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!

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!

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!