Five for Friday: Turtles, Buckets, and Writing. Oh my!

I am linking up with Kacey over at Doodle Bugs Teaching with my five!

1

I have been working with my students on the "turtle."  This strategy originated from PATHS but I have seen adapted versions around the internet.  When students get angry, sad, or extremely upset, they are to stop, pull their body inward, breathe deeply until they can can calmly state their feelings and the problem. After this, they can work on problem solving.

2

I really wanted to have the students make buckets and write bucket fillers to each other.  Even though some students cannot write, I will take down the message for them. They can add a picture and their name.

3

It took us several days to discuss the scenarios and really think about why these actions were nice or not nice. 

4

100th day

Rather than ask parents to bring in 100 items for the children to glue, I provided the children with a hundreds chart and fruit loops.  This way I could ensure that we would be working with items that would stay glued down.  Last year, we had feathers, straws, and tiny beans brought in.  These materials did not work at all. We also had these very cute capes from Really Good Stuff.

ORDER HERE

5

I just received my Kindergarten Handwriting Without Tears Teacher's Guide. I am so excited! If you have a guide, you can get started right away even if you don't every thing they reference in it.

These are the Capital letter and Mat Man pieces.  They are available as a reference on the website when you enter the code on your teacher's guide. I printed 14 copies on color card stock and cut them out.  This gave me plenty of pieces to work with. 

You need to provide a mat of some kind with a starting point in the left hand corner.  Students will need this when using the pieces to make letters.  If you don't give them one, they will build the letters backward.

This gray block paper was created by homeschoolcreations.com

This is our first mat man, which uses the same mat and pieces as the letters. We just needed to find hands, hair, eyes, a nose and a belly button.

Here is a picture one of the students drew of him after the activity.  The purpose of this is to create body awareness in student drawings.  (Remember all the drawings of heads with the arms and legs sticking out.)

This is our revised mat man. He has a neck because one of the children pointed out that he needed  one.

I used this rectangle stamp to create the writing blocks on white paper.  Then we worked on writing numbers.  If you can find one of these it could be very handy.  I also used it to stamp out the blocks for a child to learn to write his name in capitals. 

Here is the wet dry try activity using some 4x6 inch chalkboards from Hobby Lobby.

If you find these activities interesting, you should visit the Handwriting without Tears website.  They have lots of videos and information.