Mid-Year Assessments and Sequencing

Well, we did the last part of our Snowy Day project.  We are just waiting for them to dry so we can hang them up!

We did workplaces in Math today.

We are working on our mid-year assessments for conferences.  Today many of us completed the sentence dictation part of the assessment.

This afternoon, we completed a sequencing activity.  If you are not sure what sequence means, be sure to ask your child.  They know what sequence means!!  :-)

We are excited for tomorrow and our "Good Stuff"snowman project!

A Chubby Little Snowman

This morning we worked on the second part of our Snowy Day project......

This afternoon, we learned a new poem.

Chubby Little Snowman

A chubby, little snowman
Had a carrot nose.
Along came a bunny
And what do you suppose?
That hungry, little bunny
Looking for his lunch
Ate that snowman's carrot nose
Nibble, nibble crunch!

Then we made our own chubby, little snowmen!!

The Snowy Day and a Visitor

It has been a busy couple of days in Kindergarten Plus!

On Monday, we worked on our Science Notebooks.  We have finished our unit on Paper and are writing about all the cool stuff we learned in this unit.

In Writing Workshop, we started a new Small Moments story yesterday.  Small Moment stories are when we think of something to write about and stretch it on to three pages.  We are focusing on details, stretching out our words and writing down the sounds that we hear, and sketching our pictures quickly. It is pretty amazing how much our writing has improved since September, but we will keep working on it so it gets even better.

We are still enjoying our lunch time.  It is a great time to socialize and get to know our friends.

We read the story "The Snowy Day" by Ezra Jack Keats.  This book won a Caldecott Medal in 1962!! Be sure you ask your child what the Caldecott Medal is awarded for...they can tell you!

We started our own snowy day project.  Mrs. Radermacher is helping us with this.  It involves lots of painting so it will take about three days to complete it.  We will be sure to get some photos of the finished product!

We had a special visitor in our classroom this afternoon and her name is Miss Claire Elliott.  Claire is a sophomore at the University of Wisconsin - LaCrosse majoring in Elementary Education.  She is a 2011 graduate of Eastview High School and is spending some time observing in our classroom while she is home for her winter break.  We welcome Miss Claire and hope you enjoy learning in our Kindergarten Plus classroom.

School Spirit Day

Today was School Spirit Day.  The theme was color.  Each grade level was assigned a color to wear.  Can you guess what color Kindergarten had??

We did more independent reading during our Reading Workshop time today.  Be sure to practice and return your Guided Reading book so you can get a new one sent home next week!

We worked on our Number Corner during Math and also did our workplaces.  We also had Young Scholars with Mrs. Hemsey this afternoon.

It was a fun day.  Have a great weekend!

Independent Reading Time and Recycling Paper

Today was a busy day in Kindergarten Plus.  We were introduced to a new procedure for Reading Workshop called Independent Reading time!

While Mrs. Kurt teaches Guided Reading groups, the rest of the class needs to be busy working so the kids in the small groups can learn how to read better.  So today, we got our red reading folders and had a chance to shop for just right books from our classroom book collection.  We call them "just right" books because they need to be books that are not too easy to read or not to hard to read...they need to be just right for us to read so we can practice and get better at reading.  After we read a book, we write the title of the book in our reading log (inside the red reading folder).  It was the first time we did this today, but we did a really good job and we are excited to try it again tomorrow.

In Science, we completed our Paper Recycling investigation.  We learned that we could make new paper from old paper.  Students stuffed eight square lengths of toilet tissue into a small bottle.

We added water to the bottles until they were about 2/3 full.  Then we put the caps on the bottles and shook them for five minutes.  At this point, we learned that the paper inside the bottles had broken down into very small pieces, called pulp.

Next, we screened the pulp and soaked up all of the extra water.  Then using the bottles, we rolled out the paper on to a piece of waxed paper to dry overnight.  Hopefully, these will be sent home in our Friday Folders tomorrow so you can see the results of our hard work.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!  I hope everyone had a relaxing winter break.  It was so exciting to welcome everyone back this morning and to catch up with each other.  Morning Meeting was filled with sharing, talking about our breaks and just reconnecting with our friends.  It was great seeing each other.

We were pretty fired up that we were able to go outside for recess.  It sure is a lot of work to get all of our winter gear on.  We are getting things on lots faster than we did when the snow first appeared on the playground!

Our unit this week is Winter.  We read the story "Snow" by Uri Shulevitz.  Then we made adorable loop snowmen to hang in our room.  They turned out really cute!