October 29, 2010

Thank you!

Thank you Mrs. Ceru and Mrs. Evans for planning such a fantastic party!  Also, thank you to everyone who donated items or helped at the party!

Tuesday's Tornado Warnings

Everyone did a phenomenal job on Tuesday when we had to go to our safe location due to the weather.  We spent quite a while in our safe positions and I was SO impressed with your children!  Feel free to take this opprotunity to talk about/practice what your family does at home in case of a tornado.


Wild Learning in Kindergarten

*Heart word for the week: see

*Our focus book for the week was called, What I Like.  With this book, we worked on asking questions while we are reading.  We were also introduced to identifying the characters.

*Almost every morning, we come in and write in our journals.  We spent this week working on posters to show our knowledge about pumpkins.

*During our formal writing time, we wrote stories about spiders and bones.  We practiced stretching out words and using our heart word like.

*We had a busy week in math.  We were introduced to a tens frame (10 boxes- 5 on top, 5 on bottom).  We explored them and used it to match quantities to numerals.  We also were introduced to creating specific shapes on geoboards and then recording these designs on a piece of paper.  We were also introduced to tallying with popsicle sticks this week.  We used our knowledge of tens frames, numerals, and tallies to play a game of bingo.

*Our theme for the week was bats, skeletons, and spiders.  We learned a bit about each and did some activities surrounding those themes.  At our community centers, our dramatic play was turned into a bat cave.  We also made some spiders out of our hand prints and skeletons out of macaroni.

*Our science center had some slime in it.  We discovered that it was hard when we would squeeze it and then it would melt through our fingers when we stopped squeezing it.

*We acted out the nursery rhyme, Little Miss Muffet, throughout the week.  We also practiced finding spaces and words within the nursery rhyme.

 *We had a fantastic Halloween Party!!

 

October 22, 2010

 Wild Learning in the Kindergarten Jungle!


*Heart word of the week: a

*Our focus book of the week was called, Peter's Chair.  With this book, we practiced recognizing the story structure (beginning, middle, end) and we practiced making predictions.

*We wrote a nonfiction story during our formal writing time.  We wrote about the life cycle of a pumpkin.  I have sent many papers home involving our writing.  You may notice that you can read parts of it and not others.  That is completely normal and part of the developmental process of learning how to write.  We are currently working on writing the sounds that we hear in words.

*In math, we practiced a lot with patterns.  We were each assigned one out of two or three animals.  Each animal had a sound and motion.  We then put ourselves into a pattern and went through the line making the animal noise.  With this, we practiced creating, extending, and naming the patterns (AB pattern, ABC pattern, AAB pattern, etc.).  We also practiced the same skills with cubes.

*During Daily 5, we learned a new activity called Word Work.  With this new activity, we will be working with words and experimenting with them.  With our current specific word work, we are matching letters and/or writing words (names, heart words, etc.)

*In science, we continued to practice with the life cycle of a pumpkin and we practiced recognizing some of the various parts of a pumpkin.

*We explored many of the same community centers this week.  One of our new centers was our marble run.  With this activity, we practiced our construction and problem solving skills.  At our fine motor center, we worked on our gluing and folding with a pumpkin life cycle project.

*Scrubby Bear from the Red Cross came and taught us about hand washing.

*We enjoyed our field trip to the pumpkin patch!

*Last Friday, we met our 4th grade buddy class.  They read some stories to us, asked us questions, and helped us look for heart words in the books.

Pumpkin Shakes!

Here is our pumpkin shake recipe if anyone is interested!

Ingredients:
1 can solid pack pumpkin
Skim milk
Vanilla frozen yogurt

Directions:
1. Allow frozen yogurt to soften slightly
2. Scoop out 1/2 cup of frozen yogurt
3. Pour in 1 tablespoon of milk
4. Scoop in 1 teaspoon of pumpkin
5. Stir

Enjoy!!

October 15, 2010

Wild Learning in the Kindergarten Jungle

*Heart word of the week: like

*We continued with our pumpkin theme this week.  We focused on the life cycle of a pumpkin and also learned some of the different parts of a pumpkin.  We learned that the stem is also called a peduncle.  The outside skin is called the rind.  The lines down the sides are called the ribs.  We also learned that the circle on the bottom of the pumpkin is where the flower used to be and is called blossom end.

*We did some pumpkin measuring this week.  We measured the circumference and we measured how many cubes tall our pumpkin is.

*Our Farmer's Market opened this week during our community centers.  We practiced sorting, counting, being farmers, being buyers, etc. with this center.

*At our fine motor center (building hand and finger muscles) we had a sunflower and used tweezers to pick the seeds out.

*Some of our other centers included: pumpkin smelling play-doh, bricks, Mr. Pumpkin Head (like Mr. Potato Head), art, and corn in our science table.  

*Our focus book for the week was called, Picnic at Apple Park.  With this book, we practiced recognizing the story structure (beginning. middle, and end).  We also worked on identifying the setting.

*In writing, we wrote stories about pumpkins using our heart word, the.

*We learned a new center this week called, Which Bug Will Win?  With this center, we are practicing counting, comparing, and graphing.  We also practiced sorting bugs this week by some of their different qualities.

October 8, 2010

*Next week, our farm/farmer's market will be opening for "business"!  We would love some small pumpkins and squash to compete our special area.

*On Friday, we are going to explore our sense of taste with a yummy pumpkin recipe!  We would love 1 can of solid-pack pumpkin, 1 pint of skim milk, large cups, straws.  If you are able to donate an item, click on "0 comments" at the bottom of this post and indicate the item you are sending in.  If you do not have internet access, send a note in and I will post.  Hopefully this will prevent duplicates from being sent in!



Wild Learning in the Kindergarten Jungle! 

-Our Heart word for the week was: the

-Our new theme is pumpkins!  We will be exploring pumpkins and doing pumpkin activities for the next few weeks.  We will become pumpkin experts by the end of our unit!  We had many fun activities during our community centers.  At our science center, we were able to dig inside pumpkins and discover what the insides look like, smell like, and feel like! We practiced our fine motor skills (hand/finger muscles) by using tweezers and picking up pumpkin seeds.  The seeds were put inside little pumpkins.  Each little pumpkin had a number on it and that was the number of seeds that needed to be put in.  This week we also practiced measuring how tall we are by using pumpkin cutouts!

-Our focus book for the week was called, Whose Baby Am I?  With this story, we practiced recognizing the pattern.  We noticed the same words were repeated on each page.  We learned that this helps us figure out the words so we can read them!

-In writing, we continued to practice writing stories using our heart words.  We also continued practicing stretching out sounds and listening for the letters that we know.

-We made October calendar markers this week during math.  We also made a paper quilt and explored the patterns in the quilt.

October 1, 2010

**I am emailing the link to the blog this week.  Please let me know if you do not receive the email.**

Pumpkins!!!
We will be spending the next few weeks learning about pumpkins!  Our dramatic play is going to be turned into a harvest area/farmers market.  We would love pumpkins, gourds, baskets, or anything else that would be fun to have!

Wild Learning in Kindergarten

-Our Heart word for the week was: we

-Our theme for the week was apples!  We read some apple books, did some taste testing, and did some apple projects.  One of those projects was adapted from the book, Ten Apples up on Top.  We drew a picture of ourselves and counted out a certain number of apples to put on top of our heads.  We also did some finger painting and turned paper plates into apples.

-We had a science center this week where we were able to explore apples.  We were able to weigh them, sort them, and examine them inside and out!

-A book we focused on this week was called, Jazz Baby.  With this book, we practiced listening for rhyming words and we paid attention to how the author made the book sound musical.

-In writing, we continued practicing stretching out words and writing down the sounds that we know.  We also started writing some of our heart words within our writing.

-We continued with shapes this week.  We played a game called "Good-bye Shapes".  With this game we eliminated shapes by an attribute (size, type, color, number of sides, etc.) until all of them were gone.

-During Daily 5 (literacy activities), we learned that there are three ways to read a book.  We learned that you can read the pictures, retell the story, or read the words.  We practiced doing all three while reading to self and reading to someone.