A few weeks ago I had a meeting with a group of kindergarten teachers in my district. We were talking about days of the week not beginning written into the common core standards. We laughed at the thought of not addressing this! How would first grade teachers feel about that?!! Of course, we would be teaching them!! One of my favorite books that addresses this concept is Cookie's Week. Unfortunately, there was not a lot out there, so I came up with some of my own activities. One of our activities was making a Cookie's Week retelling puppet. Students used the picture clues and the days of the week listed on the body to retell the story. This is a different way to make the puppet using black construction paper and a craft stick for a handle. My students retold the story to the class during a short day when there was not time to start something new. Cookie's Week Retelling Puppet *************************************************************************** We also worked on a interactively written Thinking Map. Students had to describe Cookie for this bubble map. I modified the interactively written part based on students selected. Sometimes, I had them only write the first or last letter they heard in the word while I wrote the middle. The most able students wrote the entire word or most of the word. I followed up this activity with a writing assignment. Since this was the first time students have written a sentence, I gave them a lot of support. They only had to write the last word on their own. I also modified this by allowing more able students to choose the word from the map that they wanted. The others had to copy my example. Then for fun and to practice following directions, I gave them a directed drawing lesson for Cookie. Cookie Writing Page ************************************ We also used coloring pages from Making Learning Fun to make a book. She has other Cookie books available on her site, but I found that they were too difficult for the beginning of kindergarten. This student is very enthusiastically pointing to and reading the sight words he knows!! Link to the Cookie book at Making Learning Fun ************************************************** We did our Cookie paper plate project again this year. This time I used my circle punch to cut out Cookie's green eyes and I used my heart punch to cut out his nose. This was a huge time saver!! The ears were cut by hand. Students drew the mouth and whiskers with a marker. Have fun with Cookie!!