Groundhog's Day

I love holidays. (If you haven't been able to tell before now.) I just love the opportunity they give to do some extra fun things, and do a little learning around a theme. I thought I'd share what we did today for Groundhog's day. I had fun with this day when I was teaching... reading books about groundhogs, making books, learning about shadows, doing shadow activities with manipulatives on the overhead, writing about fears (because the groundhog is 'afraid of his shadow', which is why he goes back in his hole if he sees his shadow.)

Today, is February 2... Groundhog's Day. In case finding out whether Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow or not, wasn't on your top ten list of things to do today, I'll tell you. He DID see his shadow, which means 6 more weeks winter is on the way.

Here are some pictures of the fun things we did to celebrate the day:

Every good 'unit' starts with BOOKS! I love books! I use them to introduce every topic I teach. Today, we read these two that I made (actually, my aide's helped) when I was teaching. The first one is a class book we made where each student made a page and we bound them all together in a book.

 

We made groundhogs that popped out of their holes.  A combination of these two activities:

Activity 1

Activity 2 

 

There's a little groundhog's day poem on the Activity 1 page that I printed onto green paper to use for the grass.

 And we worked on coloring pages from here:

We talked about the letters she was coloring as she did it. We didn't do it today, but we should have gone outside to look at our shadows and talk about them.  Wish I'd thought of that earlier!

 Definitely a fun day.  Hope you can use these activities, if not this year, maybe next year.  Although, don't be afraid to do the activities after the actual holiday.  The kids don't know or care.  :)

Here are a few more activities for you...  This one is a set of writing practice sheets I made for Kindergarten.
(When you click on the link, don't just save the image that comes up.  Click 'download' at the top right corner to download a full quality PDF of the activity.)

PRACTICE SHEETS

 

This is a poem I did in my class.  (It was quite a few years ago and I looked it up and couldn't find the author, so if it's yours or you know where it came from, please let me know so I can give you/them credit!)  There's a poster, a sheet of the poems small for a poem journal, and a sheet of sentance strips for the poem.  Keep in mind the sentence strips are meant to be printed on 8.5 x 14 paper.

POEM

 

SMALL POEMS

 

SENTENCE STRIPS