Pumpkin spice and everything nice!

 This was a short but fun week, packed with celebrations!  

Birthday Mania continued, with two MORE birthdays on the same day.  We have 2 sets of birthday twins in our class this year, not even counting the real set of twins we have!  What are the chances?!  

Happy birthday to Josiah and Lincoln!

We are working on a virtual Christmas ABC book that will be online.  I will share it with you next week when it is done!  Here is a sneak peek of a couple of pages!

And I have to share this cute picture.  The kids are always making me pictures... I love it.  They are so loving and sweet.  Usually I am Ms. bed or Ms. ded.  A name with a b and a d in it is SO not fair for a kindergarten teacher!  :). 

 We had so much messy fun making Pumpkin Pies for the kids to take home for Thanksgiving Dinner!  

We had a delicious Thanksgiving Dinner at school on Wednesday!  Shout out to the kitchen and all the staff that helped put that together. along with a Charlie Brown Thanksgiving movie! It was the perfect ending to a fun week!

I hope everyone has a WONDERFUL Thanksgiving.  Just know, your children are a light in my life, and I am so thankful for them, and for you!  Happy Thanksgiving!

Moving Forward!

 We have some really good forward momentum in Kindergarten.  It has been so great to be able to stay in school IN-PERSON consistently, and it is showing up in the progress the kids are making.  

We are learning lots of new "popcorn words", or sight words, and also working hard on rhyming, word families, and phoneme segmentation, or listening for sounds when we chop up words, and being able to translate those sounds into phonetic spelling!  The language we use with the kids is "chopping up words", "What sound do you hear first?" "Then what?" and "kid spelling."  You may want to practice those skills for fun at home with your kinder!

We also are working on greater than or less than in math, and had fun making alligator puppets and playing with dice to make the alligator "eat" the greater number!

We are still celebrating Thanksgiving in lots of fun ways, including making cards for our families to show them we are thankful for them!  

The class earned a "sun" party, by blasting their rocket off through the solar system all the way from Pluto to the sun by being good listeners and working hard, so we had microwave s'mores on Wednesday, and watched a Magic School Bus movie about the human body.  We finished up our body unit this week, by answering our last question, "How does hair grow?"  See if your kinder remembers the answer!

We also had Birthday Mania this week, with three birthdays! We have two more coming up next week!  It was lots of fun, and if you ever want to invite someone to your birthday party, I recommend kindergarteners.  They were WAY more excited about my birthday than I was, and I got the BEST group hugs!   Happy birthday to Brent and Mary Ellen too!  The kids had so much fun making blue lipstick out of the frosting :).  

A GLOWING Week!

 This week was full of celebrations!  We are of course beginning to celebrate Thanksgiving and learning about thankfulness.  We also celebrated and honored our Veterans, and just for fun we threw in GLOW day!  

We learned about what a Veteran is, and made cards for the school to put in care packages for our community Veterans.  We also had fun learning about our flag and making a HUGE flag to say "thank you" to our Veterans virtually, since the annual Veteran's Day Assembly had to be cancelled. 

We had fun making turkeys, and the kids thought of so many wonderful things that they were thankful for!  We are going turkey crazy... singing about turkeys, coloring turkeys, doing turkey math, and reading about turkeys!

We are thankful for our new aide, Jocelyn, who experienced sledding for the first time this week with the kids! :) 

We are continuing to explore the wonderful things our bodies can do, and answering the kinder scientists' questions, such as "How can I move my feet?" and "Why does my heart beat fast when I run?"  This week we learned about our muscles, what they look like, how they connect to our bones, and how to keep them strong!  We did some exercising and yoga in class!

We also learned about our brains, and our nervous system, and how nerves relay messages from our brains to our bodies, and back!  We demonstrated this by playing "telephone" with one kid being the brain, and the kid at the end of the line being the body part that had to do what the brain told it to do!  It was pretty funny!

We also learned about a very important involuntary muscle, our hearts!  We drew what a real heart looks like, did an experiment about our heart rates, and made model hearts!

OK, I saved the best for last.  We had the most fun Book Buddies possibly ever.  GLOW DAY!  Ms. Bonnie the third grade teacher had this wonderful idea, and we have been planning it ever since the beginning of school when we decided to do Book Buddies together this year.  So we decided to turn our room into black light GLOW rooms!  We had some reading time thanks to Ms. Nicole Wells, who pulled a ton of books about stars and moons and space for us and brought them to our room.  Then we played various glow games like twister, spelling ping pong, tic tac to, and glow Jenga!  Then we did coloring pages and mazes with highlighters, and then used Oreos to create edible phases of the moon!   

After Book Buddies we did Glow Math and Glow Reading and lots of other fun glow activities all day long!   Just watching the kids come in in the morning made it ALL worthwhile.  It was the BEST!  

Here are some more pictures!

GROSS!!!

We did quite a few GROSS experiments this week in Kindergarten, all in the name of science!  But first, this was a big week in Kindergarten for another reason, too, as we learned about the voting process along with the rest of the United States!  

What began as a simple lesson in voting and using tally marks turned into quite the social experiment! It was fascinating to see how the students, when presented with a choice of whether to vote for a dog president or a cat president began spontaneously campaigning for their candidate of choice, and trying to get others to come over to their side! It turned into a political rally! 

 So then we had a time to campaign and express our opinions, and talked about what it means to express your opinion and respectfully allow others to do the same.  Then it was time to vote, in voting booths!  The best part was getting the sticker afterwards.  I guess you never outgrow that!

After the votes were counted the President Elect came to visit the class, and then all were united again, supporting our new class president, Oreo.  She was very popular with the voters, and even shook a few hands.  :) 

We had some wonderfully gross science experiments going on in our class this week.  We watched as our pumpkin decomposed before our very eyes, thanks to mold!  We looked at the mold under the microscope. 

As part of our health unit we also had taken swabs of different places we thought we might find germs, and grew them in petri dishes!  The germs were too small to see on their own, but in a big colony we could see them!  We had germs from the nose, hands, feet, door handles, mouth, and toilet.  There were some wide eyes when the kids saw that there really were germs all around us, even though we can't usually see them!

We continued our study of nutrition and the body by learning about the grain group, doing an experiment to see how yeast "breathes" bubbles into our bread, and making bread!  That was one experiment that was not gross but very delicious!

In one other gross experiment of the week, we learned about digestion!  We learned about the process and parts of our digestive system, and we measured how long our intestines would be if we stretched them all out!  Almost 20 feet long!  Then we "digested" a snack in a baggie stomach.  It was disgusting!!!