Happy Half Birthday Nicole!

Yesterday, Feb. 8th was Nicole's half birthday and we were all very excited to see Confetti in our classroom this morning so we could celebrate Nicole's half birthday! We had a very easy time coming up with nice words that describe Nicole to make her present! She brought all of her friends a goody bag that had a notepad, pencil, and stickers inside and we were all very excited and thankful! We hope that Nicole had a great Half Birthday here at school with us. Here are a few pictures of her day...

 Confetti and the half birthday girl, Nicole!

 Birthday girl Nicole!

 We are singing Happy Half Birthday to Nicole!

 Nicole and her friends!

 Nicole brought all of her friends a goody bag - THANKS Nicole!

 We were all pretty excited about the goody bag!

King Kamron

This past week Kamron was the King of the Jungle! Since we had two snow days last week we had to finish up Kamron's reign as King today! Kamron was excited to be the King and we all enjoyed learning more about him. Kamron's favorite color is red, and he likes monkeys and the song "Happy". He also likes football and his favorite team is the Packers! He also likes the movie Rio and brought in a toy dog to share that is from the movie! He also likes to eat pizza and macaroni and cheese and his favorite book is "It is Christmas David". He is a special kid because he is a great friend and nice to others. When he is at home he likes to play the wii and when he grows up he wants to be a teacher! We all enjoyed learning more about Kamron. Please check out his video of him as King of the Jungle!

Moving right along...

In reading we will be starting Unit 7 and this week we will be talking about how some animals are alike and how some are different. We will be learning more about the letter U and the words “for” and “have”. We will be reading “ZooBorns”, “Baby Farm Animals”, and some poetry about animals. Your child will be reading either “Two Cubs” or “Animal Bodies” during guided reading and in our crabby books we will be reading “A Pup and a Cub”.  Our vocabulary words are appearance, behavior, exercise, wander, and plenty.  When we are reading Zooborns we will be focusing on rereading as well as listening for evidence in the text that tells us how the baby animals are alike and different and then we will fill out a venn diagram together.

In writing we are working hard on making our stories better by adding more details. We know that adding adjectives are a great way to make more detailed sentences. We know that we can add what color something is, what size it is, what it feels like or sounds like to help make our stories more detailed. I am so impressed with my friends and am looking forward to seeing the three page stories they will be writing very soon!

In Math this week we will telling and solving story problems. We will be comparing two numbers and talking about the different between them. Ms. Taylor will be teaching us this week and we will again get to explore more with shapes – my friends loved last week when we got to do this – we explored with triangles, parallelograms (diamonds), trapezoids, and hexagons to fill in the pattern grids! This week we will also be learning about math mountains and the tiny tumblers that live on the math mountains – I will admit I do love the tiny tumblers and am excited to teach my friends about them because we will be learning a lot more about number partners!

During Unit Studies we will be talking about how to keep our bodies happy and healthy and will be getting a Nutrition Kit from the University of Lincoln that has a ton of fun activities and lessons to do over the next couple weeks. We are going to be having a special visitor, Ms. Alyssa, who is going to deliver our kit and then she will do a super fun hand washing activity with us as well! It is sure to be a fun time!

Also this week we will be celebrating friendships and Valentine’s Day – please remember non-edible Valentines would be amazing and that you can send them anytime this week as long as there is one for everyone in our class. Again if you can make it to help us celebrate on Friday afternoon at 3:00 please just let me know!

The Meadow Lane Science Fair is this Thursday, Feb. 12^th at 6:30 please come check out the cool projects if you are able to! Henry and I will be there with our balloons! As a class we will go and check out the 3^rd – 5^th grade projects in the afternoon!

It is going to be another super fun week in kindergarten!

Happy Half Birthday Cody!

 Today we were all super excited to see Confetti in our room again, but also a little confused because it wasn't anybodies birthday or half birthday so we didn't understand why he was here. But then we saw the note on Cody's desk and after decoding it we realized that tomorrow, Feb. 7th is Cody's half birthday. Cody was pretty pumped about being exactly 6 1/2 years old tomorrow. So today we made him a present, sang him Happy Half Birthday and celebrated with him. We all hope he has a great half birthday over the weekend! Here are a few pictures from his day!

 

The note Confetti left for Cody!

 Cody's friends singing him Happy Half Birthday!

 Half Birthday Boy Cody!

Cody and all of his friends!

100th day of School FUN!

On the 100^th day of school we had so much FUN!!! We celebrated being 100 days smarter in so many different ways. We started the day off by showing off the projects we made with our families and they were awesome!!! We loved all of them and the kids are so excited to bring them back home – I just can’t part with them yet because they are so cute and I love seeing them in our coat hall! We also made necklaces using 100 fruit loops or beads – we first used our counting mat to make 10 groups of 10 and then we started to make our necklace. Mrs. Schroeder’s class was in our room for this part so it was a little crazy! We also talked about what we would buy if we had $100. Probably our favorite part of the day was when we got to make our snack – we got to choose the items we wanted in our snack and we again filled up our counting mat with 10 groups of 10 different snack items! During daily math routines the kids were soo excited to get to 100 – we now know that we can show 100 in many different ways – it can be 1 group of one hundred, 10 groups of 10, or 100 ones. We are sooo smart! We also got to read some great books about the 100^th day of school and some of us even dressed up like we were 100 years old! It truly was a wonderful day and I hope it is one that your child will not forget!! Here is the video I made from our super fun day!

Family Math Night

Last Thursday night 15 of my friends were able to come back to school with a member of their family to learn more about math and just have fun. It was so wonderful to have so many people come back for our math night! If you were not able to attend I promise that is just fine too but you should have received the packet of papers I sent home with everyone that night – I would love for you to put all of these papers in your binder so you can continue to practice the things we are working so hard on when you are at home – just slip them into the plastic sleeves! Of course if there are any questions please let me know.

At math night we started out by making a prediction to see how many m&m’s were in the jar and made patterns with our families. Then we talked a little bit about our curriculum and how we learn about math during the school day! It is so crazy how math plays a part in almost every job there is so of course we decided to make a video talking about what we want to be when we grow up and why it is important that we know math (I fixed the video so you can now see all of my friends cute little faces). Next we got to do four different activities with our families that we do throughout the day usually during counting mats. We played a teen number matching game, we used the purple numbers to make teen numbers and showed them using different coins, we put our purple numbers in counting order and played a fun game called “crackers crackers”, and we even used dice and counters to add, subtract and compare numbers! I also showed the backpacks and bags that I will be sending home to do with your families – remember these activities are meant to encourage learning at home and are meant to be FUN – so please make it work into your family schedule! I sure hope all of the families that were able to attend had as much fun as I did! I took a few pictures of our fun night and put them into a video as well. So please enjoy both of our math night videos! The first one is of what we want to be when we grow up and the second video is of our actual family math night!

    

February!

I can’t believe it is already February – we are just soo busy and the time is flying by!

Today was Groundhog’s day and we missed it because of the snow and unfortunately we may be seeing more of the snow if Punxsutawney Phil is right! But not to worry we can still read our Groundhog’s Day books a day late and I am sure all of my friends will be super excited about the snow! If we are lucky and the weather cooperates we may even build a snowman together this week!

This week we will also be getting ready for Valentine’s Day. This year I am asking that if student wants to bring Valentine’s for their friends that it a non-edible item or a hershey’s kiss. A more detailed note will be coming home about this soon so please be on the look out!

In reading we will be reviewing all of the letters and words we have learned so far. But we will be learning some new vocabulary words and they are safe, prepare, notice, celebration, and enough. Our essential question is “How can you stay safe in bad weather?” and we will be discussing this and also practicing this at school. We will also be reading “Waiting Out the Storm”, “Rainbow Crow”, and “Be Safe in Bad Weather”. During guided reading your child will either read “Bad Weather” or “Getting Ready” and we will read “Mack and Ben” in our crabby books. We are really becoming such good readers – we know the difference between genres of books, we can visualize, make predictions and find key details, and we can even make connections between stories. This week we will be talking a lot about question words that start with “who, what, when, where, and why”.

In math we will be telling story problems using fruits and vegetables, and comparing two groups of numbers using the words more and fewer. We will also be looking at numbers 11-20 on our counting mats and will be using our teen equations cards and discussing our teen numbers. We will also be reviewing different shapes and how you can put them together to make new shapes and practicing patterns. Also this past week we were lucky to have gotten two new practicum students assigned to our classroom to help us learn more about math! We are excited to have Ms. Taylor and Ms. Fisher in our kindergarten room – we love them both already!!!

In writing we will be working on adding details to our stories and using transitions words to write about what happens in our stories. We are also working hard on using good handwriting and writing our last name! I am amazed at some of the sentences my friends are able to write!

We finished up our weather and seasons unit and will start learning more about our body! We know that we have to be healthy to be the best student that we can be. We will be making a book and talking about what our body needs so we can grow up strong, happy, and healthy!

The Meadow Lane Science Fair is next Thursday, Feb. 12^th and I would love to see you all there if you don’t have any plans for that evening – I understand you may not want to do a project this year but I urge you to come and check it out. Henry and I will be doing a project I hope– the topic is still yet to be decided… seeing as we can not agree on anything yet (my five year old is quite stubborn and opinionated :) and obsessed with hunting at the current moment)  last year we researched Elk and found some fun facts and pictures to share and it was so much fun that we will definitely be doing something again this year for the Science Fair! If you have any questions about this please let me know!

Well it is going to be another fast fun week in kindergarten! I hope to post our video about the 100^th day and Math Night by the end of the week!