Friday, January 10, 2014

Mitten Mania!

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BRRR!  It's been so cold all over the country this week that I bet even in the south kids are wearing winter clothing they've never seen before!  This week in my speech room, we've been doing activities related to MITTENS!  Here's the run-down:

The Mitten:
In many of my groups, we read "The Mitten" by Jan Brett. Who doesn't love this book?!? Believe it or not, I drew the animals from the story when I was in college (in the mid to late 90's) and they are STILL hanging in there!  This still shocks me because I didn't even think of laminating them at the time!  


Here's a closer look:


We worked on sequencing the order in which the animals went into the mitten and I found this printable emergent reader take-home book from Jamie Mayas on Teacher's Pay Teachers. What a great way for my preschoolers to practice the vocabulary from the book!

Noisy Story:
In some other groups, we read the Noisy Story "The Mitten." (Click HERE to see more information on the Noisy Stories program).  This story is about a lost mitten.  I begin the story by wearing one mitten and telling the kids that I'm going to tell them a story about something you can wear in the winter.  Believe it or not, they don't ALL clue in that the story will be about a mitten! Once they do figure it out, I tell them that there is a BIG problem in the story (mind you, I'm still wearing ONE mitten).  Eventually someone infers that there is a missing or lost mitten in the story...


At the end, the mitten is found on a snowman! My preschoolers love when I pull out my snowman (above) with the mitten stuck to his belly.  (Sometimes they make me feel like a magician!)  The younger kids worked on same/different using real mittens (see photo below) as well.

PS, If you want a similar type story for older kids, check out "The Missing Mitten Mystery" by Steven Kellogg.

EET: Mitten style!

I have rounded up a ton of mittens over the years.  I usually pick them up at the end of the winter in a clearance bin. We focused on the "eye" bead of the EET strand and described what the mittens look like.


I don't know if I mentioned this before or not, but I'm doing my Student Learning Goal for my Educator Evaluation on the EET.  Based on my mid-year data, my kids are just NOT getting the eye bead!  Here's an example of a very typical response from my kiddos during mid-year data collection:
Me:  What's this?
Student: A carrot.
Me:  Right! {shows green bead}Green-group. What group does a carrot belong in?
Student: Food group.
Me: Nice! {shows blue bead}Blue-do. What do you do with a carrot?
Student: You eat it!
Me:  You're doing great! {shows eye bead} Eye ball!  What does a carrot look like?
Student:  It looks like a carrot!
Me: {face-palm!}
We spent about 2 weeks on describing appearance, but I guess we need some more time with that!  So, we grabbed the EET strand and worked on describing the appearance of the mittens.  If you don't have a ton of mittens like I do, you can always make them out of paper.  


I used a pattern similar to the one below and printed them on letter size scrapbook paper, then cut them out.


Want a copy of the mitten patterns? Click HERE.

And there you have my week of Mitten Mania!  What are your favorite Mitten activities?


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