Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Run, Run! As Fast As You Can!

We have been doing a lot of work with the story of The Gingerbread Man!  The kids LOVE this story and have really gotten into reading all the different versions.

These are just some of the books we have read...



Can you believe how many different stories there are?

The Gingerbread Man is the perfect story for us to use when we are learning about story elements.  We have spent a lot of time talking about the difference characters in each story.  We done some comparing and contrasting as well!  We have also talked about the settings of each story and the plot and main idea!  These are all the concepts that the children will need to be able to identify on their own later in the year!

We also got into some Gingerbread Fun of our own!  We made Gingerbread Boy or Girl glyphs.  We had to answer different questions and the answers determined what kind of nose, cheeks, bow, buttons, etc. we would use to decorate our Gingerbread!  We love looking at these and comparing them with our friends!







We also made some Gingerbread ornaments to hang on our trees at home so we would always remember the story!
 


I bet you're hungry for some Gingerbread now!  I know we sure are!

Sunday, December 7, 2014

Thanksgiving

We spent the last few weeks of November learning about the first Thanksgiving.  We were shocked at what life was like on the Mayflower!  We thought they might have eaten pretzels or marshmallows... Boy were we surprised!!

We had a Thanksgiving Feast with Mrs. Smith's class!  They were the Pilgrims and we were the Native Americans.  We presented to each other what we had learned. 

We learned about the Native American's houses, what they wore, and what the kids did for fun.  We learned about Squanto helping the Pilgrims learn to hunt and fish and grow crops.  We also learned about different Native American symbols.  We made signs of these to show Mrs. Smith's class. We worked together to sound out the words!




Now that we are done with them, we have put them into a book!

After our presentation, we had a feast!  Everyone came back to our classroom to eat!  We had made decorations for our tables and placemats for us to use while eating. 




We made costumes to wear for our presentation.  We had headbands and vests that we decorated with Native American symbols.  We also talked about Native American names.  We each picked our own Native American name for the back of our vest!



We had a great time celebrating together!  We hope you had a Happy Thanksgiving!

Sunday, November 30, 2014

Our Apple Project

We have been SO busy working hard and learning that I have been horrible about taking pictures!

BUT... I have taken some!

We finished up our apple tree life cycle project and want to share it with you! 

We worked really hard learning about the life cycle of the apple tree.  We made the different seasons of the tree in the hallway.  That way all of our friends can see and learn too!


We traced our hands to make leaves for the summer tree.


We used a water bottle and paint to make the flowers of the tree for the spring season.


We used real apples that we were investigating to make apple prints for our fall tree.


We used brown paper to make the trees and worked together to write the labels.


We did some other projects including taste testing different colors of apple and graphing our results! 




But without further ado - here's the videos we made to show you what we learned!

Our introduction...



The winter apple tree...



The spring apple tree...



The summer apple tree...


The fall apple tree...


And all about our taste test and graph!


They did a great job! 


Sunday, October 12, 2014

Apples Galore!

We have been learning A LOT about apples!

We have found the answers to lots of our questions in the books we have in our library.  We have learned how apple trees grow, the life cycle of apples, and what happens if you swallow a seed!  We have been most interested in the apple recipes!

Last week we decided to make applesauce!

We looked at different recipes that we found in the books we have.  We also watched some videos about how to make applesauce.  We brainstormed a list of what we needed. 

FINALLY, we were ready to actually MAKE the applesauce!

Everyone helped!  We all got pieces of apple to cut up into tiny little pieces.













Then we put our pieces into a crockpot with some water, cinnamon, and sugar.  We let it cook all day long!  It made the room smell DELICIOUS! 

The best part was tasting it!  Almost everyone wanted to try it.... and said it was GOOD!

We decided that we are very good cooks! 

Thanks to everyone who sent in apples!  This week we plan to taste test different kinds of apples and make some apple prints!  We're also trying to figure out if we can use the ovens in the kitchen to make some other apple goodies!


Sunday, October 5, 2014

Exploration

This past week was filled with lots of exploration!

We found some new friends on the playground!




We were fascinated with these little creatures!  We wanted to bring them inside but decided they were better off living in their natural habitat!

We also started our first unit of exploration.  We voted on different things that we were interested in and wanted to know more about.  Most people said they wanted to learn about APPLES! 

We came up with a list of wonders... Things that we wanted to know about apples.


We came up with a great list of things we wanted to learn!



This will help us plan our apple unit.  We will use books, websites, videos and more to answer our questions. 

We can't wait to get started... we think this is going to be a tasty time!

Sunday, September 28, 2014

Brown Bear Centers and a Special Visitor

This week we started centers! 

We usually will have literacy stations and math stations.  However, for our first attempt at centers we just did one round that was a combination of both literacy and math! 

We have been working on learning to read and spell the color words!  One of the books we read was "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?" by Bill Martin Jr. and Eric Carle.  All of our centers this week focused around Brown Bear! 

At this center, we traced the color words using the correct color crayon.  We also practiced reading sentences using the color words and the animals from the Brown Bear book!


At this center, we rolled a dice with the numbers 1-4 on it.  We then wrote the number in one of the bears on our paper.  This was good practice writing the numbers and recognizing the numbers!


At this center, we chose pictures of the animals from the Brown Bear story.  We counted the number of dots on each and animal and recorded it in the box on our papers.  We then colored the animal the correct color.  This was great practice counting, counting one to one, and writing numbers!


At this center, we used unifix cubes to make patterns!  We were very creative!  We saw lots of AB patterns (red, black, red black).  Some of us got fancy with other kinds of patterns!  We also did some measuring to see who had made a longer pattern and counting to see how many cubes we had used!


At this center, we rolled a dice with different shapes on it.  We then traced the corresponding shape on our paper and colored it in.  This was great practice making the shapes and identifying the shapes of square, rectangle, triangle, and circle. 

At the end of the week we had a visit from our Superintendent, Dr. Clifford!  He talked to us about the 40 developmental assets.  He also talked to us about being pirates and we sang our pirate chant together! 


Sunday, September 21, 2014

Shapes, Lit Lab, and Picture Day... Oh My!

We had quite the busy week!

Last week we talked in depth about the shapes square, triangle, circle, rectangle and hexagon!  We talked about how many sides each shapes has.  Each day we made a different shape person.  This not only helped us learn about the shape but it also was great practice for our fine motor skills! 

Here are some pictures with our square people!











We have a new song that helps us remember the hexagon!  It is super fun... and catchy!  You can check it out here!

Also this week we visited Literacy Lab for the first time!  In literacy lab, we work in small group with a teacher.  This week all of our centers focused on our names.  We worked on writing our names, recognizing the letters in our names, and making those letter sounds. 

In one of our centers, we used cereal to trace our names!  This was more great practice for our fine motor skills!  When we were done with this, we practiced writing our names on dry erase boards.  We really worked on using a capital letter followed by lower case letters.



Another one of our centers focused on finding the letters of our names in magazines!  This was great practice recognizing the letters even when they might look different than what we are used to!




We also found the letters in our names using beads!  This really worked out our fine motor muscles because those beads were small! 






We also spelled our names using letter stamps!  We really talked about using upper and lower case letters and letter names and sounds!



After all that hard work this week, we needed to relax a little and posing for pictures was a fun was to do it!  We are all quite the little shutter bugs!








 Aren't we just the cutest kindergarteners you've ever seen?!?