Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Buzz Book

Our kindies are working so hard on their writing. We are trying really hard to draw our pictures and label them with the sounds we hear. Encourage this at home too! If your child is drawing pictures, ask them to label. "House. What sounds do you hear in house?" You will be amazed at the sounds we know so far!
Our buzz book asks us a question. We answer it by "buzzing" to the person next to us to share our ideas. Our after the buzz is designed for responding to writing by drawing and labeling.

Our Class Promise

We had a long talk about what we wanted our kindergarten classroom to be. We decided we ALL want a classroom that's calm and quiet. We want a classroom where we work together, share our things, are nice to each other, and listen to one another's words. Ask your kindie what it means to say, "we help each other to bloom". Every day we recite this poem at circle.
Our Class Promise
When we care about each other
and our classroom, we share, listen carefully,
work hard, and have fun together.
We help each other to bloom!
When someone asks us to stop, we STOP!
This is who we are even when no one is watching.

Hopes & Dreams

We talked all about what our "hopes and dreams" are for our year in kindergarten. What do we want to be stronger at? What do we hope to accomplish by the end of our year?

After we discussed what our hopes and dreams were, we drew it and wrote our names on a flower. These hopes and dreams flowers will be up all year so we can check back and always remember what we wanted to accomplish. Ask your kindie what their hope or dream was.

Friday, September 12, 2014

Math Maniacs

We have been super busy exploring math manipulatives. We just learned and reviewed 6 different shapes: hexagon, triangle, rhombus, diamond, trapezoid, and square. We worked in pairs to explore our shapes by looking at the different attributes each one has. Ask your kindie how many sides a hexagon has.

We held up each shape and traced our fingers along the side to count how many there are. Ask your kindie what a trapezoid looks like. After we explored and discussed each shape, we played the shape game. One friend was in the middle of the circle covering their shape and the rest of us marched around in a circle singing a 1-10 numeral song. Once a friend guessed what the correct shape was, the game started again with a new friend in the center. Ask your kindie to play the "blast off" game with you at home. What a great way to count backwards from 10!


Every Monday, we will introduce a new poem. We will say our poem and add hand/body motions to help us remember and make sense of the words. On Friday, we are ready to illustrate the poem and read it to ourselves. We are doing an AWESOME job touching each word and reading! 
 We also read to others at our table and practice our poem so our brain grows stronger. After we finish reading, the poem goes in the poetry book for your child to take home with them and share with you. Practice reading the poem over again and encourage your kindie to read it to others.




We just LOVE recess time! Thankfully, the weather has cooled off and we are able to enjoy our recess….sweat free! Recess is such an important time in your child's day. Play is a very important component of school. We enjoy swinging, sliding down the slide, climbing up the bars, running over the bridge, and doing flips and tricks on the bars. We discussed how if "if we can't reach it, we aren't ready for it". Maybe by the end of the year, some of us will be big enough to try the monkey bars. For now, we are all smiles doing the things we love outside :)














Flashback

Time sure does fly! Let's take a flash back to our first day of school, now that we have permission to post pictures :) 
Our very first class picture…remember how hot it was on our first day of K?!

Our first whole school morning meeting

Morning centers are a daily favorite for the kindies. This is a 20 minute time first thing when we come in. We play and work together. Ask us which center has been our favorite so far.

WE MADE IT THROUGH OUR FIRST DAY OF K WITH NO TEARS! :)
Of course, the kiddos wanted a silly picture.