5th Grade Buddies

Today we met with our 5th grade buddies from Mr. Cottone's class! We try to meet every Wednesday afternoon to do something together.  Today we started working on a Keynote project on the IPAD.  5th graders worked with their kindergarten buddy to create a project that is centered around all of the important places in our room that they know about it.  For example, they made a slide featuring our math routines and what we do each morning in this area of the room.  This was a great way for the kindergartners to verbally explain to the 5th graders all of the important places/things in our room and what they do there.

New Playground Fun

The kiddos were so excited to use our new playground equipment that was bought for us by Mr. Whan! They loved walking on our new stilts, playing with the playground balls, jump ropes, kicking balls into the soccer net and and bouncing on the new bouncers. They couldn't stop smiling! Below are a few pictures from our morning recess today.  It was hard to catch them!

Welcome to a New Year!

We are so excited to be starting our fourth week of Kindergarten!  The kids are off to a fantastic start this school year! For the past few weeks we have been learning many new routines in our classroom. Children are learning how to line up, how to share their ideas, eat snack, have lunch at school, use the smart board, listen to stories, complete their work nicely, use math tools and much more! We have also been focusing a lot on making positive choices and being a bucketfiller. Children are learning how to use their BIG voice if someone is bothering them. We have been noticing a lot of very helpful behavior and friendships forming as a result. I am so proud of the kiddos! These first few weeks of school are critical to creating a safe and caring classroom environment. They are the foundation for the rest of the school year! 

They are doing a great job! It makes me so excited for what's to come!

Insects Eat Too!

On Friday we learned that there are four different ways that insects eat. Butterflies and bees have tongues that work like a straw to drink nectar. Flies have a mouth like a sponge that soaks up food. Mosquitos have a mouth like a needle and ants have pincher like mouths like a clothespin. I set supplies at the kids tables and they got to pretend they were different insects. We used large tweezers to pick up items like an ant. They soaked water up with a sponge an drank with a straw. They used a syringe to suck the water up like a mosquito. We talked about what the different insects ate and why they had a special mouth to help them eat. Then we learned how to draw each insect and created a book today about how they ate. 

Plant Tasting Party

After two weeks of learning about plants and how they grow, today we had the opportunity to eat several different parts of plants. We set up a buffet in the cafeteria and divided all of the plants into groups. There were seeds, roots, stems, leaves, flowers and fruit. The children went down the line and helped themselves. After they recorded what they ate and what they liked or did not like. I was so proud of how adventurous they were! Everyone was willing to try a bite of everything! Well as least a nibble!
Checkout the Photo Link for pictures!

Earth Day Trash Bash

Today we celebrated Earth Day by learning of big and small ways that we can help take care of and protect our planet. We read several stories and talked about what it means to reduce, reuse and recycle. One story we read was "The Great Trash Bash."  In this book a town had a trash bash and picked up litter around their city. The boys and girls sorted pictures of different recyclables into the appropriate category, graphed their results and then answered some questions about their graph. We listened to a song, "What a Wonderful World," and illustrated pictures for a book about the song. In the afternoon, the kids were given plastic gloves and grocery bags and we went around Bemis and picked up garbage that we found. We had our own Trash Bash. We filled up almost 25 bags with paper, snack wrappers, cardboard and plastic water bottles.    We will spend the next few days talking about ways we can make the earth a cleaner and better place to live. 

Word Work Practice

Today with our Boulan Buddies we practiced our sight words.  We started off the morning cutting up our individual word cards and putting them in a bag. Each bag had 24 words in it that we could practice!  We then took our bag of words around to differnt practice stations that were set-up in the cafeteria. We were able to practice in so many different and fun ways. 

Some examples of  practice stations were:

• white boards
• stamps
• salt trays
• stringing words on necklaces
• stringing words on pipe cleaners
• typing them
• chalk boards
• bumpy boards
• swatting them on shower curtains
• wikki sticks

We also practiced sorting them in many different ways. Thanks to our Boulan Buddies who helped us too!  Please see the photo link for pictures from this morning.