100th Day!

We had so much fun today!  The 100th day of school is probably one of my favorite days to be a teacher.  We teamed up with Mrs. Ballard's class today and had a whole lot of fun!  This morning the kids entered through a special doorway to find 100 Hershey Kisses scattered throughout the classroom.  They were all labeled with a number on the bottom, they had to identify the number and place the Hershey Kiss on a 100's chart. 

After finding 100 Hershey Kisses, we headed to the cafeteria where we read 100 CVC words...

and wrote 100 CVC Words.... 

We ran into a little old lady who looked A LOT like Mrs. Wanke.  After completing our CVC challenge, we headed back to the classroom where we listened to our skip counting songs, and read 100 books!!!  After reading, we got our bags of 100 items and compared weight.  Ashley had the heaviest bag for sure!!

After lunch the kids did 100 exercises and wrote their numbers to 100.  

When I picked them up from music Mrs. Durand was so excited!  We had seven friends sing the Star Spangled Banner and earn their certificate!  We were both very impressed!!

Then we made and ate our 100's day snack.  Each kid took ten of each snack item and put it in a small bag.

We did a lot of fun 100's day activities with our reading buddies.  They really enjoyed resting for 100 seconds. 

It was an exciting day in Kindergarten for sure. 

This is not a picture from today, but it is a favorite from last week, and I have to share!

Counting Songs

We have been working hard learning to count by 1's, 5's, and 10's to 100.  While most of the students are able to count to 100 all three ways, there are some that could use some extra practice.  Here are some fun youtube videos to help reinforce the concepts at home!

Count by 5's

Count by 10's

Count by 1's

Just a reminder that tomorrow is the 100th day of school.  Students should bring in his/her gallon sized bag with 100 objects for a Math activity tomorrow morning.

Thank you so much for all of the donations for the 100's day snack.  It is greatly appreciated!

In November we held a mock election where students voted for a Go Noodle Monster.  Each monster had a platform ranging from promoting kindness to space exploration for all students.  The kids all had to register to vote and show up with their voter registration card.  They had a great time learning about the process of elections. 

Our Christmas celebration was a blast. The kids had great treats and a great time decorating each other as Christmas trees.  Thank you to all the parents who helped plan this special time for our students. 

We kicked off the new year with a special celebration.  We learned about a new habit, Think Win-Win, then Mrs. Brockway announce the winners of the Jog-a-Thon.  Ashley was the top earning student and won $200!!  Our class came in first place, which means we will get a scoopie party from Culvers this spring.  After the winners were announced we had some Minute to Win It fun!  This assembly is always one of the favorites for the students!

Ag In the Classroom

Ag in the classroom visited us this week and the students got to learn all about bees.  They had a lot of fun learning about bee keepers and trying honey!  They will be visiting again next week and the students will learn about pumpkins and gourds!

This is why you never give Mrs. Ballard the camera and put her in charge of taking pictures!!

We can't wait for them to come back soon!  

October's Here!

Can you believe that October is already here???

We have been super busy in kindergarten and have been working hard and having fun!

 Seriously, how cute are these two!?!?!  The rest of our shipment came in from the grants that we received for our classroom.  We got six more stools today and bouncy bands to go on 8 chairs.  The students were too cute as we opened them all.  Every thing I pulled out got firework worthy oooh's and aaah's.  Never in all my years of teaching have kids been so excited to sit down and do work!  I even got a few groans when I said it was time to clean up!!!  

We have been busy in kindergarten this week learning about decomposing numbers.  The students are really doing well at breaking about numbers and using their "math talk" to tell about what they did.  We will continue to work on that, as well as number formation, next week.  

We took a week to review the letters we have already learned, and really focused on letter formation this week.  It is super important that they are following the correct path of motion when they are making their letters, along with appropriate line usage.  This is a skill that we will continue to work on throughout the entire school year.  Please use the sheet that came home in this week's communicator to help them with the letters in there name first.  Once they have those mastered, they should practice the other letters as well.  You may see them come home with their name written multiple times on the back of their paper.  When I see they didn't write their name correctly, and they have a couple extra minutes, I tell them to practice on the back of their paper. 

We are also working on print concepts right now.  Today we focused on the difference between a letter, word and sentence.  I printed and cut apart letters, words, and sentences and then threw them under the parachute.  The kids took turns running under the parachute, getting a game piece and then sorting it into the correct pile.  They were really good at telling which was which, but we are working on being able to say why.  By the end, they were really good at remembering that sentences begin with a capital letter, end with a punctuation mark and have spaces between the words.  We will continue to work on print concepts over the next couple of weeks.  

You can check out our most recent Donor's Choose project here!

Exciting News!

This fall Target teamed up with Donor's Choose to fund teachers who created grant proposals for supplies and materials that encouraged health, fitness and movement in the classroom.  I created two separate grants with things that will help the students be active listeners and Target funded $1600 leaving about $98 dollars left!  A huge shout out to Kayla Nolen, my mom, and Tina Sundaram for funding the remaining $98.  The kids were super excited as our supplies started to come in this week.  We have received a trampoline with a handle bar for safety, a parachute for active learning games, and 5 hokki stools.  In a couple weeks, we will receive 6 more hokki stools and desk bands that allow students a place to bounce their feet while working!  Here are a few pictures of our new supplies in action!

We also had the Jog-a-Thon on Friday!  I can about imagine how well these kids slept Friday night!  Not one of them ever gave up or sat down for the entire hour!  Jennika and Adam were kindergarten lap winners with 11 and 15 laps respectively. 

Make sure you get your pledge sheets and money turned in by Friday in order to count for the drawings!

If you would like to see what Donor's Choose is all about, check out my teacher page by clicking here.  You can also search for other teacher's by zip code or name by clicking in the box that says find a classroom to support at the top of the page.

Wow!

W have had such a great year so far.  I thought I had been updating the website, but apparently I was clicking on save instead of publish.  Oops!   Here is what we have been doing so far this year!

 The students have been working hard on learning their letters, we did some practice with our letters in shaving cream.  This is one of their favorite things to do!  We are running low on shaving cream, and always appreciate the donation.  The cheap stuff works great! The students have also been working on numbers 1 through 5, sorting things that are alike and different, and 2 dimensional  and 3 dimensional shapes.

We also have our first Letter Olympians.  These students have demonstrated master of all uppercase and lowercase letters, including the typecast a and g. We have a few students who are really close to being Letter Olympians!

We have also had a couple color days! The kids always love when we come dressed in the same colors!  

Yesterday we had Pinwheels for Peace.  The students all made a pinwheel in art class, then on Thursday we got to plant them.  We talked about ways to spread peace and ways to be kind to one another. 

Yesterday we also learned about germs from our school nurse.  We learned how to stop the spread of germs and when and how to wash our hands. Then we did an experiment where the kids put on "germs" (lotion) and washed their hands.  Then they came back and checked how they did under the germ finder (aka black light).  It's safe to say, we still need practice washing our hands correctly. 

Finally, today we had Unity Day.   This is such a fun day for our students.  I don't have many pictures of friends in our class because the students are split into mixed grade level groups.  They complete team building activities with minimal help from adults.  It is so much fun to watch them problem solve together and come up with different solutions to the station problems.  Some of their favorites were the Sponge Bob water balloon toss, where they had to use tarps to throw a water balloon over a wall and then catch it on the other side, the egg drop, where they had to build a contraption out of tape and newspaper to protect their egg that they dropped from an 8 foot window, and Giant Kerplunk, which is exactly what it sounds like!

We have had so much fun in kindergarten this year.  Thank you for sharing your child with me.  This is the best job in the world!