Queen Nicole

 Nicole was our Queen of the Jungle this week and she had a great week! Both her mom and dad came in to have lunch with her and her mom even read us 101 Dalmations! Nicole loves dogs and even brought in a lego dog she got from Lego Land! When she grows up she wants to be a pet rescuer for dogs! She really does love dogs and even has two at home! Nicole loves the colors pink and purple, and any Dr. Suess book. She loves the movie E.T. and Frozen. She also loves volleyball, noodles, strawberries, and horses. She loves the song "Let It Go" and "Everything is Awesome". She is special because she has a lot of talent and she is a nice friend! When she is at home she likes to play with Colton and help her mom cook! Nicole was a great Queen, below is her video!

                       

Happy Birthday Sopheigh!

Today was Sopheigh's birthday and it was a great day! She was super excited for her birthday and has been counting down the days! Confetti came to Meadow Lane today with Twinkle because her twin sister, Emma, is in Mrs. Schroeder's room and Twinkle is their birthday elf! We all thought it was super cool that Sopheigh and Emma share the same birthday and that they were born on the same day! Sopheigh enjoyed her present and even brought in a yummy treat for all of her friends! We hope that Sopheigh had a wonderful 6th birthday today! Here are a few pictures from her day!

 Birthday twins, Sopheigh and Emma!

 Singing Happy Birthday to Sopheigh!

 The confetti Confetti left all over Sopheigh's chair!

 Sopheigh and all of her friends!

 Birthday girl, Sopheigh, and the note Confetti left for her!

Confetti and the birthday girl!

Fast February

This week is conferences and I am super excited for you all to come back to school with your kindergartener so we can talk about all of the amazing things we are learning and doing during the school day! If you can’t make it to your schedule time please let me know so we can figure out a time to meet!  

In writing this week we will continue to work on our 3 part stories and make sure that our sentence flow together well and will be learning about the writing trait of fluency! I really am excited to show you your child’s writing!

In math we will continue to learn more about number partners and math mountains (we will practice drawing those tiny tumblers – we have found out that they sure are tiny)! We will also be learning more about addition equations and how to solve them!

During health we will continue to do activities from our nutrition kit, we have loved learning about the five food groups and can’t wait to see what else is in the kit! On Friday, Ms. Alyssa is going to come back and pick up our kit and do another fun activity with us. We will be reviewing all the things we have learned about nutrition and take a little test and then we will get to make and then eat our yummy pudding.

In Literacy we will be talking about where animals live. Our vocabulary words are habitat, wild, complain, join, and stubborn. We are going to read a super fun book called “Bear Snores On” and also “Anansi, An African Tale” and “Animal Homes”. In our crabby book we will be reading “A Vet in a Van” and during guided reading your child will either read “We Want Water” or “A New Home”. We will continue to work on the strategy of making, confirming, and revising our predictions, but will also talk about the plot of the story and cause and effect. We will also be learning the words “said” and “want” and focusing on the letters X and V.

Boy oh boy it will be another fast fun week in kindergarten! Remember Tuesday is a PLC day so it is early dismissal!

Happy Birthday Xander!

Today was Xander's 6th birthday and what a great day he had at school! Confetti wrote Xander a note and of course covered his desk with confetti! Today was also a little crazy because we had 45 kindergarteners in our room for the whole day so when we sang happy birthday it was pretty loud! Also when we made his gift he sure got a lot of compliments! His mom even got to help make his gift and she even came in and showed us a cool story that was from his uncle- we loved Frosty The Snowman!! She stayed for lunch and even brought enough cupcakes for everyone! We were all super excited! Xander had a great day at school and I am sure will have a great birthday weekend!!

Xander and Confetti next to his birthday note!

All of us with Xander's mom after she read!

Xander and his mom!

Xander and his mom at lunch!

Birthday boy Xander!

Xander and his friends!

Xander and his birthday treats!

Queen Miliani

Miliani was our Queen of the jungle this week and she had a great week! We started the week off by her mom coming in and surprising her and then her mom read some of her favorite nursery rhymes and then she even stayed for lunch- Miliani was super excited! Now a little bit about our Queen Miliani- she loves the movie Frozen and the song Let It Go! She also likes the color purple, cats, running, and pizza! She also likes the book "Big Bad Wolf". Miliani is a special kid because she loves to sing, dance, and build things. When she is at home she likes to play with her baby sister, mommy, and daddy! When she grows up she wants to be a vet! Please check out Miliani's video as queen!



                

Happy Birthday Josiah!

Today Confetti came to help us celebrate Josiah's 6th birthday! Josiah's actual birthday was on Valentine's Day and from what I hear he had a great birthday and wonderful weekend! Josiah and all of his friends were excited to see Confetti today when they arrived at school. Today Josiah brought in fruit snacks to share with all of his friends and we all enjoyed making Josiah his gift! We hope that Josiah had a wonderful birthday weekend and a great day at school. 

Here are a few pictures from his day!

 Josiah's friends singing him Happy Birthday!

 Birthday Boy Josiah!

 Josiah passing out his treats!

 Josiah and all of his friends!

 Josiah and Confetti and the note he left!

Short busy week!

This week is going to be another busy one! We are going to be working on adding details to make our stories better and also will be adding a sheet to our writer’s workshop folders to help us become the best writer’s we can be! My friends were very excited about the three page stories we started last week! I am excited for conferences to share with you some of their great writing!

In Math we will be comparing numbers, exploring with shapes, drawing tiny tumblers on our math mountains, and telling and solving story problems. This week Ms. Fisher will also be teaching us a lesson on shapes!

In reading we will be talking about how we take care of different kinds of pets. Our vocabulary words are responsibility, train, depend, compared, and social. We will be reading “The Birthday Pet”, “The Family Pet”, and “The Perfect Pet” and in our crabby books we will read “I Hug Gus”. During guided reading your child will either read “My Cats” or “Their Pets”. We will also be focusing on the letters G and W and learning the words “of” and “they”. This week we will focus on the plot of the story which is usually how the characters figure out or solve a big problem. We will also talk about predictions and how good readers make predictions to figure out what they think will happen next in the story and sometimes readers have to revise their predictions.

In Unit Studies we will continue to do activities from the Nutrition Kit we received last week – my friends and I have loved learning about “my plate” so far and have learned what happens to our food after we eat it! We are excited to learn more about nutrition!

This Friday is going to be a little crazy as Mrs. Schroeders class will be joining us for the day! Their classroom is being painted all day and since we do everything the exact same way we thought we would just invite them over for the day. We will start the day with going to the library, then we will all do our g and w letter projects. Then we have a parent reader. After lunch we will do daily math routines and tell and solve story problems. We also have a dentist coming to visit us and she will talk to us about the importance of brushing our teeth so we will be doing a few activities with our teeth as well. Then we will go to specials and finish the day with activities from our nutrition kit – so I promise we will still have a lot of learning going on but wanted to give you a heads up in case your kindergartener tells you that her friends were with us the entire day – because usually they just come over for a short period of time or for fun games or videos! If we are lucky we might also start trying to assess some of our friends for report cards since we will have two teachers in the room!

Last week you should have received a note about your child’s conference. Please send this back as soon as you can or let me know if you need to switch days or times! Also please plan on bringing your kindergartener to the conference with you – I think it is so important that your child knows that we talk about how they are doing at school and your child has a few fun things to show you! If you have any questions or need to talk to me about something privately please let me know and we can figure out a time to talk without your child! Thank you so much for your help and support! I can’t wait to talk to you all next week!

Happy Valentine's Day!

I hope you all have a wonderful Valentine's Day!

Please know that your kindergartener loves you so very much! 

I also hope you like your gift we made just for you! 

Here is a little poem and video that we made for you as well!

I love you so much

What more can I say

You are my whole life 

Each and every day!

You are my Valentine 

Today and for always!

You are the one

I will love you forever!

Happy Valentine's Day!

King Keegan

This week Keegan was the King of the Jungle! I would have to say it was a fun week and think he would agree! He was super excited to show us all his new toy that he won at CoCoKeys - it was a big purple minion! All of us LOVED it! Keegan's mom also came in to read us his favorite book "Where the Wild Things Are" and she also read "Stand Tall Molly Lou Melon" which was an amazing book! Keegan's mom even got to dance with us to his favorite song "Happy"! Keegan likes the movie Ninjago, football, cheese pizza, lions, and the color black! He is a special kid because he is nice, caring, athletic, funny, and a good dancer! He likes to play with his sisters when he is at home as well as any sport and his loves to play his wii. When Keegan grows up he wants to be a football player! Keegan had a wonderful week and was a great King! Please check out this video of his week!

Happy Birthday Gabbi!

Today was Gabbi's 6th birthday and it was a great day! At first I didn't think Confetti was in our room but luckily my friends found him on my very messy desk! Of course that silly birthday elf also wrote Gabbi a note! Gabbi's mom came and read us two books this morning and then stayed to eat lunch and her dad even came to have lunch too! We had a very easy time coming up with words to describe our friend Gabbi and since her mom was there with us she contributed an adjective to describe Gabbi for her gift as well! She had a wonderful day at school and we hope she enjoys being 6 years old! Here are a few pictures from her day!

 Gabbi with her note from the birthday elf, Confetti!

 Gabbi and her mom after she read to all of us!

 Gabbi with her parents at lunch!

 Gabbi and the birthday elf!

 Gabbi and her present from her friends!

Gabbi and her friends!

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!