Beach Day and Pizza Party!

 To celebrate being back from Spring Break, we all went to "Belize" and had a beach day!  We flew there on our "airplane", complete with snacks and an in-flight movie about Belize.  Once we arrived we played in the sand and made sand pictures!

We sang fishy songs and did beach math, and then in the afternoon, we looked at pictures and videos of all the cool animals in Belize like iguanas, sharks, and rays and lots of beautiful fish!  Then we cracked open our own coconut and drank the milk and ate the meat!  

After lunch it was time to hit the beach!  Jo Jo brought beach snacks for us, and we had a blast!

In other news, your kinder is learning fractions!  We have done fourths and halves, so if you have a chance at home, maybe at dinner, to help them divide things in half or in fourths, that would be great practice!  We made paper fraction pizzas, and wrote down our orders.  Then we made the real thing!

We have been doing LOTS of writing lately, and the kids are making LOTS of progress!  Many of the kids are independently writing stories using "kid spelling".  It is exciting for me as a teacher, and also for them, as they realize they can actually communicate through written words, and people can understand them!

Every morning they answer my Morning Message.  Usually it is just a picture or a tally mark, or filling in a letter or a number, but recently they have been writing me messages back!

We also worked on Boo Boo Stories this week, based on this book:

The kids had fun writing about their own boo-boo's and getting band-aids to put on their pictures!  Any project involving band-aids HAS to be fun, right?!

Valentine's Day, Battle of the Books and Book Buddies!!!

Valentine's Day is always a favorite... the kids are so excited to share their valentines with their friends! We had fun making animal Valentine mail bags and passing out cards to each other.   We also wrote notes to share with people that help us around the school!

For Valentine's Day math we tallied and graphed candy hearts, and then did a STEM challenge to build the tallest towers we could!  

  

The other people we love are our BOOK BUDDIES!!!  We had the best time learning about animal tracks with Mr. David from Tetlin Refuge.  We played an animal relay game, and got to see and touch lots of furs.  Then the kids made animal track story pictures with their buddies!  

Later in the day for Drop Everything And Read time we went to our Book Buddies' room to read under their tent and have some snow icecream!

We had a fun Battle of the Books.  All of the teams did great!!!  The kids worked VERY hard to memorize titles and authors and learn all the details of four books!

We have been doing some fun St. Patty's Day writing and reading!  The kids learned about lucky charms by eating Lucky Charms and then coming up with ideas about what makes them feel lucky!

Last but not least we really enjoy having STEM class with Mr. Steele.  He taught the kids about wind power today, and they made sail cars!  We had so much fun doing the engineering process to make our cars better and faster! 

Celebrations!

 February can be a dark month in Alaska, but we brighten it up with SO many celebrations in kindergarten!  Last week we celebrated Chinese New Year, Ground Hog Day, and Hundred's Day! Not to mention other fun visitors that came into our classroom to teach us about mining and geology.  We even threw in a birthday celebration for Maiya!

Monday was Chinese New Year!  We celebrated by making paper fans, learning the Chinese character for Good Luck, having a dragon dance, and eating long noodles for a long life, and sweet oranges for a sweet life.  

Our dragon dance took us all over the school making lots of noise to scare out the bad luck and bring in the new!

We had some hilarious chopsticks practice! 🤣🤣🤣 

We had some fun shadow play with the projector as we learned about shadows and Ground Hog's Day! We made ground hog puppets!

We had a unicorn birthday party for Maiya! Thank you Tori for the yummy cupcakes!

We had a couple of geologists from Kinross Fort Knox Gold come into our classroom and talk to us about minerals.  We made toothpaste from minerals, with lots of interesting flavors and colors!   

The kids identified the mineral sulphur by smell!

We played a game to find out how many minerals we use in our everyday lives, and mined cookies for "gold" - chocolate chips!

We started a new unit in writing, learning the six tools of writing!  To kick it off we had fun playing with tools and building writing houses.  For the rest of the year we will be focusing on these tools of writing: ideas, voice, conventions, word choice, sentence fluency, and organization.

Hundreds Day was the BIG EVENT of the week!  So exciting!!!  We had a jam-packed day of fun and hundreds day activities!  We did a literacy rotation with first and second grade in the morning, when the kids wrote about what they would do with 100$, wrote 100 words, and made old people pictures of themselves.  We had a hundreds day show and tell - thank you all for helping your kinder count out 100 things to bring!  

In the afternoon we did math rotations where they made a boat that could hold 100 pennies, learned about the biggest number, placed our final number on our hundreds chard, and did a hundreds chart mystery picture.  Finally, we had a hundreds day cake with the second grade, got our certificates for being 100 days smarter, and ate our hundreds day snack.  Thank you for bringing 100 pieces of snack food!