Friday, December 27, 2013

The Christmas Sing

Our class was chosen to sing last week during the annual Senior Citizen's Luncheon that is held at our school!  The kids worked really hard learning the songs!  They were really excited to wear the reindeer shirts and perform!  And they sure looked cute doing it!



Weren't they darling?!?

And here is a little funny to go with it...

One of the children (who shall remain nameless) says rather loudly as I am placing them in their places on the stage, "Hey Look!  That lady has blue hair!"  HA!  Of course, any more blue hair is pretty common... and actually in style!  So maybe it was a compliment!


Tuesday, December 3, 2013

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving!

We had a wonderful time celebrating Thanksgiving in our classroom!  We were so excited to have a feast with another class!

We made placemats by doing an ABC pattern around the edge of a paper and then making a turkey handprint in the middle!  We made centerpieces by twisting a paperbag into a fall tree and listing what we are thankful for!  These looked really nice on our tables!


Our class played the part of the Pilgrims and Mrs. Roland's class played the part of the Native Americans!  We invited them to join us in a feast of Thanksgiving!  We dressed like Pilgrims and they dressed like Indians!

Our class had been learning about pumpkins so we did a little reserach on pumpkin recipes!  We voted and pumpkin cupcakes won!  So that is what we made!  Everyone got to help make them and everyone put icing on two cupcakes!  We made 6 dozen!!!  

We had other yummy things at our feast like turkey, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, green beans, corn, and lots of deserts!  We made labels for our food so everyone would know what each dish was!


The children were SO EXCITED about the feast!  They worked so hard planning it and preparing for it that by the time we were ready to eat they were ready to burst!!  Both classes ate in our room (the food was in Mrs. Roland's class)!  I was shocked that all 60 kids fit so well!  They had a great time just sitting and talking with one another!  They were so, so cute!






We spent time learning about the Pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving.  The children were shocked to learn about the lives of Pilgrim children!  They could not believe that they did not have a Christmas tree or presents!  They found this very sad!  

We talked about similarities and differences between life now and life then.  We all agreed that we were really happy to be alive today!  


We also learned about the Native Americans!  We made our own teepees out of ice cream cones, pretzels, and chocolate frosting!  YUM!  


Thank you so much to everyone who helped out by sending in items for us to use and goodies for us to eat!  And a big THANK YOU to those who volunteered to come in and serve food!  It would not have been as successful without your help!  

I hope you had a wonderful holiday!  


Sunday, November 3, 2013

Leaves and Literacy


 We have been doing a lot of leaf investigations in our class!  The children have been really interested in the changing leaves ever since the trees on our playground started to turn color.  And who could blame with beautiful leaves like this?


           

We decided to learn what kind of trees we have on our playground and in front of the school.  We discussed how we could learn this... through books!  We had lots of books in our classroom library that we used to do some research.  We also used the internet!  

After we learned what kind of trees we have, we decided to make a book!  We went to each tree and chose a leaf and took a picture.  We then worked together to write a book about the trees!  It is now finished and we plan on sharing it with other classes!  We did a great job!

We also have loved playing in the leaves outside!


 
 

 


We also have enjoyed inspecting the insects we have found outside, too!


Of course, it isn't all play!  We each chose a favorite leaf and then sorted and graphed them by color!


We have also made our own leaves and written about our favorite leaves!  

In addition to the leaf learning we have been doing, we also have been working on literacy!  Here are some of the literacy stations we have been working on...


This is a Pete the Cat syllable sort!  We counted the syllables in different items in Pete the Cat book and then graphed them by the number of syllables!


In this literacy station, we worked on spelling the color words.  We are getting really good with those!


With this station, the children matched letters to pictures starting with that sound.  They then traced and wrote the letters in ABC order.

 

This station involved determining the beginning sound of the pictures and then place the correct letter in that box.  There were color word pages, too!  The children spelled the color words with the letter beads.


This station asks the children to dump the letters and then put them in ABC order!  They then fill in the blanks on an ABC order page.  This helps with letter writing practice as well as letter identification.



The girls in this station are working on putting puzzles together.  They are matching the upper and lower case letters!


This is our name center!  They are working on sorting the names of the people in our class by the number of letters they have in their names!  It's amazing how quickly they learn to read the names of their friends!

We are ready to begin new math and literacy stations this week!  We are also beginning to learn about pumpkins!  We can't wait to carve them and see what's inside!

Sunday, October 13, 2013

Beautiful Faces and Literacy Night

Last week I posted about exploring different shades of color to paint our faces and using mirrors to help us draw our features as close to "real life" as possible.  Here are the finished products!


 



I love these cute little faces!  They did such a great job trying to draw themselves just how they look!

Last week we had a literacy night at school called The Magic of Books!  It was so much fun!

Students were spilt into different groups and rotated through different literacy activities.  They made books, listened to stories and even got to sing and dance to one of our favorite children's books!

The night started with a magician!  It was standing room only!



Here is a video of one group singing to The Very Hungry Caterpillar!



The kids got in on the preparation for the night by making scenes from The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle in art class!  I was blown away by their work!



   
































Didn't they do a great job?!?

Eric Carle is on of my favorite authors and illustrators.  We will be talking about him and learning about how he does his art later in he year!

This is a great book to use to practice sequencing and retelling!  These are both skills that the children will need to be able to do before first grade!





We will have another "fun night" at school in the winter!  The next one will focus on math... and there are some super fun plans in the works for that one, too!  You won't want to miss it!


Monday, October 7, 2013

Shades of Kindergarten

Last week we continued our color exploration by doing some fun activities!

We experimented with mixing colors again!  But this time we used ICING instead of paint!  Icing tastes MUCH better!



We started with three scoops of white icing and used food coloring to make them red, blue and yellow. Then we mixed the colors together to create our own color wheel made of icing!


The best part was eating the finished product!  YUM!!

We worked together to spell the color words to make color math problems!  We are going to put these in the hall with our color wheels so we can share what we have learned with our fellow students!


(At the bottom of this picture is the word "honesty".  This is the first of (some) of the 40 developmental assets that we will be learning about this year!  More on that later...)

We also are working together to make a rainbow!  We are including different shades of the colors.  We are not finished yet but we are working on it!


Our color unit also included a discussion about shades of skin color!  During our name game, we talk a lot about drawing each person correctly.  That means using the right color shade for skin as well as hair, eyes, and more.  I've been VERY impressed with the improvement that the students have shown in their illustrations!  I love the details they are using in their pictures!  This will serve us well when we start Writer's Workshop next week!

 Table 4 working on the Name Game!

We started by mixing different colors together to make shades of skin color.  We talked about what color we need more of to make a specific shade darker or lighter.  Then we painted our blank faces!



Next we read the book, Two Eyes, A Nose and A Mouth.  We really focused on the way faces are really shaped.  We talked about how to draw eyes and noses and mouths.  We also talked about the correct colors to use.  No one has a purple nose!


Finally, we used little mirrors to look at our faces and then we drew what we saw on the faces we had painted.  

 

 


Our finished faces will on display on our classroom door!  I will post a picture of that as soon as we get it finished!  

It's been a busy few weeks working on our color exploration!  We have leaned a LOT about color!  We continue to work on spelling our color words!  You can find our color word songs on Youtube by searching Kindergarten Color Word Songs.  Your child can tell you which songs are the ones we sing!  

Stay tuned for updates on our math stations, literacy stations, fall exploration and the 40 developmental assets!