Happy Birthday Kamron!

We sure have been celebrating a lot of birthdays this week and we had one more today. Kamron's actual birthday is not until next week, but I guess Confetti thought that we should celebrate it today! Next week, Kamron will be 6 years old! Today Confetti wrote Kamron a note and left a ton of confetti on his desk. We enjoyed making Kamron's gift and singing to him. We hope he has a great birthday over break! Here are a few pictures from his day...

                        Birthday boy Kamron and his note from Confetti!

                                 Singing Happy Birthday to Kamron!

                                                  Kamron and his friends!

                                                       Kamron and Confetti!

Happy Half Birthday Sam!!!

In one week from today is our friend Sam's half birthday. We were all very surprised to see Confetti again today! Sam loved wearing his birthday crown and even found confetti in his cubby! He had a great day today at school and I am thinking he will have a great half birthday next week! Here are a few pictures of him...

                                                 Birthday boy Sam!

                 All of Sam's friends singing him Happy Half Birthday!

                                 Birthday boy, Sam, and his friends!

                                  Confetti and silly Sam!

Sam and his friends while we were making his gift!

Happy Half Birthday Hayle!

Today was Hayle's half birthday and guess who came back again to help us celebrate - Confetti! Hayle was so nice and brought all of her friends a little treat and passed them out at the end of the day. We made her a special gift and sang to her! We sure hope she had a great day! Here are a few pictures from her half birthday!

                                      Hayle's messy desk and note from Confetti!

                                                   Hayle and her friends!

                                        Hayle and Confetti - he is way up high!

                                 Hayle passing out yummy treats to her friends!

                                       Each friend got to have two treats!

Happy Half Birthday Arthur

Confetti was back in our room again today because Arthur's half birthday was yesterday. He left Arthur a note and confetti on his chair! We had a great time coming up with words that describe Arthur for his gift and we enjoyed singing to him as well! Here are a few pictures from Arthur's day!

                                       Singing Happy Half Birthday to Arthur!

                                                    Arthur and his friends!

                                                  Birthday Boy Arthur!

                                          Birthday boy Arthur and Confetti!

                                       Confetti and the note he left for Arthur!

CRAZY BUSY WEEK!

Well…I hope my kindergarten friends are ready for a wild, crazy, fun week in kindergarten!!! Of course, we will be learning lots of stuff and we will be getting ready for our holiday program on Friday!!

In literacy we will be starting a brand new unit called “Wonders of Nature.” Our theme this week will be “Watch It Grow!” Our essential question will be “What do living things need to grow?” I know it is a silly time of year to be talking about this…but we will be learning more about this in the spring!! We will be singing the song “Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary.” The stories we will be looking at are called, “ My Garden” and “Growing Plants.” We will also be looking at some poetry….can you believe we do that in kindergarten? As we read we will continue to look at the concepts of print, genre, and we will start to talk about the reading strategy of rereading.  We will continue to blend words and we will be using this strategy as we read “Hop Can Hop” from our crabby books. We will continue to learn about the letter ‘H’ and we will be sorting lots of picture cards and trying to decide what they start with!! This is so easy for us now:) Can you see we have a lot to do!?!

In writing we will continue to write stories from our lives. We are working super hard on sounding out words and using adjectives when we write!! This week we will be talking about pattern books and we will even try to make a few class pattern books!! In grammar we start to learn about pronouns! Crazy!!!

In math we continue to learn about teen numbers and the number of tens and ones each teen number has!! We are recognizing and writing numbers 1-20….this can be tricky!! Some of us like to get the ones place and tens place mixed around. We will also be looking at shapes and practicing sorting them by their attributes. 

In unit studies we will finish up talking about Holidays Around the World and we will be doing lots of projects!!!! We are so happy to complete our passports and show you all of the great things we’ve done and learned about in our suitcases.

Of course if we continue to stay on the nice list, Snowflake will continue to watch us this week and I think Confetti might be coming too to help us celebrate some half birthdays and a birthday over our break if we are lucky!
 

Please remember our Holiday program will be Friday at 12:30 in the auditorium. This should last until about 1:00. Please bring your families so they can see all of the work we have been doing!! 

Also, this week we will be giving lots of assessments to close out the 2^nd quarter. Please make sure your child is rested and has ate a great breakfast!! I want them to be fully ready to show me how super smart they are!!

I think that’s all!! I hope you have a great week before our winter break!! I will hopefully be sending home some homework to do over the break in our Wednesday folders this week to keep practicing all the things we have learned!

Ms. Kristen and Ms. Carli

Last Thursday was our practicum students last day and we will very much miss Ms. Kristen and Ms. Carli. They helped us with so many different things this past semester and Mrs. Woita really doesn't know what she would have done without them. We are very lucky they were assigned to our room - they truly went above and beyond - they came in early, stayed late, and even came in to help us with special projects. They helped us learn more about numbers, patterns, shapes, and story problems and they even listened to my friends read and helped them during writing. We wish them both the best of luck with the rest of their college classes! Here is a short video to say thank you to them for being so great!
                        

Queen Isabelle

Isabelle was the Queen of the Jungle this week and she had a great week. Isabelle loves everything about the movie Frozen and she brought in a super cool Elsa wand that sang our favorite song to show us and her mom and dad even got to come in and read the book Frozen to us. Her dad came in and read the first half of the book and then her mom came in the next day and finished it and we all loved it! We really liked the pages with Olaf and Sven! When Isabelle is at home she likes to color and she uses every color of the rainbow. Isabelle likes every animal and she also really likes any Disney Princess but I think Elsa might be her favorite! Isabelle enjoys gymnastics and eating bananas! She is a special kid because she is silly and smart and she gives great hugs! When she grows up she wants to be a singer. Isabelle had a great week being the Queen. Please check out her video!

                        

Happy Birthday Mrs. Miller

We are so lucky to have some wonderful paras that work in our classroom with us during the day and  Mrs. Miller is one of them and she is with us in the afternoon and yesterday was her birthday! We didn't realize it but Confetti was in our room and was hiding from us - he left a note for Mrs. Miller and of course some confetti on the chair she sits in! Once we saw the confetti we went on a hunt to find that sneaky birthday elf - after searching for awhile we finally found him and then we sang to Mrs. Miller and made her a gift. Mrs. Miller is a wonderful person and is always helping us all out so we can be the best kindergarteners we can be! When the kids asked how old she was she said that she was turning 25 and I will tell you I don't know how many years she has celebrated her 25th birthday :)  but I do know that we really are so lucky to have her in our room. We hope Mrs. Miller had a fabulous birthday! Here are a few pictures!

                                   We are singing Happy Birthday to Mrs. Miller!

                                         Here is the note Confetti left for her.
             (sometimes our elves write letters backwards but we are working on showing them the right way to make letters throughout the day!)

                                                 Birthday Girl - Mrs. Miller!

Happy Half Birthday Ayden!

Today we were all very surprised that Snowflake AND Confetti were back in our classrooms. We were happy to see Snowflake but were puzzled why Confetti was still here and then we found the note that he wrote us telling Ayden Happy Half Birthday! And then I realized that yesterday was Ayden's half birthday and since we will not be in school in June we are celebrating it now. We made him his gift and sang him Happy Half Birthday! Here are a few pictures of Ayden from today...

                                         Ayden with Confetti and Snowflake!

 

Ayden's friends singing him Happy Half Birthday!  

                                                  Ayden and his friends!

                                                   Birthday Boy Ayden!

Busy Times

So as I am sure you all know our elf, Snowflake, came last week to keep an eye on us during the holiday season and has been moving around our room since he arrived in his makeshift hot air balloon! Snowflake even left us a poster with Santa’s Tips for staying on the nice! Unfortunately Snowflake left our classroom at lunch on Friday and we were all super sad and a little nervous because we are hoping it wasn’t because of our behavior. I just know that this week we are all going to be trying very hard to stay on the nice list! Here is a picture of the poster he left in our room.

In Unit Studies we will finish up our Around the World book and will be packing/making a suitcase and getting a passport so we can start traveling the world to learn about more cultures and their celebrations. We will be traveling after our afternoon recess to different countries/classrooms and learning about celebrations people have in Africa, Israel, Holland, and Germany. We will be learning about Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, the wooden shoe, and the Christmas tree. It is going to be a super fun week of learning about different cultures – we will also learn some songs and will start practicing for our program that is Friday, Dec. 19^th at 12:30 in the auditorium! We hope you are all able to come!

In Math we will be continuing to talk about teen numbers and seeing the group of ten and ones. We will also be looking at different attribute cards (which is a fancy name for shapes) and will be exploring with them to sort them by color, shape, and size and we will make patterns with them too! We will also be learning about the equals and not equals signs and comparing numbers. We will continue to tell and solve more story problems and a great time to practice story problems at home is during dinner – for example you could say “we had 6 rolls on the plate and we ate 3 of them, how many do we have left?” or “I ate 3 chicken nuggets and then had 2 more, how many chicken nuggets did I have altogether?” or you can even ask your child if they can come up with a problem of their own.

During Literacy our essential question this week is “How can people help to make your community better” which is a wonderful topic to discuss and I am excited to hear the conversations we will have this week about pitching in and making our community the best that it can be! We will be reading the following stories – “Roadwork”, “A Community Garden”, and “The Bundle of Sticks”. In our crabby books we will be reading “I Can You Can” and in guided reading your child will either read “Can you Fix It” or “We Clean”. Our vocabulary words are community, improve, confused, harvest, and quarrel. Again this week we will be focusing on those key details of the story and answering and asking questions when we read. This is actually a review week and next week we are suppose to learn the word “my” and focus in on the letter H but we will be switching those around because next week will be a little crazy with our program so this week we will learn about “my” and “h”! I will also be assessing quite a bit this week for report cards! Always so much to do!

It is sure to be a fast and fun week again in Kindergarten! I hope that Snowflake has nothing but good news to report!

Happy Birthday Chloe!

Today Chloe turns 6 years old and we were lucky enough to celebrate her birthday yesterday when we were at school. Chloe brought all of us pencils and her mom came in to read a Pete The Cat book - it was a great day! Also yesterday at school something crazy happened... Mrs. Woita realized that Snowflake our scout elf is NOT our birthday elf. I had thought that Santa sent down Snowflake during birthdays but I was wrong. My friends and I were very surprised to see TWO elves hanging from a zip line when we got to school on Friday (we couldn't believe our eyes - 2 elves and a zip line made from christmas lights) - we looked closely at both elves and realized that they were different! All this time we thought it was Snowflake that came on our birthdays but we are lucky enough to have a scout elf at Christmas AND a birthday elf - we all decided that we needed to name our birthday elf and after a very long discussion and vote we decided to call our birthday elf - Confetti (which is very fitting seeing as this birthday elf seems to leave confetti all over our classroom)! We all hope Chloe has a fabulous birthday today! Here are a few pictures of our Birthday girl and our elves...

                 Snowflake and Confetti hanging from the zipline!

                       Chloe, her mom, and Pete the Cat!

                  Chloe's desk and lots of confetti!

                   Singing happy birthday to Chloe!

                           Chloe and her friends!

                        Check out these cool pencils!

                                Birthday Girl - Chloe!

Queen Hayle

Hayle was our Queen of the Jungle this week and it was an awesome week! She brought in a super cool book called "The BIG Blue Book of Beginner Readers" and it had 6 awesome stories in it - although we were only able to read one of the stories we still all thought it was great - we got to read "Put Me In The Zoo". Now a little bit about Hayle - she likes swimming, pizza, and giraffes. Her favorite song is "Do You Want To Build A Snowman" which we all agreed was a fabulous song! She likes the movie Despicable Me 2 and her favorite book is "I Can Read With My Eyes Shut" by Dr. Suess.  Hayle is a special little girl because she is silly and makes us all laugh and smile. When she is at home she likes to do puzzles and when she grows up she wants to be a singer AND a zoo keeper! Hayle had a wonderful week please check out her video as Queen....


              

The Holiday Spirit is Here...

I hope that you all enjoyed your Thanksgiving and my friends had a good break. I also hope that they are ready to get back to school and are ready for a fun, fast 14 days! We will be doing a lot over the next 3 weeks and we don't have any time to waste!
I am thinking that one of Santa's scout elves will probably be coming to keep an eye on us during this crazy time to make sure we all stay on the nice list! Our elf, George, came to my house this past weekend to keep on eye on Henry, Lily, and Macy so I am sure Snowflake will be arriving anyday now to keep watch over my friends while they are here at school! I am crossing my fingers for excellent behavior because like I said we have lots to do!

In Literacy we will be focusing on the letter d and the word "do". Our vocabulary words are appreciate, culture, prefer, proud, and tradition. We will be reading "What Can You Do With a Paleta?", "Cultural Festivals", "A World of Festivals", and in our crabby books we will read "Sid" and in guided reading your child will read either "Neighborhood Party" or "Parade Day". If we can squeeze in any holiday books we will be doing that too! We will work on our comprehension skills as well when we are reading stories and will be talking about the character, setting, and the events that take place throughout the book. We will be blending and segmenting words and also reading silly/nonsense words this week to get ready for our Quarter 2 assessments!

In writing we will be continuing to learn more about what good writer's do - the CAPS man really helps us remember that every sentence starts with a Capital letter, we need Art work to match our story, also Punctuation marks go at the end of every sentence, and between every word we need Spaces! We will also be starting to talk about pattern books and will be making a few of our own class pattern books over the next few weeks!

In math we will be working hard on learning those teen numbers, we are going to practice solving and telling oral story problems and again reviewing the different strategies we can use to solve story problems. We will be exploring with a balance to compare how much things weigh and we will be using vertical and horizontal graphs to show our results! We will also be talking a lot about number partners and working on our counting mats! Ms. Kristen will be teaching us a math lesson on Tuesday that reviews story problems and making numbers using a five-group!

In Unit Studies we are starting one of my favorite units (I know that I say that about all of the units but this one really is a good one) we will start learning about Holidays Around the World. It is so neat to talk about our own family traditions around the holidays but also so neat to talk about how different cultures celebrate. We will be making a booklet and talking about what we might see if we were to actually travel around the world! It is sure to be a fun busy week!

Please make sure you are free to come to our Holidays Around the World Program on Friday, Dec. 19th at 12:30 in the auditorium. You will be getting an invitation soon but wanted to give you a heads up that it will probably last around 30 minutes. I hope that you are all able to make it!

I can't believe it is December and we are almost done with the second quarter of kindergarten!