The kids colored a poster that says, "You are the BEST kindergarten class in the world!" And I remind them of that frequently!
We started off Monday morning by making Kissing Hands with our parents, to say good-bye.
We spent a LOT of time this week going over routines. We have routines for everything! Morning work, Morning Meeting, lining up, going to the bathroom, doing classroom jobs, eating lunch, going to recess, etc. etc. First thing in the morning we check our "toolboxes" and make sure we have all the tools we'll need for the day.
We went on a scavenger hunt all around the school to practice walking in the halls and get familiar with the school. We even found a print of Big Foot!
In math we are just doing some placement testing and working on basic number writing, counting and patterns. We'll start our My Math curriculum this week.
Like all of the elementary classes, we have a STARS class in the afternoons. This quarter, all of the Kinders stay with me, and we are working on KinderTech 101. The following three quarters the kids (with your guidance) will be allowed to choose their STARS interest-based class, based on space availability!
In Kindergarten we LOVE to make mistakes. That means our brains are growing! Here the kids are doing exercises to build their muscles. But then we talked about how to make our brains grow as well... by making mistakes and learning from them. So if your child comes home and says, "I made a mistake today!" that would be a positive thing!
Here is a word web that we made of our favorite things to do at school, to brainstorm our journal writing ideas. The kids write in their journals almost every day. We start off with tracing and illustrating their ideas. By the end of the year you will be amazed what they can write!
We did take some time to rest this week... we call this Pillow Pet time, because each of the kids have a pillow pet that comes out only at read aloud time. We all need to chill out sometimes!
We also did a lot of playing this week!
We practiced center rotation by exploring some of the fun things to do in our classroom... cabin, sand, legos, and reading jungle are some of the favorites!
We had a special guest, Ms. Mari Hoe-Raitto, an administrator of the A-CHILL grant, come in and teach us an introductory lesson about dog mushing. We will be working with her throughout the year to have more experiences with dogs and mushing! She brought a very sweet helper with her, Bud.
We learned some important lessons last week about teamwork,
and how every piece of the puzzle is important,
just like every single member of our classroom family is important!
