Appreciation Gift: Worth Your Weight in Gold

Affix the following tag to gold coin chocolate and give as a gift to students or colleagues alike!

 

 

Comprehension Clips

Pixar has made some amazing short films that can aid in teaching students about making inferences.

Here are just a few of our favourites in Year 2:

One Man Band is a cute clip about two buskers vying for the meager funds of a little kid and receiving nothing as a result.

Lifted is the story of a trainee alien attempting to abduct a sleeping man, and failing miserably.

Pigeon Impossible is the story of a special agent and a pesky pigeon who almost destroys a nation in the quest for a bagel.

Cloud and his bird friend bond despite Cloud's unintentional upsetting of bird.

Day and Night shows the relationship of the two cycles and the fun that can be had during both.

 

For the Birds has an anti-bullying theme that sends a strong message about bullies and those that stand by and do nothing.

 

Big Buck Bunny; a story of bullying and resilience.

 

Presto: a message of teamwork.

For a list of different Pixar movies on Youtube, click here.

Mr Darcy - Rich Text

 
This is such a beautiful story of friendship that can be incorporated into Morals/Values and Bounce Back lessons for all primary-aged students.


It has a deep meaning and rich language for deconstructing for older children, and so many literacy activities can be used with this one book, including the following comprehension and writing tasks I used with my Year 2 students:

Self Portraits

At the beginning of each year, my students create self portraits for display in the room. Here are some samples of my K-2 student's artworks:

Kindergarten:

 

Year 1:

Year 2:

Trading Game: Place Value

The Trading Game is a fabulous way to teach place value to younger students.

Rolling a dice, students add ones blocks to the units column of the Trading House, and then swap them for a 10 block when they reach it. Two dice can be used to accelerate the pace of the game, and it's a lot of fun when students play in pairs, competing.

WeDo Lego

WeDo .... Lego Education as a Stage 1 Robotics cocurricular activity. Lego offers a variety of robots/machines for students to build and program, including Lego Mindstorm NXT for older students, and WeDo for the younger. WeDo allows students to follow instructions to build up to 12 different robots (with the basic kit). Students then use simple drag and drop software to program their robots to complete specific tasks. Here are a couple of different robots my Stage 1 students completed during WeDo Club:

The "Goal Keeper" is programmed to move in front of the goal to block it.

The "Sleeping Giant" is awakened and moved using a crane.

The "Drumming Monkey" beats a tune and bangs his arms.

Teacher Resource Website

 

K-3 Teacher Resources offers hundreds of beautiful classroom resources including display charts, literacy, numeracy, science and HSIE printables.

Here is my Parts of Speech word wall, courtesy of K-3 teacher resources:

The Elves and the Shoemaker

Read (or watch) the story and complete the following activities:

 

These worksheets are most suitable for Early Stage 1 and Stage 1 students:

 

Tiddalik

Tiddalik the Frog is an excellent story to use when learning about water conservation. It is also a great Dreamtime story to read to students when teaching them about Aboriginal culture.

There are a couple of different versions, and you can watch one of them here on youtube: 

 

A fun activity Kindergarten undertook after learning about Tiddalik, was this craft activity:

 

Students were provided a frog template photocopied on green cardboard (I found this one in a google search). Then, using a single hole puncher, they punched holes around the outline of the frog. Afterwards, students weaved colourful string in and out of the holes. To add further decoration, they threaded beads onto the string.

Umbrellas

Kindergarten strengthened their fine motor skills by cutting out these umbrella templates from black cardboard and then pasting sheets of coloured cellophane in each of the windows.

Fixed to the window, they shone bright colours throughout our classroom.