Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Zero the Hero! Day 10

We had a fantastic day :O). We started the day by learning about our BRAND NEW Calendar Binders - we track the date and how many days in school. We also keep track of the weather.


 
Then at Reading Time we used the SMARTBoard to help us keep track of what to do on our work - and clipboards were a great tool to write on.


We celebrated "10 Days of School" and the number 10 having a zero by playing some Zero the Hero games - your child has them in their backpack! I shared a round snack - Oreos - since zeros are a round number. I can't wait for Day 20!
 

 

Thursday, September 12, 2013

Books, Books, and More Books!

Favorite stories are a great way to connect learning in our classroom. We have been busy with projects and not many papers have made their way home, so I wanted to share a peek into our classroom!

 
 
Cutting, gluing and matching our illustration to the text was our job for this project.
 
Eric Carle's story The Very Hungry Caterpillar is a great repetitive text. We learned to SNIP circles from squares to make these caterpillars, plus we made an AB pattern. Guided discovery of our markers helped us get ready to color the butterfly.
 
 
Chrysanthemum is a great story about a little mouse whose name is sooooo long! We used this story as a lesson for learning that mean words can hurt someone's heart.
 
 
And of course, no project is complete without our name!
 
 
 
 
 

Week 1 in Review

We had a great first week! I can't wait for Week 2 to get started.

We do a graph each morning - it helps us to determine which number is greater with visual support and we also learn to take turns!
We are earning classroom rewards by earning smiles for doing good things - things like lining up quietly, working hard, listening to stories and being AWESOME! When we earn 5 we cash them in for a reward - this week it has been playing outside!
 
The Kissing Hand is one of the first stories we shared as a class - and we made a Chester Raccoon puppet to help us remember to retell the story at home and share a kissing hand with our family. Using crayons helps us get strong finger muscles! We are building our stamina for working with our fingers. We use our hands a lot at school!
 
 
 
Look at Me! I'm in Kindergarten.
We completed self-portraits to document our fine motor skills. I can't wait to tuck them into their memory books for Spring!
Building routines is an important part of our first days at school. Each day we 'sign-in' by placing our name card on the apple.

 

Gingerbread!

We baked cookies to end Week 1. When we read the story of the Gingerbread Man, it didn't take the students long to read along! We used our 5 senses to explore the gingerbread dough - it was really sticky but it smelled great!
 
 

When we went back to the kitchen to get our cookies - they were gone! But thanks to the notes left behind, we were able to find our way around the school and CATCH THE GINGERBREAD MAN!

We had a chance to cut and glue when we "frosted" our paper gingerbread. We frosted our real cookies with white frosting and decorated with M&M's -YUM!