Monday, December 9, 2013

Family Traditions

My love of books, family, and holidays is the reason that I started a family and (school) tradition in which I wrap holiday books in decorative wrapping paper and allow my kids to open and read one book each night underneath our Christmas tree. At school, the books are all wrapped and each morning one student gets to open the wrapped book and we read it together. They love this fun tradition!

Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Make and Take Night-Family Fun!

Thanks to all of the parents and students who attended our "Make and Take" night. Students had a great time making their Inuit dwellings-igloos! They also enjoyed drawing Native American symbols and pictures on our big blue chart paper that will serve as our table covering for our Pow Wow lunch on Friday! I really thought that playing the Pow Wow music would provide some great background music and set the mood for the night. I loved that some of the students decided to get up in front of the class and began showing off their dance movements and singing. They only gave a sneak peek though, you will get to see the whole production, costumes and all, on Friday for our Pow Wow! The fifth grade students also did a fantastic job presenting on the Native American tribes that they studied. Thanks again for making this a fun family event that the kids will remember!

Students received a stamp from listening to each fifth grade group that presented on their Native American tribe! What an amazing learning opportunity for Kindergarteners, fifth graders, and parents too!

Monday, November 18, 2013

"How to" Writing



Students have been learning about and working on "how to" or "step-by-step" writing.  Today we made chocolate pudding together and talked about each step as we did it. Then, students wrote about each step for Writers Workshop! The best part of course was eating the pudding at the end of the day!

Sunday, November 17, 2013

Skills Practice

Students worked with partners today using white boards during Skills Block time. I called out simple CVC words (words that have a consonant, then a vowel, then a consonant) and the students practiced sounding out each word and trying to write the beginning, middle, and ending sounds. We will continue to use white boards for so many other skills in upcoming lessons (word families, sight words, number writing, addition and subtraction problems...and so much more). 

Sunday, November 3, 2013

Fall Centers

The students really enjoyed getting to rotate through several different "Fall" themed centers: playing pumpkin bingo (with candy corn as counters), making a scarecrow, ghostly bowling, making a bat hat, decorating a cookie, making a spider web (with marble art) and a spider, making a mosaic acorn (with small pieces of tissue paper). A big thanks to the parents who were able to join in the fun! We appreciate your extra helping hands!! You can see by the big smiles on their faces that they had a very memorable day. Fall Centers on PhotoPeach

Fall Centers

Fall Centers on PhotoPeach

Literary Parade!

Our literary week was a blast! The kids loved painting and decorating our class pumpkin to look like the peddler from the book, Caps for Sale. They also loved dressing up as their favorite book character and parading through the downstairs hallways. I'll be posting a link later this week for you to see a video of the parade.

Field Trip Fun!

Field trip fun!

We had such a great time on our field trip to Connor's A-maize-ing acres! The kids loved every minute from the bus ride to all of the things they saw and did there. A huge thanks to our parent chaperones who came along and helped out! (Warning-sorry for all of the individual pictures. I took them with my phone and didn't want to email each one to myself in order to do a slideshow! Thanks for understanding.)