We Are Thankful!

We spent some time this week being thankful for the many people that help us at school and in our families and community...  The students wrote thank you notes to many people in our school. 

We are thankful this week for the Upper Tanana Health Center for allowing us to come over on a field trip to learn about x-rays, our hearts, and how to stay healthy!  We had a great walk over from the school, and stopped by the big snow mountain in the parking lot on the way home!

We are also thankful for the many family members who volunteer their time to help us in our classroom and on field trips!  Thank you to Cody and Lily Omta for helping out on our field trip this week, and to Scott and Kelly, Trapper Holmes' grandparents for coming in this week to help us make pies and do math!  I am also grateful for Jill Kranenburg and Michelle Erickson who come in every week to help with reading groups.  You make a BIG difference in our classroom!!!  

Here is Trapper's Grandpa helping the kids learn how to read a recipe and make thanksgiving pies!

We are VERY thankful for our awesome 5th grade Book Buddies!!!  We were able to make some extra pie filling (with the last of the cranberries that we picked this fall!!) and share an apple cranberry crisp with our Book Buddies on Wednesday while we read stories together.  We love reading with our Book Buddies, and not only are they great readers, but I have seen them being so kind to the kindergarteners all around the school... they play with them at recess, give them hugs in the halls...they are just the best!

We were very thankful for food this Thanksgiving week, and had lots of fun making pies and bread!  In science we are studying nutrition, so we learned about the grain group and did an experiment to see how yeast adds air bubbles to bread.  Here, yeast is blowing up a balloon!  We focused on working together while we read our bread recipe and made bread, and then watched The Little Red Hen, about some animals that did NOT work together to make their bread!  

I am thankful this Thanksgiving for every single amazing, wonderful, talented, and adorable student in my class, their families who support their learning at home, and the teachers and staff at Tok School who make Tok School a great place to learn, play, and grow!  Happy Thanksgiving!!!

Instant Challenge!

Towers, tools, fruit salad, Dead Bug, and a snowshoe hare!  Just another eclectic week in Kindergarten at Tok School!

We started the week off with an Instant Challenge!  This is a virtual learning opportunity for us to connect with other schools around Alaska and work on an engineering challenge all together!  This Instant Challenge was all about building a tower using no more than 12 pieces of paper and 12 inches of tape that could withstand the wind of a fan. The kids had fun seeing other students from around the state working on the same project!  We learned about the design cycle of engineering: "Find out more, try an idea, make it better."

However, we ended up learning just as much about working together in a team and persevering as we did about engineering!

After our Instant Challenge was over, we headed next door to Ms. Sara's First Grade, who also participated in the Challenge, to watch their fan tests!  I think the Kinders were inspired by what the First Graders built!

We continued the building theme in our writing lesson for the day...introducing the Six Tools of Writing by using tools to build a Story House!  After we had lots of fun using drills, hammers, screwdrivers, and pliers, we learned about the tools we use to build great stories!

In math we are working on number words, and sets of 10.  The kids are learning to use an abacus to picture what adding looks like, and to help count by 10's, among other things.

We had fun following a recipe for Fruit Salad in reading, and then writing a recipe of our own.

A big thank you to Mrs. Kranenburg who came in to help us, and taught us about composting!

In science we dissected a snowshoe hare to see in real life what the body parts we have been learning about look like!  There were mixed reactions... but mostly lots of "cool!", and a kind of grossed-out fascination.  We cut open the heart, brain, spinal cord, muscles, tendons, eyeballs, and looked at the stomach, intestines, bones, joints and bladder.  These guys have learned a LOT about anatomy this year!  On Monday we have a field trip to the Tok Clinic, and we'll end our unit with nutrition and healthy eating next week... just in time for Thanksgiving!!!

Are you still wondering what Dead Bug has to do with our week in Kindergarten?  It was a really fun game we played in P.E.!  Ask your kinder how to play...  Here they are being Dead Bugs!!!

Little Writers

I am super happy with the progress our class is making in writing!  They have come so far in just a Quarter!  Now that they have letter formation and some letter sounds down, we begin the Six Traits of Writing in earnest.  The Six Traits are the District's Writing Curriculum, and include the traits of Voice, Organization, Conventions, Ideas, Word Choice, and Sentence Fluency.  I love teaching writing, because there are so many FUN and CREATIVE ways for Kindergarteners to work on the Six Traits!  This week we worked on characters and the trait of "voice" - the art of giving writing a personal flair.  The kids created thumbprint characters, wove a story around them, and made sure that they talked to each other in the story.  What we ended up with were adorable thumbprint books!

After we put our books all together, we had a writers read-aloud party and enjoyed each others work!

What is 16-21 feet long and inside your body?  No, not a giant tape worm.  At least I hope not!  It is your small intestine!  Here the kids are measuring what 21 feet looks like as we learned about the parts of the digestive system.

We learned about how digestion is a process that actually starts with chewing and saliva, and breaks food down into smaller and smaller pieces that can be used by your body.  So we "digested" some breakfast cereal and fruit in our pretend stomachs by squeezing and mushing and adding liquid to the food, just like our stomach does.   Kind of makes you lose your appetite.

Do you have "Yankee Doodle" stuck in your head?  Has your kinder been singing it for days?  If so, it is because we sang Yankee Doodle and a few other songs at our Veteran's Day Assembly on Thursday.  Tok School honored the Veterans in our community with a concert of patriotic songs, speeches and poems.  I was so proud of our Kinders, they did a GREAT job!

Winter has come to the playground!

  

And with it, a new found sport on the hill... belly sliding!  Wheeeeee!!!!!  Thank you for making sure that your kindergartener has the Big 5 every day from now until...the snow is gone, which could be almost the end of the school year!  The Big 5 are: a hat, mittens or gloves, snowpants, boots, and a warm coat.  This will help the kids have fun outside all winter long on the playground!  We go outside everyday with a cold weather cut off of -20 degrees.