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?!? 

Sunday, September 14, 2014

Chicka Chicka Boom Boom!

Chicka Chicka Boom Boom!  Look Who Is In Our Room!


We read the the book Chicka Chicka Boom Boom by Bill Martin Jr and John Archambault.  This is one of our favorite books! 

We decided to make our own Chicka Trees!  We crumpled our brown rectangles to make them look more like tree bark.  Then we added the leaves to our trees. 

Next we talked about the letters in our names!  Each person got the letters in his or her name and had them climb up the tree that they made!

Finally, we counted the letters in our names! 




We did a great job!  This was one of our first projects and we spend a lot of time talking about how to use the glue and scissors.  This was great fine motor practice to strengthen our fingers! 

We also really enjoyed working with the letters in our names and comparing them to the letters in our friend's names! 

We have really been focusing on our names!  We also read the book The Wheels on The Bus!  We read different versions of this book, too!  We really liked The Seals on the Bus by Lenny Hort!  It was really funny!  We also enjoyed The Wheels on The School Bus by Mary-Alice Moore. 


We made our own school buses to go with these books.  Again, we worked hard to strengthen our fine motor muscles with all the cutting!  This was also great practice with listening and following directions! 

We then added words to our buses! We took the first letter in our names and used it in a line from the story.  For example, my bus would say "The wheels on Mrs. Addington's bus goes Mumpity Mump Mump!" 


We had a lot of fun going around the room and reading each person's sentence! 

This was great practice for letters and letter sounds! 

We have really been working hard!  But having a great time as we do it!

Sunday, September 7, 2014

No, David! Our First Project

Last week, we read the books No, David and David Gets In Trouble by David Shannon. 



David tends to do lots of things that he shouldn't do!  We talked about his behavior and then sorted behavior by things that would make you a peacemaker and things that would make you a peacebreaker.  We decided our classroom would be a much happier place if everyone tried their bests to be peacemakers!!


Then we made our own Davids!  This was great practice for us with our cutting and gluing skills!  We also really had to listen to the directions to make David the right way!  They turned out great!





                                                      This activity was courtesy of Julie Lee's Kindergarten!