Letter Mm is the first letter we study in our curriculum and it is definitely one of my favorites! There are so many great (yummy) things we did this week to help us learn the letter! We had a jam-packed 4 day week (district learning day on Friday...so no kiddos). Here's a run down of a few things we accomplished:
On Monday I introduced the letter using my monkey puppet (Mr. Malcolm Monkey) and taught my kiddos the Mr. Malcolm Monkey poem/song from our reading series. I wish I could share it...but it is a part of the series and obviously copyrighted. :( We talked about all of the reasons why M is MY favorite letter and began a huge web of M words that we added to throughout the week. By the way, my kids were totally blown away by the fact that my first name is Mary....with an M. Haha. So of course it has to be my favorite letter! :)
I should tell you that I very rarely reward my kids with candy (outside of our many edible activities!). I'm not one of those teachers that keeps a jar of skittles on hand. So when I do reward them with something like that they think it is a BIG deal! This week's motivator was a bag of mini marshmallows. Randomly throughout the week I would ask a student for another M word to add to our web. If they could provide a new word, they got to "munch" a "mini" "marshmallow" as a special treat. Total success!
Tuesday we enjoyed my favorite candy which just so happens to be M & Ms! We sorted by color and graphed our M & Ms.
Wednesday was all about Moose. Muffins too. We read Laura Numeroff's
If You Give a Moose a Muffin as our literature focus and then worked on turning the letter M into a moose. We also made cutesy headbands to go with it and munched on mini muffins. They were more like mini cupcakes but no one complained!
The template for the hat is from Simply Kinder and can be found
here.
The M craftivity is from Rowdy in Room 300 and can be found
here.
Thursday was our grand finale! All of kindergartners dressed for our annual Mickey and Minnie Day! They were a-dor-a-ble! I always love seeing how creative they can get with their outfits!
We watched an episode of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse (Minnie's Mystery) and recorded all of the M words we heard throughout the movie, practiced following directions while assembling our mouse crafts, and enjoyed a special mouse treat with ice cream and Oreos!
What a marvelous week!