The Beginning of Kindergarten! 2013-2014

The beginning of Kindergarten is an exciting and emotional time for all involved. We all are anxious about so many things! I have to say that so far, the school year is going great! Everyone seems happy and engaged every day! We've learned about what peacemakers and peace-breakers do, handwriting, learning about where we live, and this week about our 5 senses! 

In case you didn't get any pictures of the first days of school here is one of each student that I finally had time to take!

       

 
 
 
 

Here are a few others of your kiddos in action:

Learning about our 5 Senses was so fun and so hands on! Sometimes it is so tricky to find things that are engaging and exciting but the kids loved learning about the ways God gave us to explore His creation. We sent home the 5 Senses Science Journal in the Friday Folders this week so please check that out! There are also a few pages that we didn't get to but that gives you an opportunity to learn about what they learned!

                                


                              
                           

For sight, we made binoculars and played I Spy! with this big book! We sent home these binoculars on Friday so hopefully their binoculars are still all in one piece! 

For listening, we took a listening walk! We took a walk through our garden, along the playground and through the halls to check off some things on our sounds checklist which is in the 5 Senses Science Journal. 

 Just like with our smell jars, we put various things in the jars to shake and use our hearing sense to guess what they are. You can see what sounds we found in the science journal as well!

For touching we felt 4 different textures (in the journal!) and described things that felt like those textures. We also made texture rubbing of of the bottom of our shoes to explore which texture our shoe was. 

For taste (sorry, no pictures of this one!) We explored the 4 different types of taste: candy corn for sweet, lemon candy for sour, pretzel for salty/savory, and dark chocolate for bitter (this one wasn't as bitter as I thought it would be but I'll take any excuse to get chocolate involved!) Check out your student's science journal to find out what our class' favorite taste was! 

Next week we will be learning about vegetables and fruits and what they need to grow so expect a post about that! 

Thank you for trusting me with your child and for giving them such good attitudes. Each personality, interest, strength and weakness inspires me to reach each of them where they are.

 Please pray for the year to continue in it's abundance!   

                                               

Hearts, cookies and hats!

First of all I must apologize for just now getting these pictures up! Valentine's Day was a blast and I think you can tell that your little sweeties LOVED love. 

We talked A LOT about what love is. We defined what love is as a teacher, a student, a child, a brother, a sister, a friend.....we have really tried to continue to remind ourselves to show love. We do this by being patient, by not talking when it is another person's turn or by not being distracting. They are already so loving so they didn't need much practice doing this!! 

We decorated our boxes as either monsters or owls.

Valentine's day was FULL OF SUGAR. And since it was raining on Valentine's day WE HAD NO OUTSIDE RUN YOUR ENERGY OFF TIME :) It was a fun day for sure!

Here are a few of the snacks we had:

Donuts!!!

Cupcakes!!

Notice how JD licked the icing right off-pure sugar!!!! They loved every minute of it!

We then became professional cookie decorators! Seriously, if someone had told me how into this and how quiet they would be as they decorated their cookies, we would have done it much earlier in the day and just ignored the sprinkle mess!! 

Some real focus going on here!! Some of them couldn't even eat them from all the sugar we had already had but they really enjoyed decorating the cookies. A big thank you to our room mom committee!! 

Then of course there was the big valentine hand out that the kids were pumped for!! Their cute little faces lit up every single time they got a valentine! I just loved this week!! (even with all the sugar!)

They are all just the best of friends:)

Above are pictures of Sweetheart estimation and graphing! 

Happy President's Day!!

                                                               Happy Birthday to J.D!!

As if we hadn't had enough sugar last week., we talk a lot about cookies this past week.

Many students had been struggling to understand the how many more and how many fewer concepts so we practiced with little cookie crisps.

We then solved the mystery of Who stole the cookies from the cookie jar?? This helped us practice making inferences and understanding how elements of a story really connect. 

Our clues-the yellow post-it says "Go Purple!" because we have been mentioning the PowderPuff game that was on Friday so the note was suppose to help them think that the person is on the purple team. The red box has a pitch pipe in it.

Writing our "reports"! :)

Our suspects and why we were inferring about them.

Mr. Evans was the culprit:)