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!