Monsters Go to School! And a Freebie!

Have you seen these cute books from Creative Teaching Press?  I don't work for them or anything, I just like to use their monster books.  I think I have three or four of their titles and we use them to reinforce the rules at school. They are all very simple and the kids can reread them easily.  I made some felt monster puppets and my kids get to act out the book The Five Little Monsters Went to School.  Of course we get to do it four times so that they all get a turn.

Five Little Monsters: felt, puffy paint and wiggly eyes!

This year I am hoping to let the kids act out the book while we snap pictures with the ipad and then they can narrate the book and we'll save it.  Haven't gotten to that quite yet.  :)


 I made a simple paper book to go with the Where do Monsters Live? book.  The kids color and fill in the color words.  Nice and easy!

Monster Houses

We also read Go Away Big Green Monster and make these cute monsters.  We used green paint with some gold glitter mixed in on the first day.  I have them fold the paper in half and write their names.  Then they glob on the green paint and close the paper on the fold.  They smear it around with their hands and we open it up to see how it looks.  The next day we decorate the faces.  I model it but then try to let them do their own things.  They cut out teeth, eyes, mouth, noses, and ears then use the purple glitter for the hair.  I love how they come out!

Other fun monster activities:

We practiced our subtizing while making a Monster face in math.

We also sing a little song to go with the book.  It goes to "She'll be Coming Round the Mountain" and it is very simple: Go away big green monster, go away.  Go away big green monster, go away. (repeat, repeat, repeat).  Silly and fun!

There is an ipad app, too, that I have used with my own grandchild but not at school yet (we need a dongle!).

Bats!

One of the wonderful topics we manage to squeeze into every October is: BATS! We have a lot of fun with this unit.  The kids are able to learn some amazing bat facts as well as enjoy some great fiction.  We even do some non-fiction writing so this is a great way to include some non-fiction for the Common Core Standards, right?  We have a great time learning about bats.  Here are a few of the books I read:

Stellaluna by Janell Cannon
Bats by Gail Gibbons
Zipping, Zapping, Zooming Bats by Ann Earle

Starting with my favorite, Stellaluna!  I have a big book of Stellaluna and I love the humor in the illustrations of this book.  The baby birds trying to be like Stellaluna is great.  Poor Stellaluna trying to eat bugs (she is a fruit bat) is priceless.  The kids are a little confused about the light shining out of her eyes at night in one picture so we have a discussion about how bats can see better in low light (and they use echolocation).

She saw a house, some pumpkins, and fruit.

She saw her Mom and her Dad and some fruit.

She saw a cat and books and a flag.  (This smart little girl looked at labels in our room!)

She saw a dog and a bee and a flower.

At the end of the week, we made a bat facts book.  The kids dictated their fact to me . I type it on my laptop which is projected up on the big screen in the front of the room.  Then they go to the printer, pick up their paper, and illustrate it.  Love the little bats!

Have a batty week!!!