This 3-day activity reinforces what students have learned about animals. The activities focus on pets: cats, dogs, birds, and fish. Main Curriculum Tie: English Language Arts Kindergarten Reading: Literature Standard 2, with prompting and support, retell familiar stories, including key details. Activities in this unit reinforce what students have learned throughout the year about animals. For each activity, a different group of animals is studied. These activities focus on pets: cats, dogs, birds, and fish. Students will re-read both fiction and non-fiction stories that have been previously introduced during the school year. As they read the books, they will have activities to complete in order to earn their “badge” for that animal. Each student will make a paper bag vest on which they will be able to display badges they have earned.

Students will explore five different "Discovery Buckets". These buckets will give them opportunities to practice expressing both their thoughts and feelings. Main Curriculum Tie: English Language Arts Kindergarten Speaking and Listening Standard 6, Speak audibly and express thoughts, feelings, and ideas clearly. We recognize that an increased ability to communicate thoughts and feelings gives children the skills they need in their interactions with others. Acceptance by peers is not only correlated with positive attitudes toward school; it is a powerful predictor of social adjustment throughout life. This lesson helps children understand their emotions and how to appropriately express thoughts and feelings with others.

Students will begin to understand the concept of maps by describing the path that Little Red Riding Hood took on the way to Grandma's house. Main Curriculum Tie: Social Studies - Kindergarten, Standard 3 Objective 1, Identify geographic terms that describe their surroundings. Many fairy tales and nursery rhymes take the characters on a path through the rhyme/story. In this lesson, we will be making up maps for the characters to follow. In the first activity, the class will be recreating a map of the path that Little Red Riding Hood takes to Grandma’s house. The students will be exploring basic map directions and characteristics.

This unit uses the childrenŐs names as the foundation for teaching language, alphabetics, one-to-one counting, sequencing, concepts of print, and phonemic awareness. The childŐs own name is the most important word to him. Although many children come to school with an awareness of environmental print, they see the environmental print words as a whole.

In this lesson students perform a line dance to reinforce story telling through movement.

Students will listen to a familiar story with repetitive lines that the children can remember. They will make puppets and retell the story in small groups with an adult volunteer or an older child. Main Curriculum Tie: English Language Arts Kindergarten Reading: Literature Standard 2, With prompting and support, retell familiar stories, including key details. All children will participate in retelling a familiar story using puppets. This will help develop oral language and comprehension.