Christmas Time

Holiday time in the classroom is always SO much fun! We learned about reindeer-yes they are real! Each student should have a fact book that they can teach you with! I am crossing my fingers that you will be able to watch the video I am posting-The Reindeer Hokey Pokey-it is ADORABLE! If it doesn't work just ask your little reindeer to teach it to you! We used this song as a little brain break to get our wiggles out and have a little fun;)

You can see that they kids are more motivated to work when they are dressed for the holidays:)

With all the excitement, the holidays can really take the jingle from your step! This sweetie feel asleep during a winter story.

 At snack time we used the ReindeerCam to check on Santa's reindeer and we even got to wave at Santa a few times!

 Pajama Day was a blast!

 No holiday is complete with a visit from Santa!! Our class came to the conclusion that Santa and Mr. Wade must be brothers because they sure do look a lot alike ;)

Titus celebrated his birthday with us and some donuts!

 As you can see we had a blast and I hope that your Winter break was too!

Over my break I got to read a note from each one of your children that made me feel very appreciated (and teary-eyed!). Thank you for choosing me to teach your children and for making my job a dream come true!

Gingerbread Time

What part of a gingerbread cookie would you bite off first?
We are learning to graph as well as to recognize when a group is greater than, less than or the same so we used gingerbread cookies to help us with that!

We also used Gingerbread stories to help us problem solve. As you can see we were using the "Draw a picture" strategy on this day. Here are some examples:

Throughout the week we read several Gingerbread stories. First we learned what a refrain is-ask them! Then we talked about conclusions and how they are always at the end of the story. We discussed how the problems also are usually fixed by the conclusion! Here are a few samples of the time when we got to write our own conclusion to the story. 

Pizza Time

We earned our pizza after each student read 10 books this past quarter! Here are some pictures to show you how much we loved it! 

Thanks for all the hard work and get ready for a new incentive to work toward!

Spiders

Last week we introduced the Scientific Method in Kindergarten. Since we were also learning about spiders, I used this experiment to help us learn both! 

In the first experiment, our question is "How do spiders kill their prey?"

Take a look at your child's spider journal or ask them about it!

The next question was "Why don't spiders stick to their webs?"

God gave spiders oily legs so that they wouldn't stick to their own webs so they could catch their prey! We tried this out by putting some oil on our fingers and trying to get it to stick to a piece of sticky tape or "web". 

Last Wednesday was the end of the 1st quarter so we celebrated by "playing" with shaving cream (while give the tables a good cleaning!) We practiced number formation with our shaving cream and fingers.

This week we talked a little about skeletons so I played this song for them and they loved it!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e54m6XOpRgU

Today we also put together a little take home book titled "Orange Pumpkin, Orange Pumpkin". I think that I put everyone's in their folders so this would be a great thing to read together! Your students should recognize any sight words in the book as well as color words. They can use the Eagle Eye strategy since each page says the name of the illustration. This book as well as other picture books repeat some of the same lines which is great for emergent readers!