The Mitten by Jan Brett is a winter read aloud classic! We love having a The Mitten week every year in kindergarten, and these The Mitten activities are perfect for extending the fun into every subject area!
The Mitten Book Response Activities
Of course we read The Mitten all week! It’s a story that students never get tired of and we can use it to work on so many comprehension skills.
We start with making predictions:
What will happen when the mouse wiggles into the mitten?
Then, we talk about the characters in The Mitten. We got to practice phonetic spelling with this anchor chart.
Students practiced identifying the animals that were in this story. They sorted the animals that went into the mitten and glued them on their mitten.
Students also got to be illustrators! They colored a background to match the setting in the story.
The Mitten Sequencing Activities
The Mitten is the perfect story to work on sequencing and retelling. Just sequencing the animals alone is HARD work!
We do a picture retell of the story together. If you want to reuse these year after year, you could laminate and out magnets on the back. Then, you can retell on a white board.
These would also be perfect for a retelling literacy center!
Students made their own picture retell using sentence strips. I don’t know what it is about sentence strips, but they just make everything so much more exciting.
The Mitten Poem for Shared Reading
For shared reading, we read our My Mitten poem all week. This is an original poem written by me!
Throughout the week, we can find and highlight sight words, phonics patterns, and draw parts of the poem.
Students also get an emergent reader version of the poem that they get to keep in their book boxes.
Who Is In My Mitten? Writing Activity
Clue writing is one of my favorite ways to practice informational writing. Students have to think of 3 clues to describe their hidden animal. Then, they take turns reading their clues to the class.
Can you guess who is hiding in these mittens?
I like these writing pages because they’re differentiated for my different levels of writers.
The Mitten Math Activities
What can fit inside my mitten? I love this activity for practicing estimation, number sense, and counting.
It is super easy to differentiate. Just use bigger or smaller blocks!
We also practice measuring our friends’ with mittens. Students lay on the ground and their friend measures them by laying the mitten counters end to end next to them.
This math activity is so much fun and it fills time. ????
The Mitten STEM Project
Building a shelter is one of our science standards in kindergarten. This STEM project gives students a connection to that project.
The animals just wanted to stay warm in the mitten! But they didn’t fit. Can you build a shelter to keep them warm and safe?
You can give students any materials you have around the room to use. They will get creative with this!
Literacy Centers
Literacy centers is one of our favorite times of the day, so I definitely wanted to incorporate the Mitten theme.
Can you even have mitten centers without a mitten match up? Students will match the rhyming words to make a mitten match.
For this center, students will spin a sight word, find it on a mitten, and color it. This page is editable so you can choose the words you need!
Our writing center is always a top choice for literacy centers. I added a variety of The Mitten themed writing activities to our writing center.
Students also get to practice sentence building and reading fluency with this pocket chart center.
I think this is one of my favorite weeks of the entire year!
Do you do a mitten week with your students? You can grab all of these fun activities in both printable and digital form HERE!
