It's My 2 Year Blog-iversary!

I can't believe it is nearly my 2 Year Blog-iversary!

My blogged launched on November 25, 2013 with much HELP and THANKS to Kourtney Payton of Mrs. Payton's Precious Kindergarteners!

I was C-L-U-E-L-E-S-S on where to even begin...but Kourtney took the reigns and walked me through it step-by-step until it was published...and did I mention I have NEVER met her and we live over 500 miles apart?!

 So now it is my time to offer THANKS and gratitude!

To help me celebrate my 2 years as a blogger I have a fun Thanksgiving retelling activity for free!

Two years ago, right about the time I launched my blog, I found this First Thanksgiving retelling bracelet from Linda Ferber on Teachers Pay Teachers:

At the time I was co-teaching with our building's ESL teacher and thought it would make a great activity for us to do with the children to help with language and retelling.

We made these little baggies with all they would need and a copy of the poem so that parents would know what the bracelet was for:

They L-O-V-E-D it!

I did it again last year- and again- a hit!

(2 of my girls wanted to model their bracelets with mine- and that is a rare and vintage pumpkin pie playdough ring by the way!)

Fast forward to this year...

I again have a class of predominately ESL children (13 of my 20 come from Spanish speaking homes).  We have been working on retelling in Readers Workshop, but it has been a hard skill for them to understand and master.

I remembered this activity and thought about how I could tie it to a book to help them associate the 'retelling' with retelling a story.

So I created this reader!

It has the 'bracelet clues' on top and then the information and picture clues beneath it!

And I have decided to put this book up for FREE on my blog as my 'blog'-iversary gift to you!

Simply download and print the pages and collate them.

If your copy machine collates and staples, even better- but if not, just put a staple in both places shown below:

Then cut the pages in half and you have 2 books ready to go! 

My son, who is also in kindergarten, gave it a test run for me!  I wanted to have it out for you in time to use for Thanksgiving and was afraid if I waited until I did it with my class and got the pictures up it would be too late!

First we went through the beads and colored the tops to match what beads we would be using on the retelling bracelet.

Then he colored each page

Cover:

Page 1: 

Page 2: 

Page 3: 

Page 4: 

Page 5: 

Page 6: 

Page 7: 

Page 8:

Then it was time to make the bracelet to retell the story:

And he read each page before he added the bead

When it was all done he then used just the bracelet and bead color 'cues' to help him retell the story of the First Thanksgiving!

Here is a video of him reading and then retelling!  

I didn't video him making the bracelet because it would've been too long but he did that prior to reading.

Think this is something your students would love and/or benefit from?!

This is all you need:

1. Download the book for FREE here (or click any of the pictures in the post)

2. If you'd like a copy of the free retelling poem to tell you the colors, you can find it here (or you can use the pictures from this post to guide you)

3. Pipe cleaner and/or piece of yarn with the end taped for easier threading for each child

4. The following pony beads for each student

*3 brown

*3 blue

*1 green

*3 white

*1 orange

*1 yellow

*1 red

Give your students multiple opportunities to practice retelling using both the book and bracelet so that by the time they take it home before Thanksgiving they will be able to retell to family and holiday guests with ease and confidence!

If you need additional 'First Thanksgiving' fun, my students loved these 'sticker' stories we did last year:

and you can find all of these Thanksgiving resources in my TpT Store:

I will be blogging about a Thanksgiving Dinner plate craft and writing activity soon too

, so be sure to swing on by again!

If you don't already follow my blog via Blog Lovin' you can click HERE to follow!

They will send you an email each time I post something new!

So THANK YOU for helping me celebrate 2 years of blogging!  I have 'met' some incredible educators through blogging and am amazed at what a wonderful world it is!

Until next post,