A Springtime Surprise

Today Jackson's mom brought in his pet ducks Fluffy and Diamond to share with our class! His grandma came and read us a book about baby ducks earlier in the week and this was a great hands-on activity to go along with it! We've also been studying Spring in science class and have learned all about little baby animals!

The children loved getting to pet the fluffy, yellow ducks and many of them were very taken with how cute they were! Some of them even called them beautiful! They peeped and ate crackers and were wonderful guests!

Thank you Jackson for sharing with us!!

Guess who's back!

First off, I apologize for my lack of entries over the past few weeks. As many of you know, I am working on my National Boards this year. This has been an all-consuming task for the past 5 months. It consists of 4 huge entries and an exam. Each entry has very specific instructions and even packing the box has a long list of very specific instructions. While this has been a difficult task that has taken up most of my Saturdays, my Christmas break, and many days in between, it has been such a learning experience for me and has caused me to look at the things that I do in my classroom and try to find new and exciting ways to teach the curriculum to my wonderful kindergarteners. That being said, I mailed my box today!!! Now I just have an exam to take and to wait until November for my results.

Now onto my classroom!

Over the past few weeks, we have been learning about clouds. We learned about the different types of clouds and then we went outside to practice our observation skills. When I asked my children what it meant to observe, one of them said "discover". I love this definition! Each day, we went outside and "discovered" the clouds around us. We sat outside and the children were asked to draw the clouds that they saw in their Cloud Journal. If it was sunny, they should make their picture sunny. If it was rainy, their picture should be rainy. After we observed and discovered, we came in and looked at different pictures and decided what type of cloud it was and wrote that in our Cloud Journal.

Today, we read the book, It Looked Like Spilt Milk, and I let the children go outside and do a little imaginative drawing. They observed for five minutes and then picked a cloud that they wanted to draw and drew it. Then we came in and they had to describe what their cloud looked like. We had ice cream, dinosaurs, and flying saucers! This was such a fun way to end our unit on clouds.

I hope the children have enjoyed going outside and observing as much as I have. There is no better way to teach science than to just get out there and experience it first hand!

Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss!

Last week we celebrated Dr. Seuss's birthday all week long! We had a ball reading some of our favorite Dr. Seuss books and finding fun ways to celebrate.




On Monday we read The Cat In The Hat and journaled about our favorite rainy day activities. We also made a graph of which character was our favorite. The majority of our class liked Thing 1 and Thing 2 because they were silly and did fun things. A smaller number liked Fish because he was trying to keep them out of trouble and , surprisingly, none of them liked the Cat because he was doing bad things and getting them in trouble! (I was SO impressed!!)


On Tuesday we read Fox in Socks and had a crazy sock-feet day. The children enjoyed wearing socks in class and LOVED picking out their craziest ones to wear! We had fun reading the story and getting our tongues all twisted!


Wednesday was "Wacky Wednesday!" The children were able dress wacky tacky and they looked fantastic! Some wore shirts backwards while others wore mismatched shoes and socks. We looked at Dr. Seuss's book, Wacky Wednesday and actually put the pictures of it up on the smart board and the children were able to come up and circle all of the things that were Wacky.


Thursday we read one of my personal favorites, I Wish That I Had Duck Feet. The children laughed at the different animal parts that the boy wanted and then were asked to draw their own pictures and write what they would like to have if they could have any animal parts. They also had to tell me how they would use them.

Friday was a really fun day! We read Green Eggs and Ham and then made our own for a breakfast treat!

I gave the children recipe cards and they had to help me put in order how we should make the eggs and then they got to add the ingredients and scramble up this delicious treat!

We had a wonderful week learning about some of Dr. Seuss's stories. We also practiced some of Dr. Seuss's signature techniques! Dr. Seuss loved to rhyme. We practiced rhyming at puzzle center where the children had to put together rhyming puzzles. We also used rhyming words as our ticket out the door to go to the playground. We also enjoyed watching the video for Horton Hears a Who during lunch time several days.

Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss! We sure did have a ball celebrating!

V is for...

Last week we learned about the letter V. Our week started out with our Valentine's Dance!

This was our second Tea Party for the year. We collected pennies at the door for our charity, Pennies for Peace. We brought one container back to our class and counted almost $22.00! Way to go guys! I can't wait to hear how much was in the other container! I told the children that we could by 2200 pencils with that and they said "WOW, that is enough for a whole school!" In fact, this enough to pay a teacher's salary for 2 weeks or to buy one child's supplies for a whole year! It is amazing how we can do so much with what, to us, is so little!

We had a ball at the dance!

There was dancing..

Food...

And even a dress-up photo booth!

And even a fun dress-up photo booth! Our second tea party signifies us all becoming friends. I could tell that we all are! Children from different classes were playing and dancing together!

Many thanks to all of the parents who put all of this together. It was a WONDERFUL time for everyone!

Even the teachers...

Our Week

This past week we spent some time enjoying the book, Cookie's Week. This book is hilarious! Cookie, a silly kitty, gets into trouble on each day of the week. As we read we discussed calendar concepts like yesterday, today, and tomorrow. The children loved seeing all of Cookie's crazy adventures.

We read Cookie's Week each day and then the children made their own "week" book. We talked about the things that we had done in class each day and the children were asked to draw a picture of something that they did that day either in class or at home and also write a sentence about it. I encouraged them to try and spell things on their own and I was really impressed! We are awesome writers!

Each day we spend time with our calendar. We discuss different upcoming events and important dates to remember. The children often will tell me that they have dance on Tuesdays and will always remind me that we have ice cream on Fridays. It is important for them to understand what the calendar means and why it is important. I always tell them how important it is in case they have somewhere to go or something to do. By working on our "week" books, they were thinking about their days and what each one means to them.

Be sure to check these out when they bring them home! They did a fantastic job!!

Happy 100th Day of School!

Yesterday was our 100th day of school. We did lots of 100 activities to celebrate this fun day! We read one of my very favorite 100 day books, Jake's 100th Day of School by Lester Laminack. Lester was my professor at WCU and is an amazing writer and teacher. No surprise this is one of my favorites! We read the story and we talked about the things that we did that were similar to the things that Jake's class did to celebrate the 100th day.

One thing that we did that Jake's class did was make a 100th day snack. Here is the recipe in case you want to make your own!

10 Marshmallows, 10 Goldfish, 10 pretzels, 10 chocolate chips, 10 raisins, 10 white chocolate chips, 10 chex , 10 cheerios, 10 piece of caramel corn, 10 m&m's

Add them together and you get 100 yummy things to eat!

We counted all the way to 100 this morning by 1's and by 10's. We had been building up to this all year! We also made a 100 chain of 100 links. Each day we would take our links and estimate and measure something in our classroom. Today we put all 100 links together and we went out into our school to measure. We found that the bookshelf in the hall was 100 links, the lunchtables were less than 100 links, and BIG RED (our inside slide) was also shorter than 100 links. Our line was also shorter!

Then the students shared their 100th day projects. Each student was supposed to bring in 100 of anything that they chose, however they chose to share with our class. We had ALL kinds of creative projects to share!

We had a book filled with 100 things we have learned in Kindergarten

We had things made out of 100 legos!

We had 100 seashells collected at grandma's house.

We had collections of 100 pieces of popcorn, 100 stickers, and 100 buttons.

And then we had 100 YUMMY treats... actually 200! Boy they loved eating those!


We also had a great picture of a man fishing made out of snacks!

The Mitten

This week we spent some time getting familiar with the book, The Mitten, by Jan Brett. This is one of my favorite books for winter! I love how silly it is and how true to life parts of it are... how many of you have single mittens at home missing their match?!If you haven't read The Mitten you should definitely check it out!

We read the book together on Monday and then each day a group of students read it as their listening center for the week. After reading, they filled out a sheet with their favorite part. Most of them liked the bear the best!

We also made our own retelling mitten. The children colored and cut out all of the animals and a mitten and then we put them together with a ziploc bag so that the children can retell the story to their friends and families. Be sure to ask them to do this!

On Thursday we did some "Mitten Math". Each table group had a mitten and we estimated how long the mitten was and how many cubes it would hold. Then we actualyl measured using cubes and filled them to the brim. Afterwards , we talked a little bit about what estimating means and how to decide if our estimate was a good one based on how close it was to the real number. This also went along with what we've been learning about more and less because the students had to decide if their estimate was more or less than the real number. We had a lot of fun... who knew you could have fun doing math!?

To end our unit on the mitten, we acted out the story as a class. This gave my students who are more kinesthetic or movement oriented learners a chance to shine!

The kids had a great time cramming into our homemade mitten! I think they will all remember this classic story for a long time to come!