Meet Miss Odeen

This is Miss Becki Odeen.  Miss Odeen is a senior from the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls, Iowa.  She is majoring in Early Childhood and Elementary Education.  She is currently completing a Level Three Field Experience which is why she is with us.  Miss Odeen is originally from Tipton, Iowa and she is super excited to be in our classroom.   She will be with us all week.

While here, Miss Odeen will work with Mrs. Kurt to plan and teach specific lessons.  She will also spend time observing classroom management, procedures and routines.  In addition, she will have some experience working with the whole group as well as small groups of students.  She will also be here on Friday for our ImpactLives service learning event.

Please join me in welcoming Miss Odeen to Northview Elementary!

Snow Day Adventures and Story Problems

I hope everyone enjoyed their snow day yesterday.  It sure sounded like the kids had fun.  In fact, we wrote all about our "Snow Day Adventures" in Writing Workshop this morning.  Hopefully we will finish and share them tomorrow!

Our next order of business was to finish our group sea creature problems.  Again, we had to work together in a group and share responsibilities.  We know that this is a hard thing to do sometimes, but we worked hard and had fun!

  

Great job, everyone!

Dental Health and Working Together

We know that February is Dental Health Month.  But since it is such a short month and we had so many other events, like Valentines Day and the 100th Day, we decided to talk about it in March.  We made a toothbrushing chart.  Our goal is to do our best to brush our teeth every morning and every evening, even on the days that we are too tired!  We also talked about the fact that many of us have lost, or are losing, some of our baby teeth.  Losing teeth is a little scary, but it is fun when the Tooth Fairy stops by.

This is our new friend, Blake.  His first day in Kindergarten Plus was today and he did great!  We are so excited that he is part of our class and we look forward to getting to know him better.  Welcome, Blake!

We are finally getting to the end of our sea creature story problem activity.  Today, Mrs. Kurt had us work in groups.  As a group, we had to decide which sea creature we wanted to use, addition or subtraction, and the numbers.  Wow.  We found out that sometimes it is hard for everyone to agree!  We learned that when you work in a group, everyone has to contribute.  We also learned that we don't laugh at other people's ideas because we need to be respectful.  Most of all, we learned about compromising and being patient!

After our discussions, we started writing out our problems.  It was pretty cool to actually write a Math problem!

 When we finished our writing, Mrs. Kurt published our problems.  Now tomorrow, we will work as a team to make the pictures to go with the problems.  It is going to be fun to actually solve each other's problems!

The Cat in the Hat, Shoe Tying and Good Bye!

Tomorrow is Dr. Seuss' birthday.  All week, we have been reading books written by Dr. Seuss in honor of his big day.  Today, we had our third grade buddies from Mr. Nylin's class help us make our own cat in the hat.  They were awesome helpers and it is so much fun to work with the big kids and learn from them!

 If we got done a little early, the third graders read to us!  We had such a fun morning!

 Here are the finished projects, hanging in our class room.  Thanks Mr. Nylin and the third graders!!

We had a visitor in our classroom this afternoon.  Mrs. Jackie Young is an Occupational Therapist that works for our school district.  She came to help us learn how to tie our shoes.  We discovered it is a little hard, but if we try and practice lots, we will be able to do it!  She let us practice and if we didn't have tie shoes, our friends that did have tie shoes shared with us.

We definitely all need to keep practicing this skill.  Any extra practice at home would be great!

It was time to say good bye to another one of our friends.  Today was Krishant's last day in our Kindergarten class.  He is moving.  We are going to miss his friendly smile and enthusiasm for learning.  We wish Krishant and his family all the best as they start off on their new adventure.  Keep in touch, Krishant!

Eagle Facts and Leprechaun Hats

This morning we wrote facts about eagles.  Then we made it in to a form called "Meet My Eagle".  We gave our eagle a name, told about it's favorite food, it's age and a fact about something the eagle can do.  These will soon be hanging outside our classroom, so check them out if you get the chance.

We also decided that it was time to send our loop snowmen home.  We are all getting a little tired of winter, so we decided to get ready for one of our favorite days in Kindergarten...St. Patrick's Day!  We made leprechaun hats to hang in our classroom.  

They sure helped to brighten up our classroom!

Learning About Hunger

We had some visitors this afternoon.  Mrs. Hanson and a group of Second Grade students have been working on a project about hunger.  They did research and created wonderful poster boards on the subject.  What was the best thing about this great project?  Mrs. Hanson and the students shared them with US!

These students were amazing!  They worked so hard on their projects and they were able to teach us about hunger.  Best of all, they were also able to teach us about our upcoming service learning event...ImpactLives.  Since we have not been at Northview before for this special event, we don't know too much about it or what it will be like on March 15.  These students showed us what the packages of food will look like, talked to us about what it is like to pack food for others, and taught us about how important it is to do things for others.

We can NOT wait for March 15!!  Thank you, Mrs. Hanson and the Second Grade students, for teaching us.

Remember the other day when we traced and cut out our handprints and foot print?  Well, we finally finished the project today.  Did you guess what they are?

If you guessed bald eagle, you were correct!

Tomorrow we will add writing to this project by writing facts about bald eagles.  Stay tuned!