Story Houses

The days are darker now and one good thing about that is that right about when school is starting we have some gorgeous sunrises out our window!  It is getting a little hard to do the weather chart in the mornings!

We are continuing our study of the human body... putting together skeletons and learning about muscles and other organs.  We also are doing a lot of reading nonfiction books about the body, looking for facts, and learning how to do research on the computer.  Here the kids are using MYON reading to look up books about bones.  MYON is one of the programs accessible at home, through a link on the side of our blog.  The kids LOVE it because they are able to search for books on any topic they like!

Our big focus this week was on learning about "building a story."  We use tools to write, just like we use tools to build a house.  So the kids built "story houses" and got very creative with the halloween theme, turning them into Haunted Story Houses!!!  

To reinforce this idea, we even had fun with some real tools in the classroom!

Here are some of the "tools" we use in writing, that we will be focusing on this year:  Organization (who wants a house where the basement is on the roof and the walls are inside out?), Ideas (like the lights coming on in our house!), Word Choice (like paint that we use to make our stories colorful!), Conventions (like periods and spaces between words that make a story readable), and Voice and Sentence Fluency, that make our writing personal and interesting to read!

I love teaching writing to kinders, because it is so fun to see the progress the kids make in one year, and how excited they are when they can actually put their thoughts down on paper and get creative!

Here we had fun one day, coming up with Halloween words that started with B to practice our letter of the week and kid spelling!

Thursday night the kids performed in a concert at the GAP dinner, showcasing some of the Halloween songs they have been learning in music.  They did such a great job, it was very cute.  I mean spooky.  

This week there are lots of Halloween Festivities going on:

Wednesday at 2pm we will have a costume parade around the school.  Students are encouraged to bring a costume, but not to wear it all day.  We will help them get dressed before the parade.  After the parade, around 2:15, we will PARTY in our room until about 3pm.  You are all invited! The kids will go home on the bus.  There is no GAP that day.  Then Trick or Treat Street is from 5-7 at the school.  There will also be a Halloween Carnival going on in the lunchroom at the same time.  

Thursday's agenda includes lots of tired, grumpy children coming down from a sugar rush.  

Happy Halloween everyone!

Spooky Skills...

This is Mr. Bones!  He's been visiting our classroom to help us learn about bones.  He seems to wander around at night because every morning he is in a different crazy costume!!

We learned how bones heal themselves, and since Mr. Bones was missing his kneecap, we gave him a cast!

We are doing some great Halloween writing!  The kids and I listened to the song Witches Brew and brainstormed some ingredients for our witches brew.  Then we wrote about it, using kid spelling!  It was so much fun!!!

We also did a fun writing lesson based on the book "The Squiggle" by Carole Schafer.  Here are some of the creative things that we turned our squiggles into.  We will do this activity again, and develop into writing full sentences and stories about our squiggles as the year goes on.  It might be fun to try at home, as well!

In math we are making great progress!  We continue to use hands-on tools to reinforce their skills.  Here the kids are playing dice games, practicing adding and counting.

We always have counting blocks, counting teddy bears, etc. available to help kiddos see their math in a concrete way.  They have gotten REALLY good at using these!  If your child is bringing math homework occasionally, using "things" to help show what they are learning will be a huge help when you work with them!

This was the last week of our KinderTech STARS class!  We have just had so much fun learning about computer coding with our ozbots and beebots!  The kids are also very competent now at logging in to their online programs independently.

New STARS classes start on Monday for Quarter 2!  That means in the afternoons (except for Wednesdays) from 2-3pm the kids will be in the STARS classes that they signed up for.  If they did not return their preference sheet, they were assigned according to the teachers' knowledge of their interests.   All the Kinders were in my STARS class first quarter, but this quarter they will mix in with the other K-2 kids during STARS time. 

 If your Kinder has come home this week sounding like a Germophobe, it's because we've been studying all about germs, and how to stay healthy!  We looked at real pictures of bacteria and viruses, learned about how they are everywhere, and that some are good for us, and some make us sick.  We practiced sneezing into a tissue with a spray bottle, and used some Glow-Germ lotion to practice washing our hands really well!  We were all surprised how many "germs" were left still on our hands!

We've been enjoying Kinder Tech. We got to visit the MakerSpace this week, and had lots of fun  building cubelet robots that could roll, spin, beep, and flash depending on how they were put together!  

The kids built some great things out of legos...

They also created an ice cream store... Makerspace is great for the imagination in more than one way!

We focused on the awesome writing trait of "ideas" this week.  We talked about having a "brainstorm" so here is our literal "brainstorm" of ideas for our Halloween costume journal page. 

We had time later in the week to play with our Bee Bots again during KinderTech time.  This time they figured out that they have a "memory", so you can tell them exactly what to do and they will do it. (Precursor to computer coding 😊.) The kids built mazes and programmed the Bee Bots to go through the mazes!

Friday afternoon is always a great time for a messy, fun art project.  We are learning about the four seasons, and created handprint trees to represent each season!

Don't forget that Monday is an early release day, and Parent-Teacher Conferences begin Monday afternoon at 2:15.  Please contact me if you won't be able to make it or forgot your appointment time.  I am excited to share your child's progress with you!

First, then, last!

We were all about the Little Red Hen this week.  It is such a great story to finish up our unit on nutrition (the grain group), and our unit on Working Together!  We also used it to focus on one of our six traits of good writing, Organization.  The kids had to put the story in order and make their own books to take home.  Hopefully they brought home their little books and told you the story, in order!  

We did sequencing puzzles this week to support the trait of Organization, and compared a story to a train, with an engine (beginning), train cars (the middle) and a caboose (the end.) . We are also writing recipes with first, then, last instructions.  

So, speaking of recipes, we followed a recipe to make bread!  The kids got to try wheat grains, and learned about how they get ground up into flour that we use to make breads.  We also did a science experiment with yeast, and saw how the gasses it released blew up a balloon, just like they make bubbles in our bread! 

Cooking with Kinders is so much fun.  They L.O.V.E.D. kneading the dough.  Several of them said, "This is my best day EVER!"  Well, that was easy!  

Our bread turned out to be very delicious, mostly because of all of the kneading!  We ALL got to eat some because we ALL worked together to make it!  Nothing like hot fresh bread right out of the oven!!!

The kids are cruising right along in math.  We do some math on our adaptive Redbird program on the computer, and then our regular paper/pencil math (with lots of hands on counters, like teddy bears).  

Often the kids partner up and teach each other.  Teaching is the best way to learn!

The kids have really enjoyed our listening center in the Reading Jungle.  There are iPods with dozens of books loaded onto them, and the kids know how to scroll down to the book they want, listen to it, and follow along by turning the pages.  We even had a special guest in the reading jungle this week!

We started the program Keyboarding Without Tears this week in Kindertech 101 (our kindergarten STARS pod class).  The kids love it so far, and we will continue throughout the year, reinforcing keyboarding skills which are so important!  Just a note on the STARS classes:  All of the elementary students switch classrooms for the last hour or so of the day, to interest based pod classes, called STARS classes (Science, Technology, Arts, Regional and global awareness, and Service.) We have been a self-contained kindergarten pod class for this first quarter, called Kindertech 101.  We have focused on getting the kids up to speed on the tech that the school uses, like learning how to access the programs independently, get on Google Classroom and complete an assignment, and learning keyboarding and digital citizenship.  Now, for the last couple of weeks of the quarter, we are focusing on beginning computer coding!  A paper came home last week with the STARS class choices for the next quarter.  Please discuss with your child his or her interests, and return it to me by Oct. 12.  We will do our best to get each child into their first or second choice class. 

We had an absolute ball today playing with Bee Bots, which introduce the kids to the concept of coding.  They were encouraged to discover how the Bee Bots work on their own, and through that process, discover how to tell the Bee Bot what to do, which is really what coding is all about.  They are getting it!  We will work some more with them, and soon get to the point where the kids can code the Bee Bots to perform certain tasks, like go through a maze.

We also got to experiment with OzBots, which are tiny robots that respond to colors and black lines on paper.  We had fun coloring in the codes and then creating pathways for the OzBots to follow!  We'll work more with these, too.  It's truly amazing to see the kids just experiment, try things out, learn from mistakes and figure technology out for themselves.  They are truly fluent in the language of tech already, and aren't afraid to just TRY things and see what works.  It is exciting to be a teacher just sitting back and watching all of this great critical thinking and creativity going on!