Color of the Week- Blue- Dear Mr. Blueberry

This book happens to be one of my favorite books all school year long.  I guess it shows because my students really love it too.  And this past year, my students were using the word migrate all year long.  Yeah, pretty crazy for Kindergarten right????  Well it helped that I was excited about the book, and oh yeah the awesome craft we did for the vocabulary word migrate.

Day 1

We read the book purely for enjoyment on day 1.  If you haven't read it, it is about a girl named Emily who is convinced she sees a whale in the pond in her backyard.  She writes letters back and forth with her teacher Mr. Blueberry telling him all about the whale.

Day 2

We re-read the book and we do a simple journal page about the characters.  The students draw Emily and Aurthur the whale.  You may choose to have students use a cutout like below, this one came from the Dollar Tree.  (I LOVE that place!)  If you do not have a cutout and you don't want your students to draw, the latest version of this pack includes a half page with Aurthur on it.  Since all we see of Mr. Blueberry are his letter back to Emily there is a question mark in his character spot.  

 Day 3

 We read the book once again and this time we will focus on the vocabulary.  I stop reading when we come across one of our vocabulary words from the book.  (Now this is the second week of school with Kindergartners, do I wish I got to every term, of course.  But many of them are still learning to sit for more than 5 minutes.)  So I judge based on the the particular class how many terms they can handle and don't stress.  I'm sure we will read this book again when we have an extra moment (when they can sit for 10 minutes at a time) and we can cover those other words then.  I do make sure I talk about migrate we used the definition- "to move from place to place."  Later in the year, around November when we are talking about Native Americans we added in to our definition that people and animals often migrate to find food.

Day 4

We read the book again.  When we get to the word migrate I stop reading and have the students explain the word to each other.  Then the fun begins, the students get to work on this set of journal pages.  The whale on the page moved up and down- a great illustration of the word migrate.  This one craft is the reason my students owned this word!

 Day 5

We read the book one last time.  Today's focus is on whales.  The students create a whale facts mini-book with simple predictable language.

Also included in my Dear Mr. Blueberry pack is a whale themed counting math center.


A new item that will be making its way into my color of the week plans are my color books.  They are super easy to put together and they fit into a composition notebook.  (Oh, did I mention they are 50% through the end of the week!)

Another part of the color of the week theme are the poetry journals I will be using this year.  I found this awesome poetry pack from Kindergarten Smiles.  In this pack there is a poem for each color of the week and a whole year's worth of poetry.  What I love about this set is that it includes the poems and also pictures for the kids to glue into their journals and then students create the backgrounds.



Some other websites for color of the day/week:

Scholastic- Books for Color of the Week	My Color Pinterest Board

Do you do color of the week?  What books do you use?