End of the Year Program

Thank you so much for attending our end of the year program this morning. Our friends were so excited to show off their new songs and spend time with you in our classroom. I can't believe the end of the year is here and it makes me so sad but I know that they are ready for first grade and I'm so excited to see them excel and grow. Thank you parents for all you have done this year supporting our learning. It means the world to me and to them. Click on the link below to view our pictures!

End of the Year Program and Party

Eric Carle Author Study

I could not help but share these with y'all! We have been working on an Eric Carle author study the last two weeks and one of the books we read was "The Grouchy Ladybug". We made our best grouchy faces and put them on the bodies of ladybugs (I hope y'all got to read their writing when the ladybugs came home as well). Their grouchy faces made my day so I wanted to share them so you could enjoy them too!

Grouchy Faces Album

Field Day

We had a wonderful time at field day on Wednesday! Thank you to all the parents who came out to support us and made that day so special for our friends. Click the link to enjoy some pictures from our fun day!

Field Day fun

Valentine's Day, Dentist Visit, Ramps, and Read Across America Day!

First up...Valentine's Day! We had a blast celebrating Valentine's Day all week. We read books about love, friendship, and Valentine's, used hearts to help us practice our money skills and graphing, as well as love monsters to help us practice reading CVC words and non-sense words. Here is a slideshow of us opening our Valentine's boxes and reading our cards.

Valentine's Day Pictures

Dentist Visit
We had the wonderful opportunity for a local dentist to come visit our kindergarten friends. She brought with her a giant mouth and toothbrush to show us how to brush our teeth. We talked about flossing and what teeth are made of too. She was so sweet and even brought us goody bags to take home!

Check out the pictures from our dentist visit!

Ramps
This past week we put aside shared reading and focused on learning about physical knowledge. We wanted to understand how gravity works as well as motion (push and pull on objects). To achieve this, I challened our friends to build the best ramps possible to make their ball roll at the fastest speed and the farthest across the floor. The first day they simply experimented with the materials and worked as a team to build their best ramp. The next day, I put all different size, shape, and weight balls in their buckets. It was the students job to figure out which one worked best on their ramp and why. The third day, the students were given felt and sandpaper to add to their ramp to see if different surfaces and friction would change their results (we only used one type of ball as our control). The fourth day, their challenge was to pick the surface they thought worked best and change the height of the ramp to see which height gave the best results. We had a lot of fun experimenting together and I think my friends enjoyed taking the learning into their own hands, they were in charge!

We are expert ramp builders...take a look!

Read Across America Day
Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss! Friday was our school's celebration of Read Across America so our goal was to read as much as possible all day long! We started our morning by having several parents and grandparents come visit and read to our class. In between visitors our friends shared about the book character they dressed up as and why while telling everyone about the book. We visited the library to check out new books, met with our book buddies to do some more reading, and got together with a first grade class to read some tongue twisters from one of Dr. Seuss's books. I even joined in and dressed up as Hooey the book reading parrot from Dr. Seuess' "Oh Say Can You Say?"! Everyone had a great time and we will continue the celebration this week by doing reading as many Dr. Seuss books as possible and incorporating him in all of our learning.

Follow me, there's lots to see!

100th Day of School

We made it! January 24th was officially our 100th day of school. We celebrated by making a crown and 100 style glasses, eating a trail mix of 100 pieces of snack, counted by 10's to 100, made 10 groups of 10 pictures, painted 100 gumballs, wrote what we would want 100 of, buy for $100, and look like when we are 100 years old. As you can see we were very busy and to end our day we watched part of 101 Dalmations. To prepare for this day though, our friends practiced counting to 100 at home by making a special project to share with everyone. Check out our pictures and how creative our friends were with this project!

Take a look at our 100th day of school projects!

Fun in Centers

My friends have been working hard constructing puzzels, rollercoasters, boats out of connecting cubes, and villages in block center. They are so very proud and ask me all the time to take their picture so here is a sneak peak of some of our centers.

Sea Turtle Expert Visit

We are currently wrapping up our study on the Leatherback Sea Turtle but before we were finished we asked a sea turtle expert from the University of Georgia to come speak to us. While researching we learned that you cannot always find everything in a book or on the computer, sometimes you have to ask an expert. Dr. Maerz was wonderful, he even brought live turtles for us to hold! There were too many pictures to choose from that I decided a link to the album would be the best way to include them all. I hope you enjoy, just click below! We will be moving on to the rainforest next!

Sea Turtle Expert Visit

Celebrating the new year!

When we returned for school after winter break we rang in the new year kindergarten style! We started off by making party hats and decided we would have our own count down from 10. When we reached zero we all popped bubble wrap (we agreed it sounded a lot like the fireworks some of us heard that night). We then decided to make our own fireworks and write about what we did to celebrate New Years Eve.

Happy New Year!

Rewind

I know it has been a while but our holiday performance and party pictures are finally here! Enjoy!

Holiday Party

Time to make like a tomato and ketchup!

Happy New Year! We are off to a great start in 2012. I am so amazed how mature my friends have come back after break and are ready for anything. There is quite a bit to catch up on and I know it will not all fit in this post. Since getting new laptops at school, I have a had a hard time finding our print screen button to show you our webs and other information but I FINALLY found it! So first off I'd like to show you our hammerhead shark we finished before Christmas. We spent a lot of time researching and developing our KWL (Know, Want to know, and Learned) as well as building our shark. Keep in mind it was all done by five year olds so use your imagination to help see the shark! He is currently swimming from our ceiling.

After finishing our hammerhead shark we were full force into Christmas. Over a few weeks we had a Christmas Around the World rotation and an Ornament rotation. We also had a pajama, hot chocolate, and Polar Express day. I have put together a slideshow so you can experience it with us. It also includes the last day before winter break's school Christmas sing-along. Since my camera battery died the day of our party, our wonderful room mom took all the pictures. As soon as I have those I will post them!

I hope everyone had a wonderful break!

Thanksgiving Feast

Before I begin, I apologize for not posting these pictures sooner! I know Thanksgiving is now way off everyone's minds but we had a great time celebrating in kindergarten. We spent a lot of time preparing for our grade level Thanksgiving feast. We studied the Native Americans and Pilgrims who were present for that first feast through various books and videos. Each friend was able to make a Native American vest, noodle pattern necklace, and headdress as well as pilgrim hats. Our friends were given the choice on our feast day what they wanted to wear. The entire grade level gathered around our "table" in the hallway and sat down to eat together. Our feast was a huge success! I think our friends truly understand the meaning of Thanksgiving and how important it is to share with friends and family and give thanks for everything we have. We also had the pleasure of Ms. Wendy sharing with us about her family's Cherokee Indian background. She brought in different artifacts for us to learn about. I hope you enjoy the album and are able to feel like you were right there with us!

Thanksgiving Feast

...and we have lift off!

After working hard researching and building our airport and airplane, we finally made it off the ground and flew to Australia this week! Our friends prepared their passports, packed their suitcases, walked through security at the airport and boarded our plane all without a hitch. Our pilots (Josie and Megan) made sure to check with air traffic control (Jacob, Cole, Braden, and Luke M.) for any other planes around us before taking off. We learned that planes have televisions in order to show a security video and a map of where we are flying but they also show in-flight movies when the flight is really long. Since a flight to Australia is almost 24 hours we decided it would be a great idea to watch a movie on our flight! We watched Finding Nemo while our stewards passed out our snack. It was such an exciting day and we are ready to begin exploring Australia. We read several books introducing the different land regions and voted on where we wanted to visit first. We chose the Great Barrier Reef to visit first. Check out the other places we will be visiting on our graph below.

Now that we are in the Great Barrier Reef, we have learned that there are many different animals who live there. Some of them include the potatoe cod, crown-of-thorns starfish, sea turtles, sharks, puffer fish, clown fish, butterfly fish, coral, and the sleeping lion fish. We took a vote on which animal we wanted to learn more about first. Our friends chose sharks! We will focus this week on learning about the different species of sharks in the Great Barrier Reef before choosing one to research thoroughly and construct.

Here is the album of our preparation for the flight as well as our flight to Australia.

Flight to Australia

Peer Teachers

Before we went on our Firehouse field trip we were surprised by a group of 1st graders who had prepared a lesson for our kindergarten friends. They were learning about the FLOSS rule in learning launch and wanted to share what they learned with our friends. It was great timing because we are going to be learning about twin consonants and the FLOSS rule this week! The 1st graders were so patient and took their time to make sure that each friend understood what they were teaching about. I was so proud of my friends for their behavior and effort during the lesson! Hopefully we can make this a regular occurance!

Firehouse Field Trip

We had the privilege on Friday afternoon of hiking up to the new Silver City Firehouse next to our school. We learned from Firefighter Michelle about what to do if we are in a building that catches on fire, toured the firehouse and firetruck, and learned about all the equipment Fireman Greg has to put on before going in a fire. Ask your child to share with your their favorite part and at least one thing they learned that day! Of course I went crazy with the camera taking as many pictures as possible so I hope you enjoy our album!

Firehouse Field Trip

Fall Centers

We had a wonderful time Friday afternoon celebrating fall centers! Our friends played pin the nose on the pumpkin, Halloween bingo, decorated coasters, felt inside mystery boxes for things like human eye balls and spider legs, and got their faces painted. To finish off our celebration we went outside and bobbed for doughnuts. Thank you to our room mom Mrs. Mercado for putting it all together for us and Mrs. Marker for coming in to help! Our friends had a blast! I hope you get as many laughs out of these photos as we did in person!

Fall Centers

Here are a few other pictures of our friends working on Boo-mallow graphs, a jack-o-lantern glyph, decorating pumpkins from our field trip, and going on a leaf in order to prepare for fall centers!

Book Buddies

It's been a crazy last couple of weeks coordinating time with our book buddies with our field trip and book fair preview, but we were finally able to last week during one of our early release days. We got to go down to Mrs. Turner's 5th grade classroom to read our new books with our buddy. Here are some pictures of our friends sharing their love of reading!

Book Buddies

QU Wedding

"Here comes the Q, here comes the U, put them together and you get QU...qua qua qua qua, qua qua qua qua"

Tuesday was a very special day for our kindergarten classes, Q and U got married!! They promised to forever be together and form words like quiet, quick, and quack. There was a bride and groom from each of the eight classes who processed down the aisle and were married by our very own Mr. Phillips. Everyone dressed up for our celebration, we even had a reception with cake, punch, and dancing in our classroom afterwards! Check out the album for pictures from that memorable day!

QU Wedding

Pettit Creek Farms Field Trip

We had such a great time on field trip Friday! Thank you to those parents who braved the trek with us and made it that much more special. We visited Pettit Creek Farms where they took us on a hay ride to see their animals, pet and feed some goats and sheep, bounced in a bouncy house, walked through a corn maze, and visited with a 4 foot snake and a very large turtle. We will be drawing and writing about our field trip in our journals this week so look for that entry next time they come! Enjoy the album I've put together of our day, I hope it makes you feel like you were right there with us!

Field Trip

Meet our new friends...

We have some new friends in the classroom this week...meet Cindy Circle, Stephen Square, Rocky Rectangle, and Tommy Triangle!

I have some friends that I just have to brag on for a minute too. They have been working so hard in their journals this month sounding out the words on their own and writing their stories without any help. They are loving writing so much that they chose to write some stories during centers! I had to share these pictures with you because they are just as proud of their work as I am of them!

These friends were so excited about having put the puzzle together all by themselves that they asked me to take a picture for our blog!