Favorite Books for Groundhog Day {and a few more ideas}

Hi, friends!  I hope you are having a great weekend so far.  February is such a busy month with all of the holidays...Today's post features a few of my favorites for Groundhog Day!  To purchase any of the books shown, simply click the Amazon links.

Groundhog Day

I like to pair my Groundhog Day activities and centers with these books in the week leading up and week of Groundhog Day.

We also work on some Groundhog-themed Daily Sentence Edits from my February Sentence Edits Pack.  Such great practice!!

On the actual day, we make this simple Groundhog Snack using Nilla Wafers, white chocolate chips, Little Debbie Oatmeal Cream Pies, and vanilla icing.  So fun and CUTE!

How about this cute {and simple} art project?  Paper plate, brown paint, black marker, google eyes, construction paper, and toothpicks.  Love!

Happy Reading!

xo
Megan

*Note: this post contains affiliate links for the books shown above.  I selected these books because I own all of them and enjoy reading them to my first graders each year.  The thoughts in this post are accurate and and my own.

Groundhog Day Fun!

Groundhog Day is a great way to do some super fun activities in the classroom!  The kids get so excited about Phil's decision!  Today I wanted to quickly share some ideas/activities with you that I have done in years past.

We always begin with a KWL or Schema chart to see what the kids know about groundhogs.  This is great for building background before launching into a unit of study.

We read a lot of books.  A few of my favorites are shown below.  I keep a bucket of Groundhog Day books out for my kids to look at throughout the week, too.

We always do a mini-book together.  We color it, search for sight words, and read it several times. The kids love taking these home and reading them to their families!  The mini-book is from my Groundhog Day pack.

During literacy centers, I like to include thematic activities for my kids.  ABC order and sentence scrambles are always favorites during centers.  Predictable and developmentally appropriate for my first graders.  These centers are from my Groundhog Day pack.

The listening center is also a favorite center.  The kids love this groundhog book!!  To get some free listening center pages, click HERE.

Here are a few Math tub activities in action.  This year I do not do Math tubs because I am still working my way through learning Go Math, our newly adopted Math curriculum.  These Math centers are from my Groundhog Day pack.

We love making this simple groundhog snack!  It's a Little Debbie Oatmeal Pie, white icing, white chocolate chips, and 2 Nilla Wafers.  I've also made groundhog cupcakes for my kids over the years.

This is a fun little writing page and then a cute topper.  The topper is free from First Grade Blue Skies.  The writing paper is from my Groundhog Day pack.

During Math, we like to make a groundhog number grid mystery picture!  You can get that for $1.00 HERE.

I'm having a sale on my Groundhog Day pack!  Snag it before the weekend and get your activities prepped for next week!  Click below!

Here's a freebie that also makes a great literacy center:

xo
Megan

Groundhog Day Recap

We had a great time learning about groundhogs last week!  We had a snow day on Tuesday and a delay on Wednesday, so we were short on time.  We made it work!

We began our study with a K-W-L organizer.  The kids had a decent amount of background information, because a couple weeks ago, I strategically placed a basket of books about groundhogs out!  The kids also came up with some great questions!

We had a lot of fun with our groundhog centers.

We colored and read our mini-books about groundhogs.

We made a fun groundhog snack!  These can be made with Little Debbie oatmeal cream pies, mini Nilla wafers, white icing in a can/tube, and chocolate chips.

We ended the day with this groundhog craft!  To make it you need: paper plates, toothpicks, white paper, a black Sharpie marker, googly eyes, and brown construction paper.

Here's some groundhog day writing/predictions with Jennifer from First Grade Blue Skies' free groundhog headband {turned paper holder!}.

Finally, I leave you with a groundhog day quote that I overhead from one of my students: "If the groundhog sees his shadow, I'm going to break every bone in his body."  Yeah, folks.  That's how we roll.

Centers, writing paper, and K-W-L pieces can be found below!

I've also got a great sentence types freebie for you below:

xo
Megan

Groundhog Day

Sunday is Groundhog Day!  We've been using activities from my "Hooray for Groundhog Day" pack for centers and reading/writing this week!

Who doesn't love a K-W-L chart?!  My kids came up with fantastic questions!  *There were a few randoms, but overall....great!

The mini-books full of groundhog facts were hits!  We were able to answer lots of our questions from this book!

Today, we started a new round of literacy centers and Math tubs.  This weather has our center rotation all jacked up!!!  Below are some pictures of the centers {both in action and upcoming!}.

ABC order is a great skill for young children to learn.  Although the use of phone books and dictionaries are almost by the wayside, I still feel ABC order is an important life skill {esp if kids want to be teachers-haha!}

Sentence scrambles are an essential for emergent readers.  My kids still struggle with this, so we will continue to practice it each week in literacy centers.

I am also a huge fan of the listening center.  Over the past 10 years, I've amassed quite a collection.  Some are books on cd and some are books on tape.  Each week, we have a listening center book.  I have enough different book sets for the year.  {Gasp}

You know me and my sight words!  Always important!  Each week we have one literacy center where sight words are practiced.  These are my Fry's First Grade Sight Word Stamps from my Sight Word Stampede set.

Every few weeks, we review telling time to the hour and half hour at our centers.  I made this simple card game for students to draw the analog clock hands with vis-a-vis markers.  They are going to love it!  *Tip: baby wipes work best to erase these.  I just picked some up tonight at Kroger! 

Fact family review is important for us right now because we learned them and then had tons of snow days and delays!

Number patterns are so darn tricky!  I have been including a number pattern center in my math tubs every week for the past several weeks.

Everything shown above is included in the pack below.  Check it out!  

xo

Megan