Thanksgiving Feast

Wow!  I apologize for getting these pictures up so late!  Before the Thanksgiving break, we celebrated by having a Kindergarten Thanksgiving Feast!  And a FEAST it was!  We kicked off our feast by eating a full turkey dinner with turkey and all the sides you can imagine.  (I think it was better than my own family's Thanksgiving!)  Then, we made our own butter by shaking heavy whipping cream until our arms hurt.  Finally, we read a story about the first Thanksgiving and made a retelling bracelet that we could share with our families.  It was such fun.  Thank you so much to all of our parents that contributed and helped make our day a success. 

Hurray! Haden's Birthday!

Happy Birthday Haden!  Haden celebrated his birthday on November 7th.  Mrs. Raders came in to read us The Rainbow Fish.   Haden was also our Kinderowl of the Week last week.  We loved seeing his show and tell, including the magic trick!  Over the weekend, Haden had the opportunity to take Hoot the Owl with him.  Read below to see what his family did!

Friday:  I spent Friday nite with my grandma.  Hoot watched us play with toys.
Saturday:  I had a futbol birthday party with my frinds.  Hoot was happy when I made a tothdown!
Sunday:  Hoot had a fun day with my family.   We played, read boks, watched tv, and went to church.

Sounds like a great weekend Haden!

We LOVE Centers!

While Mrs. Kroeger has been working with students one-on-one this week, Kindergartners have been hard at work in their math and literacy centers.  Here are some of the activities we are working on!

Simple Sums:  Students played with a partner.  Each partner rolled two dice, added the numbers together and recorded their answers on their "Ssssimple Sums" board.  The first one to fill their snake won the game! 

Simple Sums

Leaf Patterns:  Kindergartners created a variety of patterns using different colored leaves.  They then needed to label their pattern:  AB, ABC, ABB, AAB.

 

Before, After, Between:  We have been working hard on developing our number sense.  Kindergartners played this game in a group of four.  Each player receives two cards.  The first player draws a 3rd card and decides if that card "fits" between the first two.  For instance, if a student has a 3 and a 8 and draws a 5, this number fits between.  They would then record this set of numbers on their paper, keep the 3 cards and then draw two new cards.  The game continued until no more cards were left!

 Stamping Fun:  Students stamped the letters that are in their name and not in their name.  This was one of our favorite centers (and the messiest!)

That Hexagon is a Tricky Hexagon

That hexagon is tricky, isn't it?  It is for our Kindergartners anyways!  The hexagon is commonly confused with the octagon.  Knowing that some of our shapes are still tricky for the kiddos in Room 207, we have been reviewing shapes recently.  I introduced my Kindergartners to my friend, SHAPE MONSTER....

We practice "feeding" our shape monster shapes for breakfast!  The Kindergartners LOVE feeding him and never forget to remind me that he is probably hungry!

We also learned to play "I Have, Who Has:  Shapes".  Each student is given one or two cards (see below).  The first student begins by saying, "I have the red circle.  Who has the green square?"  Then, the person with the green square on the top reads their card.  We continue until all cards have been read!  This is a great game to not only review shapes, but it develops listening skills and reviews colors.

 

On another note, we celebrated Aidan's birthday today!  Mrs. Harnish came in to read us a story.  She read The Mixed-up Chameleon, which is one of Aidan's favorite books.  Happy birthday Aidan!

Kindergartners never cease to amaze me. During Snack & Chat today, some friends decided it would be fun to make patterns out of their snacks!  One friend started...and it quickly spread throughout the room.  Those who hadn't eaten all their snacks began frantically creating any patterns they could make.  Others whose snacks were gone began making patterns out of markers, crayons, anything around!  I LOVE seeing my Kindergartners take initiative in their own learning.  The shouts of "I made an AB pattern!" and "Mine is an ABC pattern!" melted my heart.  Way to go Kindergartners!

Where's My Mummy?

On Wednesday, we read the book Where's My Mummy? and talked about making connections.

Where's My Mummy? is about a little baby mummy who can't find his big mama mummy.  He goes on a hunt for her and meets all kinds of ghoulish friends along the way.  This story ends with the little baby mummy finding his mummy, who kisses and hugs him because he feels sad.  We talked about how to make connections to text and then wrote about what our "mummies" do when we are sad.  Then, we practiced our fine motor skills by creating mummies out of white strips of construction paper!  It was a blast!

 I learned that lots of our "mummies" give us hugs, kisses and even chocolate milk when we are sad!  Sounds like we have great "mummies" for mommies! 

Journal Writing

In Kindergarten, we work hard on improving our handwriting.  We work not only on using our "owl eye" (more information on that soon), but using phonetic or "inventive" spelling.  This means that we work on stretching our words out with our pretend rubber bands, listening to the sounds we hear and then writing those letters.  Although we work on this during more structured times of the day, Kindergartners have become very excited to work on their own writing pieces during their free time.  Check out some of this great writing below!

Chase wrote "I like to play on the playground."  GREAT job sounding out "playground"!

We have also been working on drawing pictures that are detailed and use the "right" colors.  We also have been talking about how to draw a picture of a person including all body parts.  Brooke did a great job showing us!

"family"

Caden and I worked to stretch out the word "dinosaur".  Using inventive spelling, we wrote "dinosor".  However, Caden realized soon after that we had spelled it incorrectly when he was reading a dinosaur book.  He corrected his journal to the "right" spelling and changed the "o" to "au".  It was a great lesson for all of us to remember to use references around the classroom when writing!

Great job editing your work, Caden!

To keep your excited about writing, try the following list of ideas:

• give your child blank paper to make a book.
• help write the grocery list for you
• use your sight word flashcards to generate sentences using words your child can already read and spell (i.e.  I like ___.  I can go to the ____.  Look at the ___.  I see a ___.)
• draw a picture and label it (i.e. draw a picture of a dog and label the parts:  ears, paws, head, eyes, etc.)

Most importantly, remember that spelling words correctly is not the focus in Kindergarten.  Encourage your child to write the sounds they hear and can identify.  For some children, this may be only the beginning sound.  Other students may be ready to stretch out longer words.  Make it fun and exciting and be prepared to watch your child take off!

Pumpkins, Pumpkins, Pumpkins!

Isn't this the best time of year? Here in Room 207, we are learning all about pumpkins!  We have been able to incorporate this into our science, reading and writing.  We have been reading several pumpkin books such as From Seed to Pumpkin and A Day at the Pumpkin Patch.

After reading the book From Seed to Pumpkin, we matched sentence strips to pictures that retold how a pumpkin grows.  During this time, we also worked on one-to-one matching (pointing to the words while when we say them) and finding sight words within our sentences.

 Today, we read the book A Day at the Pumpkin Patch.  Afterwards, we thought about all the things we learned and wrote about them on small squares of paper.  Students were given three options to demonstrate their new knowledge:  draw a picture, draw a picture and label it with a word, or write a sentence.  This allowed for students to work up to their comfort level as we are learning how to apply our knowledge of letters and sounds to our writing.  Check out this great work!

Ellie and Caden told us that pumpkins have flowers before they become pumpkins.

Brooke told us that pumpkins have seeds and Aidan told us how pumpkins turn green first before they turn orange!

 We also presented our October Family Projects!  Wow!  Students spent a great deal of time working with their families to create these pumpkins!  Thank you for taking the time to spend with your child.  Each student is truly so excited to share their project with their friends.  Pictures to be posted soon!