Friday, March 8, 2013

(top) A princess goes to tea parties.
 Kings and Queens:
Unit activities

Our kindergarten class has been studying kings and queens following the EngageNY modules (found here). We have liked the content but found the module alone to be a bit dry and boring. So here are some of the supplemental materials I developed to add to the unit.

These castles were our culminating activity. The idea is from Deep Space Sparkle- check out her tutorial and great examples here

After creating the castles we had the kinder kids write a sentence to tell us one thing they learned about being royal. I have provided some captions to help you decode the kinder-writing.
(top left) Princesses wear a dress. (middle left) Princes wear a crown. (middle right) The queen plays in a kingdom. (bottom right) The queen rides a carriage. (bottom left I have no idea, sorry)






 I also created a word jar for this unit. The purpose of this word jar was to practice with our two main vocabulary words: royal and common.

Here's the jar- it's a recycled cheese puff tub from a class party. I made the label and used packing tape to secure it to the jar:




On either side of the "word jar" label, I attached two laminated cards labeled "royal" and "common". They were attached with small velcro circles.These cards were the headings for the vocab sort. By affixing them to the outside of the jar, they were easy to identify as the headings and they were quick to find when the students only had a minute to sort.


Inside the word jar were cards that belonged in one of the two categories (shown below). On each card is a picture of the object or person and on the flip side is the word. Though many of our kindergartners cannot yet read words like "carriage" and "pajamas" they can begin to associate the word with the picture through this sort. The cards also doubled as spelling assistants when the students were writing about royal things. They just went to the word jar, found the image they needed and flipped it over to help them write the word.







Here are all the cards in their categories