Week 16

We had such a fun time painting our wrapping paper to wrap our gifts to our parents. I hope you enjoyed them! We have been working hard for weeks on them.

Yoko was our focus book this week. We continued to work on summarizing and making inferences. Our sight words this week were "in" and "or".

We continued to receive many postcards from the gingerbread man this week. He even traveled out of the country. We had so much fun finding these places on the map and learning about them. Some comments were "my grandparents live there" or "we use to live there" or "I have a cousin that lives there" or "that is where my parents are right now". It was so cute and thanks for your help with making this a success. The gingerbread man returned to school on Thursday, and boy were they happy to see him.

Here are some of the books we read this week.

Decorating gingerbread cookies was definitely a highlight of the week. It was even more fun eating them!

We took one bite and we graphed what part of the gingerbread man we ate first.

We wrote a letter to the gingerbread man and we made and decorated gingerbread houses.

In the library the last few weeks, we have been studying the author Mo Willems. He is famous for his pigeon books and elephant and piggy books. We got to have a play day in the library. Here are some of the centers we went to.

Another exciting activity this week was a visit to our 3rd grade buddies classroom. Mrs. Armstrong's class worked in collaborative groups to learn about simple machines. We got to watch their presentations on wheels and axels, wedges, levers, pulleys and inclined planes. Some of us even got to participate with them. We are already looking forward to 3rd grade.

And last, but not least, our kindergarten winter carnival. Thanks so much to our room parents for helping to organize this and making it run so smoothly. The children had an absolute blast.

My husband, my younger daughter and I are flying out this evening to spend our Christmas in Colorado Springs with my older daughter and her family. We are excited to see our grandson, Noah. It has been 6 months since we have seen him and we can barely contain our excitement. We will be there for 10 days. In an effort to get this out before we leave, I am excluding Friday's activities from the pictures. Thank you for all of the wonderful gifts I have received. I look forward to seeing you on January 7th in the New Year. Have a fabulous holiday season, however you will spend it!

Week 15

We have been having so much fun in kindergarten and staying busy, busy, busy! I realized I didn't take as many pictures this week. We've had so many extra activities such as the 5th grade music program and a super drill that took lots of time too. I have been busy on assessments for report cards and also we have been working on a surprise for you too.

This week, we learned the letter Cc with the help of Cathy Cook. Our sight word was "have".

This was our focus book. We worked on summarizing and inferencing.

We read several different versions of the gingerbread man. Here are some of the ones we have read.

Our gingerbread man disappeared from school and left us this note.

Then we started receiving postcards from the gingerbread man. We have been tracking his travels on a map.

In math, we have been working on the numbers in the teens. We used a magnifying glass to find these numbers and then represented them in many ways. It was lots of fun!

We enjoyed our new gingerbread math work stations too.

We are looking forward to our winter carnival next Thursday. This is how we will be celebrating the holidays with our carnival.

We have also had 3 cases of confirmed strep, so please be on the lookout for that. Stay warm and have a great weekend!

Week 14

Boy, is it cold outside or what? In spite of the freezing rain, we had more students at school today in our class than we did the entire week. Way to show up and be safe!

This week, we learned the letter Nn with the help of Nellie the Nurse. Our sight words were "no, not and to". We also learned the sight word "it" right before Thanksgiving break.

Our focus book of the week was Apple Farmer Annie. We practiced retelling the story and focused on beginning, middle and end.

We began our unit on the gingerbread man. We read the classic story.

We love our gingerbread boy. We call him "Gingy" for short.

We read multiple versions of the gingerbread man. Here are some we read this week.

Then we compared them in a chart.

In math, we began a unit on patterns. We made patterns in a pocket chart. We practiced making patterns with manipulatives and we made patterns with our bingo dabbers. 

In science, we focused on being healthy this week. We learned about germs and how to keep clean. It is very important to wash our hands and cover our mouths when we cough to prevent germs from spreading. 

It is also important to brush our teeth and keep germs out of our mouths to prevent cavities.

The PTA purchased iPad minis for each teacher at the end of last year. As a kindergarten team, we have put ours together to share in a small group. This was my week to have them. We LOVE working on iPads. Unfortunately, they won't be back in rotation for a couple more months. It is hard to rotate them with 8 teachers.

We also had a new dollhouse to play with this week. A big thank you goes out to Greg (Aiden's dad) for assembling the dollhouse for us.

We had lots of fun playing in other centers too.

The homework notebooks seem to be a big hit. I hope that you are enjoying these as much as the children are. I also hope that they read their books to you this week. I would love to hear feedback about these. Feel free to send me an e-mail.

We also started our fuzzies this week. The students cashed in their fuzzies today for reward coupons. You will find these coupons in the zipper pouch in their take-home folder. I have asked the students to keep the coupons in there until they are ready to use them. If it gets lost, they will also lose their reward.

Have a fabulous weekend and stay warm!