Snowflakes, hockey, and all things winter!

January is in full swing and here are few of the things that kept us busy this week! (There are many more, but this is just the fun stuff!).

Thank you to everyone who contributed coins to our Food Bank coin drive!  We sorted and counted all of the money in math, and found that we have $38.59 to contribute!  We are going to be taking a field trip to the bank soon to deliver our donation and learn about banks!  Stay tuned for details!

We got gloriously messy with puffy snow paint as we made polar bears in science.  

And to finish up our unit on how animals survive the winter we made plaster animal tracks.  Some of the tracks we used were grizzly bear, beaver, wolf, lynx, and porcupine.

In writing we worked on rhyming with the song Down By the Bay!  If you haven't heard it before, take a listen! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yt1czlnCUCg.   Your kinder will love to sing along.  Then we made up our own Alaskan version!  "Down by Moon Lake, where the blueberries grow, back to my cabin, I dare not go!  For if I do, my mother will say..."  And then we came up with lots of silly Alaskan animal rhymes for each verse, like "Have you ever seen a lynx saying "jinx"? or, "Have you ever seen a caribou getting' a hair-do?"  We had lots of fun making and singing our song!

We are beginning to prepare for the 2018 Battle of the Books!  This is a really fun event that will be held this year on March 13 at 9am in the Tok School Library!  (Everyone is invited to attend, so mark your calendars!).  Here are the four books that will be in the Kindergarten Battle.  We read and study these books, memorizing the titles and authors and every detail we can think of.  Then on the day of the Battle we answer questions about the books in teams, competing with schools around the district.  Past trophies are up in our room, and we hope to earn another one this year!!!  

We are continuing to work on hockey skills in P.E., and had our first scrimmage game on Thursday.  We had a learning opportunity when the First Graders obliterated us 8-0.  When we figured out which net to shoot towards it helped some.  But, good sportsmanship was had by all, and lots of fun.  We even had cheerleaders at our game!  I think maybe we'll mix up teams next game.  :) . 

"Gimme a T, gimme an O, gimme a K... Gooooooo TOK!"  (We were non-partisan in our cheering.)

The kids learned how to line up and "high five" after the game to practice sportsmanship.

We finished up the week by making snowflakes to decorate our room in art.  Watching the kids' faces as they unfolded their snowflakes to discover the beautiful designs they had created was just the best!  By the time we were done, it looked like it had snowed in our room!  But we turned ourselves into human vacuums and had it cleaned up in snow time.  We did get a bit flakey, though.