Potato Harvest in Pre-K

Last time we talked about how to garden with pre-k students, focusing specifically on potatoes. Now you get to see how we harvested the potatoes and used them in the classroom. I'm only showing the math lessons, but there are a bazillion other ways to incorporate those potatoes into your teaching once they're out of the ground. Yes, a bazillion!

To harvest our potatoes, I used a shovel to loosen the soil enough for the children to dig in with their bare hands. Gardening gloves can certainly come in handy, but I love getting the soil all over my own hands when in the garden so I share that experience with my students. Feel free to use the gloves! The children then just dug around until they felt they'd found all the potatoes. Some pulled out one, shouted in excitement, and were done for the day. Others sat around raking their fingers through the soil for the entire time the rest of the class was at recess.

We waited as long as we could to harvest to give the potatoes as much time to grow as possible. We dug them up the Friday before the last week of school. The plants had not yet flowered and the leaves weren't dead, but there wasn't any more time to wait. You can tell from the pictures that they could have stood to stay in the ground for much longer! The only thing that happens when you harvest too early is that the potatoes are smaller- in some cases MUCH smaller! We were still able to donate these potatoes to a local food pantry and I'm sure someone got a kick out of receiving tiny potatoes. If we'd had more I would have either made a potato dish in the classroom or let children take potatoes home. The potatoes we received were part of a service-learning project so they were destined for the food pantry from the beginning.

We pulled the potatoes out later that day during math. Oh, the possibilities! First, we counted the potatoes. We estimated how many there would be before counting and were all waaaaaay off! We ended up with 60 potatoes.

Next we sorted them by size. We decided to sort by small, medium, or large. Since they were not uniform in size, it was interested seeing the children decide which fit into each category.

After that I posed a question: Which size has the most potatoes? We discussed how we could determine this and decided to graph the potatoes. This is just a simple graph made by lining the potatoes up on the carpet (did I mention it was the Friday before the last week of school?!).

Another thing we did which I did not take picture of was to do a final journal entry of our findings. We'd done plenty of writing about the potatoes throughout the semester. One example is to predict how many potatoes they think are growing under the ground. Their incredibly low predictions crack me up- they were all shocked to find so many potatoes!

So there you have it, a few ideas to use to integrate gardening into your regularly scheduled math lessons. There are dozens upon dozens of other things to be done, of course, but did I mention it was the Friday before the last day of school? :) 

Gardening in Pre-K

My school is fortunate enough to be part of a gardening grant. Often it's easy for teachers to think of ways to use the garden for older students but it can be hard to imagine ways to use the garden with younger students. This was my first year to be "in charge" of our school garden (I am the Garden Coordinator) so I learned a lot! The most important lesson for me was this: no activity or lesson in the garden is too small for my students. Even just walking by the garden would cause children to make incredibly academic discoveries about math, science, and the wonders of nature.

Our first potato sprouts! 

We planted several things this year, but by far the biggest hit were the potatoes. They were easy for my young students to take ownership of throughout the process, which is not the case with all plants. If you've never grown potatoes I promise you, it could not be easier. Here are the bare bones of what you need to know. There are plenty of other fancy things you can do, but you've got plenty of other things to spend your time on so here is my Cliff's Notes version. 

• Get some seed potatoes. These can be found at your local feed store. Keep in mind that one potato will be able to grow several plants, so choose your amount accordingly. 
• Cut up the potatoes. You want chunks about the size of a golf ball (although not the shape of a golf ball!). Make sure each chunk has several eyes on it- these are what will start to grow once planted. Your students can cut the potatoes using plastic knives or butter knives.
• Leave the potatoes out for a few days. This is called curing the potatoes. Leaving them outside is preferable, but it's totally fine to leave them inside. We just put ours on a paper plate and ooooh'd and aaaaah'd over them in the science center on a Friday then when we came back Monday they were ready to go. 
• Time to plant! You want to plant them about a foot apart- this is a great time to use a ruler! Children can plant their own or work in pairs. Let them dig their own holes- the potatoes don't have to be planted very deep. It's a good idea to loosen the soil yourself with a hoe or shovel a day or two before having your students plant, otherwise the soil will be difficult for them to dig and it will also be harder for the potatoes to grow in the dense soil. 
• It's hard to see in the photo, but we used large craft sticks with student names to mark each plant. Before the plants sprout it's very important to use markers so you can tell where you planted them!
• Water those potatoes! They just need water every four or five days for a total of about 2 inches per week, including rainfall. (For fellow Texans- the term rainfall is used when clouds fill with moisture and release it, causing liquid drops to fall from the sky.) You may need to increase watering in high heat or sunshine. Potato plants like their soil to be moist but not saturated with water. 
• When the plant flowers, increase the watering to every two or three days to get those potatoes nice a big! The flowers are beautiful and a great talking point with your children- how many of them had any idea a potato plant had flowers? 
• It's harvest time when the leaves turn yellow and start to die. You may not get to this point before the school year ends- we didn't. If you harvest early you'll just get smaller potatoes, which in my experience excite students more than regular sized potatoes. 

90 days later

That's it! 

Along the way, there are a bazillion activities to do and talks to have with your class. I began by bringing in a single potato and discussing it. Where have you seen potatoes? What are they for? Where do they come from? Pass the potato around and let the children touch it, smell it, and make observations. I guarantee you there are children sitting on your rug who have never actually seen a potato before, so this is an important step. It goes back to my lesson of nothing being too small for your students.

 

 Next we discussed all the ways we can eat potatoes and recorded them on a chart. Once you get started, there are TONS of ways to eat potatoes! You will have to tell them about many of them and trust me, they may not believe you. Chips are made from potatoes? Crazy teacher, chips are from THE STORE. This is a great time to introduce research in your library and online. Make sure to make some vocabulary cards for all the new words they are learning! 

 

Like I suggested above, let your students cut the potatoes with plastic knives or butter knives. If this FREAKS. YOU. OUT. rest assured, I have "those kids" in my class, too. I'm not telling you to hand each child a chef's knife and letting them go for it. I'm inviting you to have a few students come to your small group area and let them pass one plastic or butter knife around the table, taking turns while you guide them. You could also do this in a whole group setting the same way, going around the circle until everyone gets a turn. This is the time to talk about the eyes on the potato and why it is important that each chunk have a few. 

 

Time to plant! Follow the steps above. This is the type of activity I typically do on a Friday morning or afternoon. It is time consuming so plan for at least 30 minutes in the garden. I like to have the children sit down around the garden area and we take turns planting each potato. I usually do my class's gardening alone, so you can adjust if you have other adults available. The fun part for those who are waiting is that they can mess with the soil and make all sorts of fascinating observations about the outdoors. SO MANY great lessons here that are completely real-world applications. If we are planting in pairs, how many potatoes do we need? If we are all planting our own, how many do we need? How much space do we need to plant these, and how can we find out? 

Gardening is an amazing opportunity for our students. How better to learn about where their food comes from? How better to learn about measurement and growth? Life cycles? Weather? Cooperation and teamwork? Gardens are the answer! For anyone concerned about "Kids Gone Wild," which is a definite concern, I offer this advice. Approach gardening the same way you approach any other lesson in your classroom, with careful planning and organization. Make sure to treat the garden area like you would your indoor classroom. You have established rules and routines you reinforce indoors so be sure to do the same in your "outdoor classroom." This helps students understand that although they are outside, they are not on the playground and this is still a structured activity.

 

Next time I'll share what we did when we (early) harvested our potatoes at the end of the year. Get ready to see some tiny potatoes!

 

 

Back to School Freebie!

Since I love spending my summers obsessing over school, I've made lots of word walls to use with all the themes in my classroom. Here's a great one to start the year- school words in Spanish. There are 20 total words.

Click here to download.

Never fear, dual language teachers, there is also one in English!

Click here to download.

If the back to school bug hasn't caught you yet, enjoy the rest of your break. Even if it has, get a little relaxing in before you head back!

What's in an ABC Center? Alphabet Puzzles!

photo credit: mag3737 via photopin cc 

My district has several required centers for pre-k classrooms and most are the centers everyone knows and loves. Art, dramatic play, library, blocks, writing, math, science, technology. We also have a something called the ABC Center. Is that basically what it sounds like? (you may find yourself asking). Well, yes! It's a center designed to encourage exploration of the letters by focusing on just them. Sure, children are (or should be!) learning about the alphabet throughout the classroom and all during the day. This is just an additional way to ensure that children have great meaningful experiences with letters every day. 


So what goes in an ABC center? My first suggestion is something that is ubiquitous in early childhood classrooms: alphabet puzzles. Many look at that puzzle and see a few weeks of use followed by a covering of dust that grows each month, but this item can actually give you a lot of bang for your buck.


For example, you can start by putting the letters in a container and have them pull the letters one at a time from it to place in the puzzle. When they are finished, they put all the pieces back in the container. I like to start with an empty wipes container because they can't see what letter they're pulling out so it's very exciting and fun. Plus they're free! I guarantee you somebody you know can give you a baby wipe container.

Change up the container with your themes, with seasons, with holidays. Put them in a pumpkin in the fall, a basket in the spring, a dump truck when you're studying transportation, a big shoe when you're studying nursery rhymes. Find anything they'll fit in and go for it! It's an easy way to use that puzzle for all it's worth and since you are spending time talking about letters every day you will see those children start to say the names of the letters, think of words that begin with those letters, make connections with those letters, try to spell words with those letters.


Shari Sloane has some great ideas for alphabet puzzles, including one I'm excited to try out next year. She gets an alphabet die, one of the 30 sided ones with every single letter. Children roll the die and find that letter to put in the puzzle until it's full. My alphabet die is from an old version of the game Scattergories that was going in the trash at an old job. Always check the trash!


Put the letters into a feely box, bag, or empty tissue box and show children how to reach in and try to guess the letters based on how they feel before pulling them out to put on the puzzle. This is a great way to get children to observe the attributes of letters, which is crucial for letter recognition and formation. If I feel a straight edge, can it be an "o?" Why or why not? 


Get a container and mix an object or picture for each letter with the letter pieces. Children first put all the letters in the puzzle then match the objects or pictures and simply place them on top of the letters. It's not fancy, but guess what- your kids haven't seen a Lakeshore catalog; they don't care. It's fun, it's easy, and it's cheap!


Make some word cards to use with that puzzle. You can make them to match what you're learning or to teach high frequency words. Just remember not to choose words with any repeated letters!


Use a set of alphabet flash cards with pictures for each letter with your puzzle. Children pull a letter from the puzzle and match it to the card.


To incorporate writing, have children pull a letter from a container, write it in their journals or other paper, then place it in the puzzle. This is something I'd do after the class has had several months of exposure to the puzzle and to writing letters. I want them to have plenty of purely tactile experience with letters to set them up for writing. That said, when children are comfortable with writing letters this is a great way to get some fun practice.


If you want to get really snazzy, get a lowercase puzzle and an uppercase puzzle and mix up all the pieces in a container. Now students have to identify each letter as upper or lowercase before sorting it into the correct puzzle. 


Would you have believed there are so many ways to use a humble alphabet puzzle? I love items that can be used in multiple ways and levels and for that reason, alphabet puzzles score high in my book. The fact that any of these activities works for English or Spanish literacy is just icing on the alphabet cake!

Here are links to some of my favorite alphabet puzzles. (Apparently Lakeshore has discontinued the two I use most often, so maybe they are creating something new and even better.)

Foam puzzles like these are usually easy to find at dollar stores or bins at Target.

Melissa and Doug have great puzzles in English and Spanish and I have found all of these at Mardel:




-Spanish: http://www.melissaanddoug.com/Spanish-alphabet-peg-puzzles-educational-toys

-Spanish talking puzzle:  http://www.melissaanddoug.com/spanish-alphabet-sound-puzzle-wooden

-English: http://www.melissaanddoug.com/see-inside-alphabet-learning-puzzle

-English talking puzzle: http://www.melissaanddoug.com/alphabet-sound-learning-puzzle

Dice, Dice, Baby

Dice are so much fun! Pardon me, random number generators are so much fun! There are a bazillion different kinds to choose from and if you're like me you can't help but buy them all. (Look, green dice! Better buy them. These have hearts instead of dots! Better buy them. These are slightly larger/smaller/heavier/lighter than the ones I already have! Better buy them.)

I've seen so many great ideas for containing dice (random number generators) around the web and have tried a few out. I use the giant foam dice at the beginning of the year because they need to be able to touch each dot to count it, but later in the year we can use regular sized dice! (This activity and photos are from February of the past school year.) This opens up so many more possibilities to Pinterest-obsessed educators like myself.

I used some very small containers that I most likely bought at Dollar Tree and were most likely in the craft section. The lids are difficult to remove, which is a plus when a 4 year old is shaking it like her life depends on it. That reminds me- putting dice in containers adds a whole new level of motor skills to the activity. They can flail their arms back and forth with all their might, all in the name of mathematics!

Here are my random number generators in their containers. See how small those containers are? 

I recommend using containers with tightly fitting lids. I also tried another type of container with less success. These are probably easier to find and come with a lot in the package, but you'd need to glue the lids closed if your students are anywhere near as vigorous in their shaking as mine chose to be. Or you could just show them how to use them more gently. We'd already gone full shake so there was no going back for us!

There are infinite possibilities for how to use the dice, but here was our first activity which just so happens to be a math journal activity. I know a lot of folks are encouraged to use math journals in the early grades and a lot of those folks aren't sure how to fill those pages. In my classroom the answer is to fill them very simply. Teaching children to record their observations and data starts small but is a great advantage to them and their knowledge of math.

This activity was done in small groups with me. Some groups worked on drawing the dots then writing the numeral that went with that quantity of dots, while others rolled dice with the numerals and drew that many dots. Both of these end up with the same things written down, numbers and dots. I didn't show the children how to record their answers first, I simply said to record their numbers and dots in their journals. It was interesting to me to see how the children decided to draw.

That's really it. After introducing this activity with all my small groups I put several dice from my inappropriately large collection in the math center where children were free to repeat the activity on their own. It was a hit! The thing I enjoyed most about this activity was that it was a perfect set up for future games involving dice and recording data. Plus everyone loved it, so it was a win for all!

Construction Theme

We just finished up a month-long construction theme in my classroom. Here are some things we did to learn more about one of my favorite subjects- building stuff! I would say these are some of the "highlights" but really they're just the "things I managed to photograph."

We talked about the parts of buildings and structures and the children drew and labeled houses. They've been working on drawing houses basically all year, so most of them turned out pretty well. We do a LOT of labeling and it's a great way to add some print to any type of drawing or art project. This project was done in a small group with my assistant. This child is in a group who is working on writing and reading syllables. (Notice the hobbit-like windows of this house.)

One week was devoted to learning about tools, so we made a graph of our favorite tools. It's important to me that my students get plenty of vocabulary in English as well as Spanish, so I make sure to include as many thematic activities as possible during math (which is taught in English). For this graph the children drew a picture of their favorite tool and copied the word. When the children make the graph themselves they are much more likely to utilize the graph during centers and at other times of the day. I hung this graph in our construction center and they counted and compared the tools to their little hearts' contents.

Here are some closeups of some of the individual tools. We've worked hard on learning to draw this year and I'm very proud of what they're able to do now that we're 2/3 through the year.

Also during our week on tools was this ever-so-fancy project I've decided to call "draw, color, label, and cut." I got the idea from a colleague and discovered there's really nothing you can't draw, color, label, and cut. This activity is great for a bulletin board or other display and gets the kids excited about labeling and cutting (because they're just not excited enough about scissors already, right?).

By the way, I highly recommend giving your students interesting tools that they can actually use, like levels and tape measures. Every year my students L-O-V-E using levels with the blocks and end up checking random objects around the room to see if they are level or not.


Here are a few more random activities from the construction month.

Nuts and bolts

Locks and keys (hey, it's construction-y!)

Toy screws and hinges, which just happen to fit perfectly on the backs of our shelves

So there you have it, a bunch of jumbled ideas for learning about construction. Next up will be transportation, and I will be more mindful about taking photographs this time!

Splash!

Two weekends ago, I was fortunate to attend Frog Street Press' 2012 Splash Conference. It's a mecca of all things pre-school, pre-k, and K, and it was a blast! I have several pages of notes full of great ideas I'm already working on to start off the upcoming school year, and plenty of books and websites to check out over the next few months.

I'll start with a great educator, Carolea Williams. You may be familiar with her products sold under the company name Teach Bright.  She has some awesome products for those teaching in an early elementary setting, but I never really looked closely enough to see how they worked. After seeing them in use I can tell you they are GREAT! The best part is that she isn't in it to get you to buy her products. She's perfectly happy to show you things she's done and how you can do them, too. (Now, if you can buy her stuff you should because all the activities include full color photos that all match each other AND are on cardstock!)

First up is an activity that uses photos from her Phonics Sorts book. (See how nice those pictures are? Obviously you can use any
photos/pictures/clipart you darn well please, but hers are just so nice.) WELL, one of the ways she showed us to use these is to get one of those small magnetic message boards from the Target Dollar Spot and put magnets on the cards. When you add the magnets you can use them all sorts of ways, but this way limits children to matching a few letters at a time which is great for beginning practice. And these boards are at Target right now! Just think of all the possibilities now that you've learned you can use these as tiny magnet boards in the classroom!

Another awesome idea she had was to create sorting mats that match your activity. These cards are from her book Animals, Food, and Clothes which are actually part of a series to teach the alphabet and beginning sounds, but look how easily the same cards can be used to make a completely different activity. These are just some of the food cards; again, any foods cards will do. I love how she uses the gingham squares to add a picnic-y feel.

And look what she uses for the cards-  a sandwich container! What an easy idea that will add so much to the activity. This can be used for any level. Children can start by sorting and naming the foods then move to writing the beginning sounds, creating a list of the foods in their picnic baskets, writing a story about the foods, or more. I can't wait to create some mats like this for different activities.

One of her biggest points was that when we're creating materials for center activities, we should maximize our efforts. This is something I agree with wholeheartedly- don't spend 3 hours creating something children will finish in 3 minutes! For example, with the picnic activity, you can switch out the food pictures so that children can complete it several times with different results. Here's Carolea's advice for creating your own materials- instead of making sets of 2 matching cards, MAKE 3! It's that easy! If you're up for it, make 4, 5, or 6. Her reasoning is that when you make a game that involves matching 2 cards, it's a one-shot deal. Of course, these are great for children to do over and over to gain automaticity with letter sounds or rhymes, but when you have more cards in your arsenal, it becomes a new game as often as you like. An example of this is rhyming cards. Instead of "cat" and "rat," make "cat," "rat," and "bat" and you'll be able to switch the cards out to completely change the activity. You can see how creating just a card or 2 more can make a huge difference in your prep time and the duration of center activities in your classroom. Once they children understand an activity, you are free to change up the cards from week to week without having to spend additional instruction time showing students how these work. Having all those extra cards also lets you differentiate instruction easily because some students can work with more cards, some with fewer.

Another great idea she has is to use craft foam for sorting. She'll cut it into strips and give children 2 strips if they're sorting into 2 groups, 3 strips for 3 groups, and so on. She also uses the craft foam to create mats that can be used for ANY matching activity- what a time saver! This is cardstock with the foam glued on, but she also does this in laminated file folders.

Using a mat like this gives children a concrete idea of how the cards should go together and lets them focus on the attribute you want (beginning sound, category, rhyming word) instead of spending time deciding where to place their cards. Know some folks who would benefit from that? Me too! When she uses the file folders, it creates a space for children to put their recording papers. She actually staples lots of the sheets into the folder and children pull theirs off as they finish, but children could easily use their own papers to record. The organization of this is something I think would help a lot of my children with recording what they've done because so many just don't yet have that level of organizational skills. This looks like a great stepping stone for them. 

Carolea Williams was absolutely bursting with great ideas and I'm so excited to use them in the upcoming school year. Visit her site to see all her great ideas- she updates her site from time to time with even more ideas to use in your classroom. More on other great stuff from the conference later!