Quickly Approaching

I can't believe that school is a mere 16 days away. I'm not sure about the kinders, but my summer has flown by. I have spent a lot of time preparing for the upcoming school year. I have made all sorts of fun things and have done a lot of reflecting on last year and thinking of what I will do this coming up year. Here are a few photos of things I have been working on...

This year I will have a full word wall. I plan on having the students read all the words each day and we will play a few games with the words! I have printed several "game/chant" ideas and taped them onto popsicle sticks. I or a student will draw a stick out of the bucket and we will spell/read a few word from the wall in the way that the stick says. (ex. Cheerleader - "give me an 'l', give me an 'i', give me a 'k', give me an 'e' what does that spell? 'like'") I feel that this will really help solidify reading and spelling our sight words.

Last year I had centers set up around the classroom on various tables. I feel that the room is small and over cluttered with all the tables. I am planning on removing a few of them and implementing the Daily 5! The Daily 5 will take over our center time. The kinders will begin the year learning the different parts of Daily 5. The choices they will have will be Read to Self, Read to Someone, Listen to Reading and Word Work. I will add Work on Writing later in the year when I feel they are more ready for the tasks of this station. While the students are doing their Daily 5 choice, I will be taking the time to call my small groups to work on reading skills! I will be writing frequently about how our learning of the Daily 5 is going as well as posting pictures of the kinders in action!

As you have noticed. I am going all out Owl theme in my classroom this year. Last year I had a few items with owls on them but this year, thanks to Teachers Pay Teachers, I have found an abundant amount of owl material. Here is a sample of the color cards that I will have hanging in the room for the students to practice spelling their color words. 

Here is my new Pete the Cat doll!!! The first day of school, I will read Pete the Cat and then we will take a tour of the school in search of Pete and when the students return to the room, this Pete the Cat doll will there to greet them! He will also be used as our tattle friend. If a kinder feels the need to tattle, I will have them tell Pete instead of me!!!

I have also been busy this summer getting our new house together! My kinders from last year were so kind to get me a few things for the house! I have been doing lots of decorating and yard work. We are getting a fence installed in a few weeks so that Buster can run around in his backyard instead of just staring out the window dreaming of running in it. Here is a picture of Buster! Another part about summer is I have really enjoyed being home all day and not having to cage Buster up while I am at work. He also seems to enjoy me being home.

Well, I think that is all I have for right now. I will be sure to write when I have more things to write about. I will be enjoying my last 16 days before I have to begin waking up early again. 

Last Month of School

Here are some photos that I took of the last month of school!

Zoo Field Trip

Zoo Field Trip

Zoo Field Trip

Zoo Field Trip

Making Spring Flowers

Making Spring Flowers

Making Spring Flowers

Making Spring Flowers

Practicing for our Luau Party

Luau Party

April Fools Day

This morning I told the kids that I was rewarding them for the awesome jobs they have done this year. I brought them "Brown Es" (Brownies). 

Needless to say, they were not very happy with me until they got the actual brownies at the end of the day.

Children Around the World Research Projects

I am very impressed with the hard work and effort the Kinders put into their reports! They did wonderful with telling the whole class about their country and the research they did. The countries we had were Italy, Ireland, Germany, Brazil, Mexico, Japan, China, Russia, France, and Denmark.

St. Patrick's Day!

This week, we learned about St. Patrick's Day and its history. We watched a video that talked about St. Patrick and his life and also about the current day celebrations in the United States. We graphed Lucky Charms for math and we even got to make leprechauns with our Fourth Grade Buddies!

Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss

We celebrated Dr. Seuss' Birthday with reading lots of books and doing several activities and crafts. We made One Fish, Two Fish math bowls, made Lorax mustaches, and made Dr. Seuss hats with the AT word family. The kids enjoyed reading all the Dr. Seuss books and thanks to Kaitlynn for bringing in and sharing her collection with us!

February Activities

February was pretty eventful with Valentine's day and President's Day. For Valentine's day, we made love monsters and I love you to pieces hearts! For President's day we did a writing project where we wrote about if we were president. We also learned about George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama.

Addition with Dominos

This week, we have been learning addition equations using dominos. The kids were partnered up and had to write equations using the dots on the dominos. Before we began this, we talked about what equations consisted of and I modeled the process of creating equations in front of the whole class. I then partnered them up and gave them their supplies and set them loose. They did great!

We are 100 days smarter!

We have a very active 100th day of school. We did numerous activities involving the number 100. Leading up to today, we created fruit loop necklaces and hundreds day hats. During the day we wrote all the numbers from 1-100, we saw how many times we could write our name in 100 seconds, we created pictures of us at 100 years old, we did a writing piece about what we could not do at the beginning of the year and what we can now do after 100 days and we also counted to 100 by 1's, 5's and 10's.  Many of the kinders dressed up as if they were 100 years old including myself. Check out our pictures.

Happy Birthday Kansas!

The kinders have learned a lot about our state symbols and they were excited to share the crafts and learning experience with their family members.

Tuesday, all three Kindergarten classes went through a rotation from class to class to create a Kansas symbol. In Mrs. Bowman's room, the kids made the State of Kansas with graham crackers, frosting and candy corn. In Mrs. Ropp's room, the kids made a box turtle with a bowl and tissue paper and in my room, the kids made honeybees with toilet paper tubes. At the end, all 60 kinders sang songs that they had worked hard on learning.