We Are Kindergarteners!

We took some official pics to commemorate our first day as kindergarteners! 

 

Welcome to Our Room!

Welcome to my classroom!  

I've tried to create a warm, relaxing, happy environment for the children!  I love the beach and it shows in my decorating style!

This is what our classroom door looks like!  We have all of our pictures and names on our door!  

This is the sign that is on the other side of our classroom door!

And this is the inside of our classroom!  

This is on the middle of our tables.  The chevron is a different color on each table and that is the color for the table. 

This is part of our behavior system.  We take this basket with us everywhere we go.  Everyone has a clip on the outside of our basket.  That corresponds to the color green.  Everyone starts on green each day.  Green stands for good behavior!

Inside the basket are other signs that correspond to other colors.  If a child is making good choices, they can move their clips up.  Blue stands for great work.  Purple stands for wonderful choices and Pink, the highest, stands for being outstanding choices and being a great role model.

If a child is making not so great choices, they can move down.  Yellow stands for slow down and think about what you are doing.  Orange stands for teacher's choice and means a few minutes spent out of recess or choice time.  Red stands for a parent contact and possible trip to the office.

We are excited for a new year and can't wait to get started with all of our new friends!  Thanks for stopping by!

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!

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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!

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!  

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!