Happy Halloween!

Our best scary faces!

Fall Craft Party

We had our first party on Thursday and it was a lot of fun.  The children made 5 different crafts and decorated a cookie for snack time!  A big thanks goes out to the moms who were able to help and join in on the fun!

Cookie Decorating was fun and delicious!  Lots of frosting and sprinkles.  We saved these for the end of the day!

We made spiders

We decorated foamie pumpkins! 

What did we do before these foamie patterns??

We made bracelets with fall beads.

We decorated our ghost pencils.

We also made thumbprint bookmarks.

But did you see those buckets???

Thank you Mrs. Morton for taking the time to decorate all of those buckets!  I just want to know how I didn't find out you could do this until I had your third child in my class!!



Hello Out There!

I knew keeping the blog updated would be one of the greatest challenges to starting a blog this year.  Oh Well!  The beginning of school is always a crazy busy time, but I really want this blog to chronicle our year, so I will be updating this week with some of the things we have been doing.  Hopefully I can get caught up and then try to post at least once a week with little snippets of our week!

I will start with some of the Math Centers we have been working on.  We have been concentrating on the numbers 1-10.  We finished our "Big Numbers" and have gotten into a good routine with our Math Series.  As you can see our Math Centers have been all about counting, counting, counting!

 

Parent Information Night

Thank you to all the parents who were able to come to Parent Information Night this evening.  It is always fun to share a little of "our world" with you!  I hope I gave you an overview of our Kindergarten curriculum and answered any questions that you may have had.  Please remember that I am always available to answer and questions or concerns!

For those of you who were unable to come, we will be having Parent Teacher Conferences in October.  I will be sending home a sign up sheet later this week or you can stop by in the morning to choose a time!

Scholastic Book Orders

I saw this video on Facebook and wanted to share it with you on the blog.  It helps explain why we push Book Orders at school.  I try not to push too much, because I know most of my students have books in their home.  But like I mentioned before, just by buying books for your child, you help supply books for the classroom and for other children.  My classroom library has grown to thousands of books and now my goal is to get class sets of books every month to give to the class. 

 Thanks to all of you who have ordered books for your children!

The First Two Weeks of School

We have had a lot of fun during the first two weeks of school.  We have been making friends and learning new routines. This will be a long post describing some of the things we have been doing!

  We start our day by watching the news on the Activboard.

We practiced sitting the "right way" on the floor and in our chairs.

We also had fun showing the wrong way to sit in our chairs!

We read the Kissing Hand and met the character Chester, who didn't want to go to school.

Then we made handprint puzzles with our own Kissing Hands.

We read  Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?

We practiced cutting, gluing and following directions as we reviewed shapes and colors by making all the animal characters!

 we even practiced tearing little pieces of paper when we made yellow duck, so he would look fluffy!

We also "read the room" by reading our Brown Bear bulletin board and pocket chart.

We learned the "magic trick" for making white glue disappear without having to go wash our hands every time we use the glue.

 get glue on your fingers

 rub your hands together

and ta da! the glue is gone!

This way we can wait until we are all finished with our project to go and wash our hands!

We read a lot of stories by Kevin Henkes.  He has a series of books about little mice and their early adventures making friends in school and at home.

 

The Gingerbread Man was also a big part of our first two weeks.  We started to learn about folktales, characters, settings, and different versions of the same story.  We learned the chant that the Gingerbread Man always used.  We illustrated and added this chant to our Poem Books.

In math, the first week of school we reviewed our numbers and began making our "big numbers", we traced, cut, and counted out sets. 

We learned our glue motto...

dot, dot, not a lot!

During the second week we started our Math Series and practiced sorting. 

I also introduced our Math Problem Solving Notebooks.  This is something new I am trying this year.  I got the idea from another teacher's blog and thought it was a great way to supplement our Math program.

 I am going to start off slow, with some easy problems to solve and see how it goes!  It is always fun to try new things!

I started introducing "literacy centers".  We explored different alphabet activities; magnet letters, letter tiles, letter matching cards and arches.  We practiced working independently and making sure we cleaned everything up before we chose a different activity.

We also RESTED!

some children would just lie still and relax

 and some just snuggled in and slept!

Some days we would read quietly on our mats.

 We just took a little break to get ready for our afternoon!

In the afternoon we go to Specials.  This year we have the same special all week.  We have been to PE and to Music.  Next week we will go to Dance!

After Specials we have Math, Snack, and Center Time.  I will also eventually be introducing different Science and Social Studies activites during this time.  It takes a while to get our Kindergarten program up and running at full speed. 

The first two weeks have been pretty busy and the children are doing a fantastic job adjusting to their new school, class, rules and routines.  It is a long day for all of us, I know I am tired at the end of the day and I am sure the children are too!