Gingerbread Houses

What a fun day in Kindergarten!  Our gingerbread houses turned out just perfect.  Special thanks to Mrs. Radermacher for all of her hard work coordinating the volunteers and helping us out, like she always does.  Many thanks to all of our parent volunteers who came early to set up and distribute the goodies.  A special "shout out" to Mrs. Town, Mrs, Bunker, Mrs. Buresh and Mr. Ball for their help and support, too.  And of course, thank you to each of our special guests for attending.  We hope you enjoyed this day as much as we did!

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

Storytelling, Interactive Read Aloud and Hockey

It's been another busy, fun week in Kindergarten!  We have been making some seasonal decorations for the hallway...

   

and we made winter trees in Math, putting green paper strips in order by length.

   

In Writing Workshop, you will find us really focusing on oral storytelling.  We are working on telling our stories and then planning how to stretch them out into our new story booklets because sometimes our stories have lots of parts and we need more than one page to write them!  We are even beginning to realize that just like real authors, sometimes we do not finish a whole booklet in one day!

   

   

In one of our Interactive Read Aloud sessions this week, we read the book "Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!" by Mo Willems.  We love this story and it is so fun to read.  We also learned that the author and illustrator used lots of techniques to help us understand how the pigeon was feeling.  The large, bold print, talking and thinking bubbles and illustrations of the pigeon helped us to know how the pigeon was really feeling!  We also took time to partner read and talk about the story with a partner!

   

   

Gym continues to be a highlight each week.  Mr. Nelson is currently teaching us about hockey and as you can imagine, we are loving this!!!

   

   

So excited for gingerbread houses...

Managed Independent Learning

Managed Independent Learning continues to be the highlight of our day in Kindergarten.  Here are some of the things we have been doing for Managed Independent Learning:

   

Small groups have been conferencing with Mrs. Kurt.  We talk about our writing, add to our stories and this week we got our new writing folders.  These will come in very handy since we will be writing more stories in booklets instead of our journals.  The folders will help us to stay organized.

We have been working on a penguin project to hang on our classroom door.

   

Here we are using the SMART Board interactively to complete a Math game, using ten frames.

Write the Room has us finding words around the room that we recognize and can read.  Then we make a list of all those words.

Here, Bowie is using the pattern blocks to complete the pattern block puzzles.  We are learning how to work independently during this Managed Independent Learning time and we are getting a little better at it every time we try it.

We read the story "Howard B. Wigglebottom and the Power of Giving"by Howard Binkow and Susan F. Cornelison.  Look at the great story map we made together!

On Friday morning, Mrs. Fleck visited our room for Young Scholars.  We worked as detectives, looking for clues to solve some story problems with her.  Some of the clues were a little tricky, but we did a really good job!  It was fun.

   

We had a pretty busy week, but we are super excited for our gingerbread houses which we will make with our special guests next Friday morning at 10:30.  Hope to see you then.  Have a great weekend!!

Writing Workshop

Our Writing Workshop sessions this week have continued our focus on oral storytelling...

thinking about our stories, drawing pictures of the stories and adding words to the pictures.  We also spend as much time as we can sharing our stories!  We do this in a variety of ways.  We sometimes share with a partner, in small groups or in a large group.  

   

One of our most favorite ways to share our work with our friends is to use the document camera.  We put our work under the document camera and it projects the image on to the SMART Board in the room.  Then we get to be the "teacher" and teach our friends about what we wrote in Writing Workshop.  We feel really proud sharing our work with our friends and it is so fun to see how much we have already learned about writing stories!

   

Weather and Wind Socks

We have been learning lots about Weather this week.  We have documented things we think we know about weather, new learning about weather and our wonderings.  We have been keeping track of weather and temperature daily in our Science Journal.  We have also been exploring about wind.  Wind is moving air.  A windsock is a tool that is used to determine what direction the wind is coming from and how hard it is blowing.  We made our own windsocks on Wednesday and decided to try them out to see if they really worked.

   

We decorated the windsocks and added some crepe paper streamers to them.

   

Next, we rolled them and taped them so they could stay in the shape of a tube.  Then we took them outdoors (like REAL scientists) to test the windsocks to see if they really worked.  They DID!!!