Lucky Little Leprechauns!

We had fun with St. Patty's Day before we left for Spring Break... and hope the trap the kids made caught a leprechaun in our classroom!  

On our Pots of Gold in this picture, the kids each wrote a mini essay about what makes them feel lucky!  One of the kids wrote, "I feel lucky when I get a job as a principal!"  So does our new Principal for next year, I am sure!!!

The rainbows you see in this picture are actually fraction strip rainbows!  We did paper folding to compare fractions in order up to 1/8.  The kids made many awesome discoveries during this activity, including the idea that the denominator shows how many pieces it is folded into, the bigger the denominator the smaller the pieces, and to get 1/6 from 1/3, you have to divide each piece by 2, and the same for 1/8 from 1/4.  We are having lots of fun with our Intro to Fractions unit!

We really enjoyed our Book Buddies sledding party on Wednesday!  It was such gorgeous weather!  We had s'mores by the fire and just enjoyed a beautiful spring day with our 4th grade buddies.  Thank you to the parents who came and helped!

Try keeping a surprise party a secret with 8 kindergarteners.  They say things like, "Shhh!!!  Don't tell her about the You Know What!"  We celebrated Ms. Alexa's birthday on Thursday.  She is very loved by our whole class, including me!  I don't know what we would do without her.  She is such a great asset to our class and the whole school.  She is a very talented teacher with awesome creativity and a natural gift for working with kids!  Alexa is one of those people that does what you were going to ask her to do before you even thought of doing it yourself.  Happy birthday Alexa!

I am excited that I just got certified to belay on the rock wall in the gym!  So we are now able to take turns on the wall during our P.E. station rotations, and it has been SO fun!  The kids are testing not only their physical strength but stretching themselves to conquer their fear and have such a feeling of accomplishment when they do!

We began a unit in science electricity and magnets.  The kids made some cool discoveries about electricity using these circuit boards!  We did some experiments about conductors and insulators, and figured out how to make a light bulb light up in a circuit!

I love it when their faces "light up" like this!  I always knew my students were "bright"!

Dr. Seuss and Battle of the Books!

I want to thank every single one of you for coming to conferences this week.  We had 100% attendance at conference, and that just tells me that we have a class full of parents who truly care about their child's growth and education.  We had a great time sharing successes and proud moments, and reaching up towards new goals.  So thanks for being, like I always tell my class, the BEST PARENTS of the Best Kindergarten Class in the World!

You are looking at the 2019 Kindergarten Battle of the Books Champions for Alaska Gateway School District!  We brought three teams, and ALL of them tied for first place, with no one missing any questions!

We celebrated the genius of Dr. Seuss this week! We had a different book theme every day!  Monday it was Green Eggs and Ham!

Yep!  It was unanimous! We all like green eggs and ham!  Next we read Yertle the Turtle, did a writing assignment about Yertle, and made pattern turtles.  Here is our stack with poor Mack on the bottom!

Cat in the Hat day was lots of fun with our hats, and Leo the kitten as our mascot!  Eragon got to be the Lizard in the Hat, too.  He was thrilled. 

We did a hundreds mystery picture of cat in the hat to help identify numbers to 100!

And we had lots of fun playing games like Cat in the Hat... to see how much we could balance before we saw "all the things fall!"

We got to help with a special Dr. Seuss lunch.  Thank you Loretta Fitting!  We had fun turning our hands green to make green eggs, and making cat in the hat string cheese!

Little Scientists!

Our Read Around the World read-a-thon has begun!  As a class we will read to earn miles on a trip around the world for the next 7 weeks!  We will mark our progress on this map, and hope to earn one continent a week, which would be equivalent to each student reading 60 minutes a week.  So far the kids have been excited about reading during their free time at school to earn minutes!  They can keep track of all of the minutes that they read or someone reads to them at home, on their reading logs.  We are keeping track at school, too.  We will earn prizes along the way, and get our passports stamped as we "visit" each continent through books!

On Wednesday we had a kick-off event with Mr. MacManus reading Dr. Seuss's "Oh the Places You'll Go".  Then the kids rotated through 3 different stations, visiting Asia, South America, and Antarctica.

Our week revolved around science, as the Science Fair was on Tuesday!  Monday was spent finishing up posters and practicing presentations to the pretend judges.  Then Tuesday the kids were so excited to display their projects at the fair!

The girls had a popular project about fingerprints.  Everyone wanted to come by and get their fingerprint taken so they could see what type of fingerprint they had!  One of our students decided after doing this project that she loves taking fingerprints so much, she wants to work for the FBI when she grows up. :) . 

Here Tanner and Jedediah are talking with Tim Lorenzini from Tetlin National Wildlife Refuge, one of the judges, about their project on temperature and air pressure with balloons!

We spent the rest of the week reading about famous scientists and inventors in reading, and writing about inventions we would like to create!  The kids had such great ideas as a fairy drone that sprinkles fairy dust, rocket shoes, a heated cat bed, and a pumpkin shaped robot that would fill our water bottles and clean up our floor at school!  After reading about Thomas Edison and Ben Franklin we began exploring electricity.  We will delve deeper into electricity and magnetism very soon!

Last, but not least, don't forget about early release on Monday, at 2:15.  Parent-Teacher-Student conferences will be that afternoon.  I look forward to meeting with each of you and your kindergartener!!!