Baseball Unit and literacy centers

Last week we had so much fun with our baseball unit!!! I LoVe baseball! And it's easy to tranfer my love of the sport to my little Kinders;) If I love, then they love it!!  I should also tell you that we live in Illinois. When you say "Illinois" what's the 1st thing that comes to mind???? Chicago, right? Well, we live about 5 hours away from Chicago. We are actually considered Metro St. Louis. We live about 30 minutes from STL...so MOST people around here are CARDINAL fans!!! Cubs=BOO, HISS!!!!! (This is the perfect age to brainwash them:)
My MOST favorite part of this unit was making our Albert Pujols pics!!!
Here he is:

Isn't he awesome!!LOL! If you love him as much as I do, leave me a comment with your email and I would be happy to send you the instructions. I'm thinking it should really work for any ball player-just change the hat/jersey colors and skin tone, if needed.

We also made these really simple baseballs. I gave each kiddo a circle to cut out. Then, we drew the seams on with glue and sprinkled red glitter on them! Takes no time at all and they're super cute!

Here's a pic of our hallway!

We made a is/has/can chart. I got this idea from Deanna Jump's blog! http://mrsjumpsclass.blogspot.com I'm sure if you're looking at my link, you probably already follow her-since she has about 1,000 followers:) But, here's her link--just in case:) She's AMAZING!!!!

Here is some of our writing that we did after we made our poster. Kiddos had to draw and label a pic of Albert. Then, they had to write 3 things about him.

This kiddo took her ideas from the chart....

This kiddo decided to go with totally different ideas:) I ♥ Kinder writing!!;)
Here are a couple of other fun activities that we did:

We cut out bats and the kiddos went around and asked for all of their friends' autographs:)

This is a sequencing activity for "Take Me Out to The Ballgame". We always stick the pics on a paper plate. They use the ballplayer on the string to move around the plate to tell the story. On the back of the plate, we glue the lyrics to the song. I found this activity in a Mailbox Teacher's Helper magazine. Not sure what year it's from?

Here are some simple pennants you can make. It's just a large triangle with a 1 inch strip down the side and decorated with some little clipart.

Last but not least, you have to have Cracker Jacks!!! When we sing the song, I always ask the class what Cracker Jacks are and I'm always amazed that NO ONE knows!!! If you have a rainy Friday, like we did and you can't go out to play wiffle ball, a GREAT little movie to watch while they eat their Cracker Jacks is called Everyone's Hero!! You can usually find this cute baseball movie at Walmart if you search in their huge $5 "Dump bin"...I think that's what they called it:)

And of course, we had to graph our Fav team!! (I still have 3 kiddos to work on:)

These pics show the backs of our jerseys and the hats that we made:)
Here are our Lit centers:

This is not the greatest pic, but you can find this literacy center game at: http://www.makinglearningfun.com/themepages/BaseballWordFamilies.htm 
I bound the gloves together and glued the baseballs on clothespins. (Use E6000)!! Best glue EVER!)

Click on the image above to get a copy of the response sheet I made for this center from google docs. Write a word under the correct family and color smile if it's a real word and frown if it's silly word.

This one's called "baseball change-ups" they have to build the word that's on the baseball. Then make a new word by changing one letter. In the picture above they are changing "net" to "vet". You can get this center at my Teachers Pay Teachers store. ***I am revising this center! Hopefully, it will be up again soon:)***

And here is the last center that we did. It is a sentence building center. The kiddos had to spin each spinner on the board. They then put it all together to make a sentence. The recorded the sentence in their response book and illustrated it.

Wow!! Sorry, this has gotten to be a really LONG post!!! But, like I said, this is one of my FAV units and I wanted to share all of my ideas with you:) Hope you found some stuff you can use!;) Have Fun!

GO CARDS!!!!!!!

P.S. It just so happens that there is a double giveaway at KindergartenWorks!! AND one of the items is a BASEBALL themed site word game from Mrs. Wills!!! Click on the "Doublegiveaway" button above to check it out!!!