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!

Fun and Festivities

During this first full week of December, we were able to start some pretty exciting projects in class.  One of our center rotations this week was creating a stuck Santa craft.  With the craft and part of another center rotation, the students wrote about what they would do if Santa got stuck.  The answers varied anywhere from "If Santa got stuck, I would help him pull him out with a lasso," to "If Santa got stuck, I would do nothing and leave him."  Some of the students got really creative with their responses. 

The kids worked really hard on these and they look great.  You might notice the handwriting in this picture.  One of our big focuses in class recently has been writing neatly and not letting our short lower case letters go above the mid-line.  The mid-line is the dashed line on each of the three lines shown below.  Many of the students have found this to be quite challenging because it requires them to write much smaller than they are used to.  Even though it is A LOT of work, it has certainly paid off and the students' handwriting has improved so much.  When we work on our handwriting like this, with our letters staying below the mid-line, not only are we working on their handwriting skills, but it also helps improve many of their other fine motor skills.  Please encourage your child when writing to try and keep their letters below the mid-line.  

We have also started some other fun holiday crafts.  We made some adorable looking winter trees, using triangle-shaped sponges.  Then the kids used their fingers to make ornaments and other decorations on their trees.  This was such a simple activity, but they turned out so nice and the class seemed to have a great time with both steps of this craft.

Our new P.E. unit for the month of December is Dance.  We love dancing so much as a class and this led itself perfectly into our English Language Arts story for this week.  One of our favorite dance videos is  below:

We listened to the story, "Jonathan and His Mommy" where they go on a walk and do all sorts of different walking movements.  As a class we tried some of them out and had a wonderful time!  We also listened to the story, "Move" and we discussed different types of movements that animals can do.  Later, we compared those animal movements and tried them out ourselves.  We tried leaping, sliding, slithering, waddling, running, and even flying.  We quickly determined that humans DEFINITELY CAN NOT fly, but we still had fun pretending.  

Also, with Language Arts this week we learned a new sight word: "a."  Now our list of sight words has grown to seven total: I, like, the, and, see, we, a.  Keep practicing those sight words.

Even with all of our work time, we did manage to find some fun play time, too.  This week the students had a chance to play with Legos, Wheels and Links, Megablocks, and Puzzles.

This afternoon, the school honored the students who had "Awesome Attendance" for the first trimester.  This meant that they did not have more than 2 absences and no more than 3 tardies or left early days.  There were a lot of students who were being honored.  These students were able to enjoy a root beer float with a parent!  Keep up the great work!

We have also been keeping up on our Lexia reading work on our software program.  Many of the students have made a lot of progress.  If your child comes home with a certificate from Lexia, it means that they have gained a level in their reading progress online.  

Upcoming Events - 

Saturday, December 16th - Breakfast with Santa event 9am - 12pm;  Thank you to all of the families that have donated to our "Game Night" basket for the silent auction at this event.  I think we have a really good basket with a lot of fun game opportunities for a family.  

Friday, December 22nd - Minimum day; students dismissed at 12:20pm

Just a reminder ---- the PTO Giving Tree is up in the office; If you would like another opportunity to donate and help out our school, take one of the stars from the tree and buy the item for that teacher.  This does not only have to be for your child's current teacher.  Thank you so much for all of your help and wonderful donations!