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!