The Biggest, Best Snowman!!

We are currently learning about fiction story structure; specifically beginning, middle, and end. I was inspired by a Pinterest post and did this lesson with my kiddos yesterday! 

We read the cutest book, "The Biggest, Best Snowman" by Margery Cuyler. 

It's a great book about a little girl who is told by everyone around her that she is too small to accomplish anything but, with the help of her animal friends, she is able to build the biggest, best snowman and prove her family wrong.

As we were reading, I stopped at various parts of the story and had students turn and talk, then share out. We had already learned about Set-It-Up (characters and setting) and Mix-It-Up (problem), so we added those elements to our poster, but we were really focusing on beginning, middle, and end. This is how our poster turned out. Those details are right from the kiddos sharing, aren't they great! One day I will share about how we partner talk and share out in my classroom. I learned the strategy from another teacher at the beginning of the year and was so impressed! Of course everyone has heard of partner talk and sharing out, but they way this other teacher did it was just so fabulous! But that's another day :)

After our mini-lesson with this great mentor text, students went out and made beginning, middle, and end snowman graphic organizers in their reading response journals. Of course I don't have pictures of their work. I totally forgot but will add them sometime this week. Happy Day!

Coin Counting Snowman Craftivity

I LOVE craftivities!! They are fun, keep students engaged, and usually turn out oh so cute! Here is a craftivity that I created this year. There are no templates, but it is easy-peasy to implement and adorable. 

We have been learning about coin counting for the past two weeks. I wanted a fun way to assess their skill so far so coin counting snowmen it was! 

Kids cut out three circles out of white construction paper. One big, one medium, and one small. Then they got to choose (choice is soooo important for kiddos) how many coins to put on their snowman. Of course the dimes had to go on the biggest circle because dimes have the most value, nickels in the middle, and pennies on top. Luckily our math curriculum came with these little paper coin manipulatives, but you could always just print pictures of coins off the internet too. Once they glued their coins, they had to find the value of each circle as well as the value on the whole snowman. After I checked that their math was correct, they could add arms and other details like bows and buttons. Some kids got really creative, even using pennies to make eyes and smiles. Happy day!