Healthy Food!

 This week was different than any other week I've ever had in Kindergarten!  We split the class in half, and I only got to see half of the class in person for two days of the week... Thank you so much for supporting your child at home the other half of the week!  Packets and Chromebooks going home seemed to work pretty smoothly. And one thing is for sure, we sure enjoyed our two days together in the classroom!  

We have lots of spontaneous teaching and fun moments throughout the day in Kindergarten, so not everything is going to be exactly the same.  But that being said, I do try to make everything as equitable as possible between the two groups.  

We had fun dressing up Mr. Bones for Halloween!  He has been in our classroom while we study the human body this month!

We took some time to be curious and come up with some questions we had about our bodies.  We will endeavor to answer these questions during our body unit!

We began learning about healthy food and nutrition. We sorted food into different food groups, and then took a trip to the greenhouse to pick some fresh vegetables.  The Monday/Tuesday class will be going to the greenhouse on Monday, and we will make a healthy treat with the veggies that we pick next week, too!

We had fun making a Caprese salad appetizer with the tomatoes and fresh basil that we picked!  One sad note: You know you are an adult when olives don't fit on your fingers anymore... :(. 

You may notice a new face in some of these pictures!  We are so happy to have our new Kindergarten aide, Jocelyn, with us for the whole school day!  She is from the Phillippines, and we are also excited to learn more about the Phillippines from her this year!  Welcome, Jocelyn!

Halloween everywhere!

Halloween in Kindergarten is the BEST.   We can use it to work on our science (skeletons, bones, bats, owls) our reading (Halloween book buddies and pumpkin sliders), literacy (writing Halloween stories and journal pages), math (counting pumpkin seeds, tallying up candy, counting spider legs) and so much more!

This week we had our Book Buddies come and visit on Wednesday.  We created a collaborative story called Witch's Brew.  Each set of Buddies came up with a poem about what to put into their witch's brew.  Here is one example, "I found a bat, and put it in my vat.  Then I saw a web, and I put it in, and also Ms. Deb."  Not sure what that means, that I ended up in the witch's brew, but I am just hoping it is because I am an easy rhyme with web.  :)   We had lots of fun reading with our buddies in the library, and the kids created edible spiders together too!

We are learning about our bodies and especially about bones this week! We have Mr. Bones, the skeleton visiting in our classroom, and we created our own skeletons out of Q-tips!

In math we are working on seasons, tally marks, and adding and subtracting, doubles addition (Have you heard your kinder sing the Doubles Rap?!), and skip counting!  Here the kids are creating addition and subtraction stories and acting them out with bears.  We also have a life sized number line in our classroom on the floor, where we act out stories by jumping forward or backwards on the number line!

Finally, we had so much fun dressing up this week for Spirit Week! Thank you to all of the families who helped participate in this!  Friday we had an assembly to celebrate the volleyball and basketball teams, and it was so much fun to go in the gym and watch some students v. teacher games.  The kinders had fun cheering as loud as they could!  We even had some students win the prize drawing for participating in dress up days!  Each day they dressed up they got a ticket in the can, and then at the assembly, student council drew out some lucky tickets.  It was a tough life lesson to learn that not everyone wins all the time, but High School students throwing out candy into the audience afterwards seemed to make most of the kinders much happier.  :) 

Helicopters, goats, and sneezes!

 The kids earned a party this week, by blasting off their rocket all the way to the sun!  So we had a helicopter party!  The kids threw maple seed helicopters on the playground, and watched them twirl down, and then made their own helicopters that we dropped from the library balcony!  

Audrey brought some fun goats come to visit!  We got to meet Rosabelle and Imax!  Thank you Michele for bringing them, what a treat!

We also began our unit on the human body, beginning with germs.  We practiced using a tissue while "sneezing" with a spray bottle, and used glow germ lotion to find out how well we washed our hands!  We needed lots of re-washing!

We worked on graphing in Math, using Halloween pictures.  The kids did great, and lots of students got their graphs up on the Super Star board!

Popcorn word folders have arrived!  This week we started their individual popcorn word cards.  They practice daily with a buddy or with a teacher, and pass off their words each week and get new ones!  

We celebrated the end of a busy week with Free Play centers on Friday afternoon.  There are so many fun things in our room, but sometimes we are so busy doing academics we don't get enough time to PLAY!  Which is also an important part of kindergarten!