It has been a busy holiday season in Kindergarten!
We began the holiday learning by investigating one of Santa's favorite animals--reindeer! First, we talked about two very different types of reindeer. There are magical reindeer, the kind that Santa has to keep up with at the North Pole. (You can always read Rudolph or the Wild Christmas Reindeer by Jan Brett to find out more about this type of reindeer.) Then, there are real reindeer, the animals that live in the wild in the Arctic. We used e-readers and other on-line sources to find out more about real reindeer, and we found lots of interesting and new to us facts about these special animals.
We used this new information and these interesting facts to create some informational reindeer books of our own. We practiced creating telling sentences that would help our readers learn more about real reindeer. We looked for information that our readers would find important or interesting, compiled our pages, and created some unique art work for our covers.
After leaving our reindeer work, we began reading and talking about a beloved holiday fiction--the Gingerbread Man! We used this opportunity to talk about the difference between real and make believe stories and to begin talking about story elements, especially problem and solution.
Sadly we found that there was no solution in the original Gingerbread Man--EEKS! So, we didn't stop there. We kept reading and looking for gingerbread man type stories that would give us that solution we were looking for in the first story. We read about a Gingerbread Baby, a Gingerbread Girl, Gingerbread Friends, a Gingerbread Christmas, and even a few animal crackers, all the time looking for and comparing characters, problems, and solutions.
After looking at how Jan Brett (Gingerbread Baby, Gingerbread Friends, Gingerbread Christmas) and Lisa Ernst (Gingerbread Girl, The Gingerbread Girl Goes Animal Crackers) created their stories, we were ready to create some stories of our own.
We began by planning our story part by part--characters and setting, problem, and solution. Next, we were ready to create our stories page by page. Just like the authors we studied, we created gingerbread men and babies and girls. We even had a gingerbread man construction worker or two! And there were lots of problems like foxes and zombies and yetis--oh my! Luckily we also had lots of solutions--not too many gingerbread characters were eaten up in these stories! The only thing left to do was create a fabulous cover for our books!
After completing such wonderful books, we went on the search for a larger audience to share our work--it was time for a Publishing Party. We invited Mr. McCullers, Dr. Brown, Ms. Benko (who missed it because she was sick), and Ms. Bliss to come listen to us share our work.
And because they were so kind to come share in our work, and because you can't read about all that gingerbread without becoming hungry for some, we measured and mixed and rolled and cut some edible gingerbread men of our own! Luckily we had no escapees!
There was also some other holiday fun sprinkled through out--we created ornaments for our Christmas tree, poinsettias for our Kindergarten tree, and Santa Claus calendars for you to use at home. We even engineered a boat to help the gingerbread man get across the river--so he doesn't have to depend on that sly fox.
Finally there was the celebration! We kicked things off with a school wide sing along and finished the day with a party!
