Learning with Style

The classroom this week was quite a busy place!  One of the things that I learned about at the California Kindergarten Conference (I mentioned going in my last post) was how to have centers in the classroom that promote more independence among the students.  Before, I talked about having more hands-on experiences in the classroom; so now I am having that idea meet with our center time in the classroom.  During the first part of the year, we did centers only two days each week.  Now, to the excitement of the students, we are doing centers four times each week.  You may not hear your child talk much about centers anymore because we have also changed the name to Jobs and Choices.  Each student will complete 2 required jobs each day that are teacher-led.  They also have 6 other areas, known as Choices, that they can go to during our center time.  Some of the Choices will stay the same for the week, while others will change.  Their jobs are typically going to be different for each day and my hope is to have some of the teacher-led jobs eventually become independent Jobs or Choices they can do later. 
Some of our jobs this week were: domino matching, number matching, saying letter sounds, and reading sight words.  Our Choices consisted of: shape beads, coloring, building bridges, and Legos to name a few things.  Take a look at the learning going on at each Choice or Job.

Making chains of Shape beads

Shape Patterns 

Block Castle!

Sight Word Parking Lot... Driving Cars and reading the words when we parked!

Building some bridges and using our engineering and critical thinking skills.

Magnet Fun!

Defying Gravity

This week we began practicing our songs for our Valentine's Day Performance.  We will be performing on Valentine's Day, Wednesday, February 14th from 9am - 9:30am in the cafeteria.  Parents and family members are encouraged to come and hear our wonderful set of songs.  We have been learning so many songs since we are doing some with all 4 kindergarten classes and each class will also perform a song.  Be looking for an invitation that will be going home this next week.

We have been working on our reading program, Lexia, on the Chromebooks in class.  On occasion your student may come home with a certificate printed from the program stating that they have gone up a level in the program.  

To end this week, we had a great time with Ms. Brown's class and Mr. Pontoni's class in the school garden.  We helped pick A LOT of Rainbow carrots that we had planted earlier in the year.  The 4th grade students helped us wash the carrots and remove the tops.  Next week we will get to taste all of our hard work.  

In case we weren't dirty enough after digging in the dirt, we made Gak, or slime, as a whole class that we will use next week as one of our sensory Choices.  We had a lot of fun with our Valentine's Day Slime and I am sure it will still be pretty popular next week.  (By the way, since my hands were covered in slime, I had one of the students take the photos on my phone ---- I'm very trusting, right?   --- so I am not posting all 60+ photos that were taken and will try to put only ones that aren't too blurry.)

My messy hands getting another batch ready

Squish!

This was the first batch I made and it turned out really great... almost perfect!

Then there was this batch that didn't work out as well for some reason or another.  I am hoping it will fix itself over the weekend, but if not we still have a really good batch we can use during our Choices next week.

I hope you have a great weekend!

Upcoming Events

* Wednesday, February 14th at 9am - Kindergarten Valentine's Day Performance

* Wednesday, February 14th - Class Valentine's Day Party --- class list will be going home soon and party details and needs will be posted to the classtag page

*Monday, February 19th - School Holiday

*Tuesday, February 20th - 100th Day of School Celebration; Also dress like a 100-year old person for the event --- a note will go home about this soon

Fun and Learning!

It has taken me a bit to get back into the routine since we have returned from winter break.... at least my routine of posting every Friday afternoon.
I am going to do a Catch-Up through pictures for this post.  First, I will start back in December. 

The class heard and learned a variety of versions of "The Gingerbread Man."  During our exploration with gingerbread men, we read, counted, played, and even tasted gingerbread.  This was such a fun unit!

Yum!

Decorating pretend gingerbread men

emergent Readers on Gingerbread tasting

  
Reading to a partner!

 

 

We want more!

We had our class party right before winter break.  A HUGE thank you to the parents that brought something or sent something in for our class party!

Since getting back from break, we have been studying the story "The Mitten" by Jan Brett.  We have read this quite a few times now.  We have done some retelling of the story.  In the next couple pictures the students are lacing their mitten for retelling the story.  They colored and cut out the characters from the book and then practiced telling the story with their props to a partner.  I always love when literacy and fine motor skills can be brought together.

This last weekend I had the opportunity to attend the California Kindergarten Conference for 2018. #CKC2018  One of the main focuses of the conference was how children learn and have better experiences through hands-on learning moments.  During our center time the class has had many different chances for learning opportunities that most often don't seem  (to the students) like they are learning.... Shhh! Don't tell them my secret! :)

We have been using some fun sensory snow in the classroom.  The kids seem to have a lot of fun with it and the best part is that it wasn't super cold like regular snow, but still has the texture of real snow.

 


 Just in case your children were asking about it, this was the "snow" we used in the classroom.

  

Learning about letters and their sounds by using our AlphaLocks purchased for us by our wonderful PTO!

Playhouse time is always exciting

Little engineers hard at work in the block area.

As we progress through the school year, I get very excited to see the students become readers.  We did some partner reading this week using some of our sight words.  Each student read the emergent sight word reader with a partner and then had to stand up and find a new partner to read with.  The kids got a lot of practice reading and tracking the words with their fingers during this partner time.

 

 

To end this week, we worked with a robot called a Bee-Bot.  The class named him Mr. Bee.  He is a new addition to our classroom that I won at the Kindergarten Conference.  He met the class today and it was very exciting.  Mr. Bee is a robot that teaches young children about the beginning concepts of coding.  We learned how to program Mr. Bee to help retell the story of "The Mitten" that we worked on just last week.  EVERYONE was very excited to push the buttons on Mr. Bee.  Although before we started just pushing buttons, the students talked with a partner about which directions needed to be programmed into the robot.  We used some cards with arrows on them to lay out our plan first.  The class was incredibly happy when we were able to program the bee to where we wanted him to go on the map.  We weren't always successful, but the students were able to see how to change some of the directions to still get our end result.  We will have to see how many more activities I can come up with Mr. Bee in order to have such engagement...even on a Friday afternoon!

Students planning out how to move Mr. Bee

Have a great weekend!