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!