Busy, busy, busy!

Hi everyone!  Things around Kindergarten sure have been busy, although I feel it's been hard to get a rhythm with Hurricane Sandy, Halloween and Election Day, etc.!  I hope all of you that have family and friends in the NY/NJ area are getting back on their feet.  As you probably know, the Jersey shore is near and dear to my heart.  I grew up going there every summer for as long as I can remember and my children love spending time there now.  I am working on finding a way to connect us with some elementary schools in that area so that we can become pen pals.  Hopefully we can send some love their way!  Thank you this month to all of our Veterans.  We look forward to honoring you this month.

This week we read Life in an Ocean.  This non-fiction text gave us a nice change and helped us learn some features of non-fiction text such as a table of contents and a glossary of terms.  We loved sharing all that we already knew about the ocean and learned a few new things.  It was great to practice going back to the text to find our answers.

We used the ocean theme from literacy in math this week as well.  Using ten frames we built sets to match numerals,  The children "fished" a numeral from a bucket and then represented it with fish on their ten frame.  We are now working with the terms "fewer" and "more".  An extension of this activity would be to ask them to represent an amount that was fewer than the number they picked.  You can try this at home, feel free to keep the ocean theme going and use seashells or goldfish crackers.

Our crabs!  The children are so excited to bring these home, but we would like to display them at school for a little longer.  The crab page in our Life in an Ocean book was so exciting and they loved creating these crabs out of clay.  The modeling clay was much harder to work with than playdoh...what a great chance to work those fine motor muscles!

Our Popcorn Word Wall is getting new words on it each week.  These are the words your child should be practicing at home.  I have heard many kids shouting with excitement during "quiet" reading time that they "FOUND A POPCORN WORD!!" in their books, this is wonderful, keep the excitement going!!

While we have moved on from alphabet activities to studying one letter each week (focusing on handwriting, and phonics) we are still engaging in activities that practice alphabetical order and require letter naming.  This was a super fun team activity at the Orange Table.  The kids were singing the alphabet song, working cooperatively and did a great job sorting a full bucket of letters!

Fall fun and more!

On our PM class Late Start day all of our Kindergarten classes got together for a Fall Fun day.  One of our projects was to take a Nature Walk around our school grounds.  The kids were wearing duct tape bracelets (sticky side out!) and as we walked they picked up interesting fall nature items.  Look at all of the wonderful things we found.  We worked on the concept of same and different and worked hard to be scientific observers.  (Don't worry AM class, when it is spring time and your turn for Late Start you will get to take a spring nature walk, I can't wait to see what we collect then!)

We are adding more popcorn words this week... our word wall now has the following words on it: I, am, the, little, to, a and we are beginning to work on color words, this week we added red.  This activity with magnetic letters is called "Mix it and Fix it", the children have to practice arranging and rearranging letters to spell the words.  They can use the checker sheet to be sure they have it correct.  Magnetic letters are so fun, if you don't have them for your fridge they are a great investment, and if your fridge isn't magnetic use a cookie sheet!

We were SO excited to plant bulbs in our school garden last week.  The weather was beautiful and we could almost imagine those daffodils and tulips blooming, but we know it will be hard to wait all winter.

Everyone got a turn to use the garden gloves and tools.  While we were waiting we looked at garden books from our library at the picnic table.

When we got back in from planting in our garden we drew pictures in our journals.  We are practicing labeling our pictures with words.  This writer showed the large dirt pile and the worm we found.  He also wrote the word, "dirt", it is great that this writer could hear all of the consonant sounds in the word!  

In math we are finishing our chapter on the study of numbers from 0-10.  One of the games we played used our  numeral cards, dot cluster cards and unifix cubes.  We started the game by calling out a number, they had to find (or make) that number with all three, then it got challenging... I asked them to make the numeral card show "one more", then have the dot card show "one less" then make the cubes show the "same" as the numeral and so on.  Our brains got quite a workout on the concepts of one more, one less and same.

October is Fire Safety Month, we were so delighted to have a visit from the Fire Departments and loved seeing their big ladder truck.  We enjoyed writing about the visit in our journals.

Popcorn Words and Number Sense

This week has been a busy one, with lots of new learning and fun!

Fix It Duck is a hilarious story by Jez Alborough.  We talked about character  and setting this week.  In our journals we wrote about our houses, since the setting of the story happened in Duck's house and then moved to Sheep and Goat's houses.  Check out some of the other Duck stories by Jez Alborough at the library.

Read Around The Room... One of my favorite activities to get the kids up and moving and learning at the same time is "Read Around The Room".  The children get to use clipboards, this makes them feel very official!  This week I had hidden letter tickets all over the room and they had to find them and record them on their sheet.  For an extra challenge they could find letters anywhere in the room (not just on the letter tickets), wow, we sure have a lot of letters in our room!

Numbers to 5 is our math chapter this week.  This activity helps strengthen number sense in children.  They had a cup with 4 beans in it, each bean was white on one side and red on the other.  They had to "shake those beans" and then spill them out onto their work mat.  They graphed the result each time.  Here are some of the different combinations of 4 that occurred.  It is great practice to try activities like this at home and school to  help the children begin to recognize visual clusters of objects, rather than having to count them each time.  (If you want to make your own version of "Shake Those Beans" you can buy a bag of dried lima beans and use a sharpie marker to write a dot or color one side of each bean... work up to more beans!)

Popcorn Words... Popcorn Words are words that "pop up" everywhere. They are high frequency words that are repeated often in books and all print media (check your cereal box, you’re bound to find a popcorn word!).  Kindergarteners need to have meaningful encounters with the words in order to build connections to other words they already know.   Learning these words will help us to become fluent readers and writers. As new words are introduced, they are added to our "Popcorn Word Wall”   We add one or two words per week to our popcorn wall.    Each time we add a word to the wall we take a close look at it.  We notice things such as how many letters it has in it, we cheer it and clap it or move to it.  Once the children are familiar with the words, we then begin making sentences with our popcorn words and our word families.  We also refer to the words when writing in our journals.  Your child is sure to begin seeing these words “pop” up everywhere.  Encourage them to look for them wherever you go!

Getting into routines and having fun!

We used these puzzles to help us practice sequencing and using the words: first, next and last.  We had some great conversation about why certain things would have to go first... you can't put your socks on after your shoes!

We loved painting this week!  I was so impressed with how well everyone used the paints and what beautiful paintings we have.  We used these vases to make flowers for the bus driver, just like in the story, The Little School Bus

Some of the kids have enjoyed exploring the writing center and then proudly displayed their work.  Great job practicing the alphabet!

Our beautiful sunflowers... even though the fall weather is on it's way we can still enjoy a little be of summer in our hallway.

Geoboards were so fun to explore and create with at the math table.  The conversation about all of the shapes they could build and create was wonderful!

This week we worked more on learning the routines of Kindergarten.  The children learned about "have-to's" and when they can have free choice time.  Our work tables this week were geared toward both our Scott Foresman Reading Street chapter, The Little School Bus, and our Math In Focus chapter on ordinal numbers.  We worked with our "Amazing Words": first, second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth.  We also worked on sequencing events using the words first, next and last.  The kids had a great week! 

First week of school

Mrs. A's favorite flowers are sunflowers!  What a bright and happy way to start the year.  This week we also painted sunflowers to decorate our hallway.

Our first day of school project...it says, "I had a great day in Kindergarten!"  I know I did:)

These are "pattern block monsters that are tap dancing."  What a wonderful and creative idea!  Amazing what we can already do in the first week of school!

We had an amazing first week of school!  The kids are really into the routines of the classroom.  This week we read books about starting school and how much work it takes to get ready for school.  Some of the books dealt with the anxiety we might feel starting Kindergarten.  The books were: Miss Bindergarten Gets Ready for Kindergarten, The Kissing Hand and my favorite, Kindergarten Rocks!  I think we all left this week feeling like Kindergarten Rocks!  Way to kick off a new school year!