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!
