Thursday, January 24, 2019

Let's Keep Learning!

Another short week, filled with lots of energy and readjustment to our classroom community after almost a week away! We got a lot done this week: celebrated our Special Me of the week, started an evaporation experiment and started learning about the water cycle, learned how to be assertive (we connected this to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.), and finished our first math unit which was centered around counting, and taking away or adding one more to a quantity of objects. I'm especially excited for the kids to learn about shapes and classifying shapes based on their attributes.

Reading is really coming along! Students are decoding lots of CVC words and most of them have "cracked the code" of reading--associating sounds with the symbols of letters. It's amazing to see this growth and to see it "click"!

In science, we touched on the water cycle, began a water evaporation experiment, and we went outside and put snow on the hot metal side of the school and watched the snow evaporate in front of our eyes! I'm excited to do even more experiments!

Finally, on our Thursday hike, students connected what we've been learning in reading about characters and setting to create their own "snow stories". They invented stories as we hiked, and then spent some time creating homes for their "characters" in their stories and told me about the setting as well. We had a wonderful time. Have a great weekend!







Thursday, January 17, 2019

Short Update...

This week definitely turned into a short week of school, but we sure had fun on Monday and Tuesday! The students were introduced to Responsibility from our CARES series, and all of them were excited to get their classroom jobs. Hopefully that will transfer over to your homes..... ;) Next week, we will all start doing our classroom jobs and exercise Responsibility (taking care of things and each other).

Tuesday was filled with lots of fun and excitement over the fresh snow, and with new stories and games and chants and songs that we've learned in class. We learned new fun games in math, and had Oey's mom come in and read one of his favorite books to the class. For those who were here on Tuesday afternoon, we read a book about a snowman named "just Bob" and made a line drawing and color-blocking art project.

It was a fun, but short week, and I'm looking forward to a more full week next week! Enjoy the photos!




Friday, January 11, 2019

Happy New Year!

Sharing our favorite parts of Winter Break!
Welcome back, everyone! We had a wonderful first week back, complete with a snow day (woohoo!), and ski teams starting up for about half the class on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. Most of the students remembered our expectations and rules in the classroom, which made the transition back to school more productive and fun. The theme for this week was COOPERATION--a fancy way to say "working together". This theme was sprinkled throughout our week, as we learned new math games, new routines for our daily schedule, and experienced cooperation through play during indoor recess on Wednesday (the kids took it like champs!).

We also practiced cooperation in learning how to play "Bump" in math, how to clean up our classroom between transitions from art/activities to learning time on the rug, and the kids gave feedback on how they did with cleanup from a range of 1-5, 1 being "it looks like a guinea pig's cage", and 5 being "it looks like a clean kindergarten classroom." They love that analogy--feel free to use it at home!

Finally, for those who were not skiing on Thursday afternoon, we hiked up through a bit of Shirley Canyon, which proved to be more difficult than normal. The rains on Wednesday had created a layer of ice over the snow, which some of the students could traverse without breaking through to the powdery snow underneath, but it definitely proved to be a challenge for the adults. They learned a bit about the differences in how weight affects snow hiking, and practiced cooperation by building tunnels in the snow. Though some of us got stuck and it took their teacher much longer than them to get through the snow, we all had a fun time! Have a great weekend, and I'm looking forward to next week!



Cooperation through building a race track

Playing "Bump" in math

Last Day Pics and more!

Walking in at the Closing Ceremonies Well, we did it. We made it! Congratulations to all these bright, spunky, energetic kindergarteners...