Hibernation Station

Well everyone, my kinders have officially made it!  They completed eight... EIGHT assessments in two weeks and survived!  It was hard on all of us - my least favorite part of the year is the stress that those assessments put on these little ones.  I know many of you experience this with your students too.  But we powered through and thankfully we finished our unit early so we have the WHOLE week this week to do fun winter/holiday things!

​Today we started off the week by reading Hibernation Station by Michelle Meadows.  For those of you who haven't read this book, it's a cute rhyming story about several different types of animals who hibernate and they use a log as their train to hibernation station!  The kids love it because all of the animals are wearing the PJs which to any kindergartener is either adorable or hilarious.  After reading the story, we did a little team building activity where the students had to clear the chairs from our tables and stack them neatly so that we could use our tables as caves and dens.

Students had to hibernate underneath the tables and for the first round, could only wake up when I gave them a pair of rhyming rounds.  This worked perfectly with the book because it's a rhyming book!  A few of my students are still struggling with syllables so we played a bonus round using certain numbers of syllables as the wake up call.

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This was such a fun activity for the kids - they got to move, be animals AND they got to practice some academic skills.  I wish you could all see the excitement on their faces when they "woke up" to the correct answers!

Finally - one more exciting part of my morning - my students work with magnetic letters each day and their main focus is to spell out words they know.  This morning I walked over to the board and students (in multiple groups) were making complete sentences without any prompt!  I could hardly contain my excitement, and neither could they!  We're excited for a week full of fun, winter themed activities and NO tests!