words. There are a few words that rhyme but have different spelling patterns.

 We listed the rhyming words.  

 Students illustrated the picture, and I took a ruler and outlined the sides. I wrote the words on an index card (one small cut in half).

This is VERY long!!

Details

I love how this Bubble map came out! Each week we have a Special Person of the week.  This week Patrick was the Special Person. Making a map with adjectives can be very challenging with kindergartners. We talked about different things we knew about Patrick, and I helped with some of the word choices. 

The goal was to think of describing words.  We worked together to make Patrick with detail. We looked at his hair color, skin color and what he was wearing. I hope to build a bank of words that we can use for the Special Person Bubble map.

Learning About Details

Who Could It Be?

Learning About Details
Who Could It Be?

Creating this Bubble map was a fun way to learn about details.
I modeled this lesson by drawing a child in the audience trying to make as many details as possible. I started by making the skin color and hair color. The students thought about who it could be by the clues given.

I could be drawing with short dark hair. Next I made the shirt. I picked a child with a stripped shirt that stood out. The class got the idea that you want the picture to look like the person. At Daily 5 time, this was a  writing choice. I let students pick anyone in the class to do. On a different day, I whispered a classmate's name that they had to do. We also did this with a partner.


I plan to keep doing this lesson because I can see that the more they do it, the better the pictures are coming out. The kids LOVE guessing who it is too!! My next move is to give the students objects in our classroom. You can get the template below.

click here for sheet