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!

The Gingerbread Man

After reading The Gingerbread Man Big Book

 we decorated a large Gingerbread Man and took him to the cafeteria to be baked.  We returned to the cafeteria the next day and much to our surprise Miss Sandy told us the Gingerbread Man had jumped out of the oven and run away.  He left us a note which took us to the Library where we met Mrs. Graph.  She told us that she saw him but she could not catch him.  He left another note that led us to the clinic where we met Miss McKenna.  She also let him get away but had another note telling us to go to the office the next day.

 On Friday we made our way to Mr. Dragon's office.

 He had found the Gingerbread Man running in the halls, caught him and put him right back on the pan.  We thanked him for catching The Gingerbread Man for us and told him we were going to eat him!

 And we did!

 We also made Gingerbread Men with Fruit Loops.  Some children decided to make patterns with their Fruit Loops.

 We added faces and buttons

We read and compared 6 different versions of the Gingerbread Man

 and learned that folktales have basically the same story but some characters and events may be a little different.  In the end the fox usually got to eat the Gingerbread Man by tricking him, except for The Gingerbread Girl version.  This was more of a sequel but, she outfoxed the fox!