Our Community Puzzle

We continue to work on fun activities to help us learn the names of our community members.  We each decorated our own name puzzle.  We took it apart and then we had to put it back together.  Putting it back together was trickier than we thought!

  

On Tuesday of this week, Mrs. Kurt gave each of us a large puzzle piece.  When we got it, it was just plain white.  We started by printing our own name on the puzzle piece.  Then our job was to decorate this puzzle piece with things that are all about ourselves.  For example, if you like flowers, you might draw some flowers on your piece.  If you love soccer, you might add a soccer ball.  The idea is for the puzzle piece to represent each individual in our community.

Once we had the individual puzzle pieces decorated, we were curious to see what would come next.  We got a giant piece of paper and started putting our puzzle pieces together!

   

   

   

   

   

We were curious about why we were doing this.  After talking about it for a little while, we realized that this puzzle represents our classroom community.  We are all individuals with special and unique talents, but when we all work together in our classroom, we fit together to make a wonderful kindergarten classroom community!

Name Chart

This week, we have been focusing on learning the names of our classroom community members.  With 21 new students in our kindergarten class, we have lots to learn.  One of the tools we use for this is our classroom name chart.

Each student gets a card with their name printed on it.  We lay the cards out on the rug and start with the letter a.  Anyone who has a name that begins with a finds their card and shows it to their friends.  If there is more than one name that begins with a, then we decide as a group which comes first and so on. Then we place the names on a large piece of chart paper.  When we are finished, we display the chart in our classroom so everyone can see it.  This is a great way to help us learn names!

   

   

We really can't believe how many rainy days we have already had this year.  Rainy weather calls for some creative things to do for inside recess.  On this day, we explored with some more of our cool math tools!

   

   

Our First Visit to the Library

On Friday, right after we had our school pictures taken, we got to visit the Northview Library for the first time.  We even got to practice sitting on the bleachers in the classroom area of the library!

   

One of the best parts of our visit was meeting our librarian for the first time.  Her name is Mrs. Lori Horton.  She showed us a slideshow and told us all about herself.  Mrs. Horton is married,  has two daughters, two dogs and she LOVES animals.  She is also a very talented artist.  She showed us pictures of some of her paintings.  She even paints pictures on bed sheets…amazing!  She showed us all around this very big room with tons of books!

   

We are very excited to get to know Mrs. Horton better.  Our class will be visiting the library every Friday to check out books.  One important thing she did tell us about our library check out day is that if we check out a book, and don't bring it back, that is OK, but we can't get a new one until the old one is returned.  Just another school rule for us to remember!

   

We also practiced using our scissors by cutting out the cute gingerbread people we decorated on Thursday...

…and read a story about a girl's first day in school ever!  It was a great week in Kindergarten!

Hope you have a good weekend!

Bus Safety

On Thursday, we had our bus safety presentation from a really nice bus driver named Tony.  He talked to us about what to do in case of an emergency on a school bus.  He showed us how to sit properly in the seats, where the emergency exits are located and even how to get out of the bus quickly.  

   

We had a chance to exit the bus through the emergency door in the back of the bus.  It was kind of a big jump but we had teachers to help us jump out safely.  Tony also talked to us about the danger zone around the bus and how to cross in front of the bus safely.  

      

He showed us how to wait on the curb and to look at the driver.  When the driver gives the signal to cross, then we need to cross in front of the flag that the school bus patrol member is holding.

   

Many thanks to Tony, Mrs. Radermacher, Ms. Kieltyka, Mrs. Dietrich and Mrs. Holm for helping us learn how to be safe on the school bus.

We Found Him!

This morning, we finished another version of The Gingerbread Boy.  By this time we were feeling kind of hungry, so we decided to head to the kitchen to get our gingerbread boy for our snack.  But when we got there, we learned that he was gone!!!

Like all good detectives, we came back to our classroom and made a plan.  We used our community writing project for today to make a LOST sign about our gingerbread boy!  We decided to hang it up in the hallway.

   

Then we decided to search the school and look for clues.  We looked everywhere…in the hallway, under lockers, in Mrs. Town's office, in Miss Elsen's classroom, the office the library, the nurse's office, the clerk's workroom and more!

   

We were getting frustrated, but we did not give up.  Finally we found him in Mr. Ball's office…right across the hall from our classroom!

We had to edit our sign in the hallway...

…and take a class picture with our gingerbread boy!

Then we got to do the best part…eat him!  He was yummy!

   

   

  

   

We shared our gingerbread boy with some special visitors…Ms. Kieltyka, Mr. Ciemney and Mrs. Town.  It was a great day in Kindergarten!