One of my challenges this year is that I have six ESL students in my classroom. Each one's ability to speak and understand the language fluently varies. For this reason, I have shifted my literacy focus the past week to include more language activities, where the children can work on their oral language skills.
The Mitten was a perfect book for practicing different literacy skills, ranging from learning the names of the animals (as some munchkins had no idea what a mole and a badger looked like) to sequencing the animals and retelling the story.
In small groups, we focused on oral language skills and retelling the story. I used a free The Mitten resource, by Mrs. Quinn, in small groups.
(I used my own huge white mitten cutout)
They each had a turn piling the animal picture cards on top of one another, which proved to be a somewhat challenging task for some of my ESL kids, as they had trouble remembering the names of some of the animals.
We worked on fine motor skills as they each cut out a mitten and drew an animal from the story that was in their mitten:
Then we did another story extension in our journals:
(This is from one of my munchkins who has a good grasp of all the letter sounds, and I am encouraging her to work on some inventive spelling! It is absolutely one of my very favorite things to see how children use letters sounds to attempt to spell words.)
The mitten fun extended into our math centers as well, as we worked on couting and matching number to set with these two fun games:
Roll & Count Snowflake Game:
Count & Match Mitten Game:
(Free Activity from Make, Take & Teach)
(Free Activity from Make, Take & Teach)
And we painted mittens templates and decorated them to add to our classroom door:
(Sorry, it isn't a very good pic!)
Ok, now I think I am over all of this talk about Winter...I am ready for spring!
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