Curious in Kindergarten

"But George was curious...." We heard this a lot this week, as our literary unit was on that adorable little monkey. We read about Curious George's adventures at school. the zoo, the ice cream parlor, and the pizza shop.  We caught on to the pattern that George was always getting into trouble, but that somehow it always worked out for good in the end.  We had one of my favorite journal prompts of the year, "Curious George is always getting into trouble. Tell about a time when you got into trouble." Well. after our 'confessional' during carpet time (they were all rather proud to share, actually), the students got to work in their journals. I don't know if you've heard of or have seen the new fad called "pet shaming."  (Here are some examples from the internet).

Well, this new trend is what inspired these pics from the journal writing today...

"I cut my own hair."  (Rather recently, can you tell)?

"I digged a hole."

"I got in trouble by breaking one of my friend's dolls."

"I spray painted my dog blue." (This is my personal favorite).

"I throwed a baseball."

As for the non-journal related activities....this week we focused on the other way to make vowels say their names: vowel teams.  We watched and played along with this activity on starfall. And we watched the wonderful AlphaBlocks on youtube.  You may recall the link from earlier in the school year that we were watching to help us learn the letter sounds.  Well, the British series (which consists of 5 minute episodes) teaches many phonics rules in a very entertaining and memorable way.  So this week, we watched an episode that taught about the ways to make the letter A say its name.  It includes the /ay/ and /ai/ vowel teams, along with the magic e. Trust me, you'll want to watch it for yourself.

In math, we moved on to the nickel. Our nickel chant goes like this;

"Nickel, nickel, thick and fat.

You're worth five cents, I know that."

To help reinforce that a nickel is worth the same as five pennies, the students colored, cut, and glued together five pennies and one nickel for their fun Friday art project.

And now for our centers wrap-up.  In the Number Work center, the students worked with pop cubes to show all the different ways to make/add together numbers up to ten. 

They played a new game in the Math Games center (one that will be featured at our Open House on Tuesday).  It's called "Cover it Up." The students roll 4 dice (think Yahtzee) and use little cubes to cover up the numbers they rolled.  This was a great game for practicing number recognition and the kids loved it.  (PS. Now that our student teacher, Ms. Kendall is leading most of the reading groups, I'm getting to play with the students at free centers and I am really enjoying the one-on-one time I get to spend with them).

The students used letter beads and strings and got to practice both their sight words and fine motor skills in the Word Work center.

A few weeks ago, we began a "Reading Rock-Star" competition between the two classes to help keep them reading while at the Read to a Buddy center.  The students are encouraged to sit "elbow to elbow, knee to knee" and take turns reading to each other. They pull books out of buckets labeled with reading levels. The students know which levels they can read by themselves and stick to books out of those buckets. With every book they read, they get to put a star in the chart. It's working!

And, as always, they put many puzzles together and played to their hearts' delight in the puzzle and block centers.

 We have so many fun things planned for the next two weeks, I can hardly wait to share them with you. But here's a little teaser for next week - we will be playing/learning with toy cars (and it won't be in the block center)! I leave you with our most recent classroom character award recipients. These two beautiful girls, Makiah and Antonella, received the award for trustworthiness. Way to go girls!

A Celebration of Presidents, Regular Routine,and Outside Recess

It feels so good to be back in the real swing of things.  It has literally been since early December since we've had five consecutive days of kindergarten.  We took full advantage of all our time together and had lots of new learning goals.  We read "Abe Lincoln's Hat" throughout the week and worked on finding 'key details' in the text. We listed them on the anchor chart and reviewed them each day.  The students really enjoyed learning about him and should be able to tell you quite a few things about him.  The journal writings were prompted by our readings about Abe.  We learned how Abe loved to tell jokes and how people found him very funny. The students wrote about who made them laugh.  These journal entries were quite adorable.  Another thing we learned was that Abe was a little forgetful with important paperwork and letters so he kept them in his hat. So at the end of the week, the students made Abe's hat and then wrote 2 facts about him on pieces of paper and "stuck" them in the hat. 

Several of our centers were inspired by Honest Abe as well.  The students got to build log cabins (just like Abe) with Lincoln logs.  

They practiced their penmanship by tracing and copying sentences about Abraham Lincoln in the Writing center.

In the Math Games center, they spun and added pennies to their ten frame mats, trying to beat their partner to 20 cents.  We had been struggling to get a handle on adding one more; what that meant, what that looked like. This game was a great visual for the students.  Plus, they were playing with MONEY which was sure to keep their attention.

 

The other centers included making CVC words with letter unifix cubes in the Word Work center, reading/playing on raz-kids.com at the computer center, and playing a ten frame/numeral memory game in  Number Work.

 

Whole group learning time has been jam-packed with new music videos and games.  This week we focused on the long vowel sounds that are created with the Super E (aka Magic E and Silent E).  Here are links to the catchy songs/videos that got us familiar with said 'e.'

   In math, we have been playing some pretty cool games to help us with our addition facts. They can't get enough of this Penguin Game. They also really like this Shark Numbers game which helps them recognize numbers in the teens and twenties as groups of tens and ones.        

    To build up and prepare for today's big sight word test, we played Quiz Quiz Trade with our sight words a few times this week.  By the way, both classes had big gains in their sight word recognition today.  I am so proud of them and I am so glad to get back on track with our reading.

 

    Of all that we accomplished this week, I think what I am most excited about is that we got to enjoy OUTDOOR RECESS!!!!  We have had indoor recess for the last 3 months.  I try to keep it fun and creative but nothing really compares to being free to run and play in the fresh air. I leave you with a few pics of their jubilation.

 



When the 100th Day Meets Valentine's Day

I meant to look quizzical here, but it came off more as if I'm

pondering if we would ever see the 100th day of school.

We began the month of February celebrating the upcoming 100th day of school.  It took us 2 weeks to get there, but we finally made it!  All of our whole-group reading and writing times and many of our centers were centered on the number 100. 
    We began the week by bringing in our bags of 100 things.  The students wrote in their journals about what they brought and we displayed them on the hallway bulletin board for the whole school to see. 

Then there were three more days of snow........



After that (it was a Friday)  we read the book, Bunny Money (a Max and Ruby book) and the students discussed and wrote about what they would do with $100.  I can tell you this, we don't have a lot of 'savers' in either class. (Then there was one more day of white stuff).....

The third day of this unit was the actual 100th day. The students made art out of the number 100

and we hopped 100 feet down the hallway. 

We counted to 100 in a whole new way with a music video from youtube.  And we wrote 100 words in a 'write the room' activity. (These are also on display in our hallway). 

The next day we counted 100 seconds.  Afterward, we discussed what we could and couldn't do in 100 seconds on an anchor chart.  I posed two questions centered on one situation.  (Could you have a birthday party? Could you sing the birthday song?  Could you eat a French fry? Could you eat your whole dinner? Could you play a game of baseball? Could you run the bases?)  Then the students wrote about what they could do in 100 seconds.  Our final writing activity came after reading a story about a character who travels to many different places. The students wrote about where they would want to spend 100 days. One student said they'd spend it at school.  Awww. 
       And now for the centers....The students used cups to make a 100 cup tower in the block center.

  It's amazing how something so cheap and simple can bring such joy and entertainment. 
In the word work center, I tried something else with cups that was...well.....less successful.  I realized after the first day that it was an activity that would be better for first grade. Each sight word was written on a cup, some more than once.  Other cups had easy to read/recognize words such as dog, cat, mom, dad, sat, ran, etc.  The students were supposed to put a sentence together, then try to stack the sentence up to read properly.  Fail.  After two days of centers, I made cards with a picture of a sentence structure already on them so all they had to do was find the words and stack them exactly how the card showed.  Fail again.  There were just too many cups. It was overwhelming. I will try this again, but with fewer (a lot fewer) cups and in a more structured way.

In the Number Work center, the students had to match up tetris-style shapes to a hundred chart.  And they raced their partner to 100 in the Math Games center.

 

And, instead of puzzles this week, the students made original creations out of 100 q-tips. Again, cheap and simple=tons of fun.

Our Fun Friday was extra fun as it was Valentine's Day. This was the first year I let the children look through their boxes before taking them home and I will do this every year from now on.  The joy on their faces was priceless.  It was like Christmas morning in our classroom! I'll leave you with pics from our Valentine's activities.  

We did this activity after playing Make a Valentine on starfall.com



The AM class made heart animals.  The PM class didn't get to make these
because of the early dismissal.



Subtracting as we ate M&Ms.



Kennedy was THRILLED with every Valentine.

We estimated (made a careful guess) how many candy hearts were in the jar.
  The winner got to take them home!

Caitlyn won in the morning class.

Khabria won in the afternoon class.