Kindergarten is the BEST!

We had a super fun week... oreo science, a kitten, a swim party, and some hockey.  Don't YOU wish you were in Kindergarten?!  😃

We practiced our phases of the moon by carving Oreos!  Be sure to continue helping your kinder look at the phases of the moon when possible at night!  If it's cloudy or not up yet at bedtime, you can always google it!

We had my daughter Ande's new kitten come to visit and be our reading buddy on Monday.  He got pretty tired out by reading time, so whoever was reading with me got to snuggle with Leo while they read!

On Wednesday we took a super fun trip to Ft. Greeley in Delta!  Thank you SO much to Janine Holmes, Loretta Fitting, Amy Young, and Alexa Peet for coming along and making our trip possible.  We had pizza, played in the bouncy house and blocks room, and then had a great time swimming!

We wrote stories about How to Lose Your Best Enemy, based on the book Enemy Pie, by Derek Munson.  The kids came up with lots of sweet ways to turn an enemy into a friend.  

On Friday we got to support our Tok Wolverine Hockey team and go watch a game!  The kids were GREAT cheerleaders! 

 Later on our very own Saylor, Kenzie, and Tanner played on the Tok Wolverine Mites hockey team.  They did awesome!  Great job guys!!!

Snow, Ice, and Everything Nice!

We spent the week embracing winter.  We studied thermometers and learned about the coldest parts of the earth.  We also enjoyed a snowy Book Buddies party!

In math we learned about how to read a thermometer (all of our counting by 10's practice came in handy!).  We did an experiment to gather snow and take the temperature of snow, our room, and our thumbs.  

We graphed our results and put them in order.  Then we wrote about our conclusions and shared them with each other!

We learned about the coldest place on earth, Antarctica.  We watched a Nat Geo film about it, and played penguins on icebergs to model how difficult it is for penguins to escape predators when the ice is melting.  We created icebergs with saran wrap painting and practiced making ovals and hearts and triangles while creating our cute little penguins!

Book Buddies was all about snow as well!  The kids look forward to seeing their Book Buddies so much.  It is on our calendar every month and they count down the days!  This time, our Book Buddies event was based on the book Snowmen at Night by Caralyn Buehner.  

We made silly looking snowmen out of donuts, and the kids wrote their OWN versions of what snowmen do at night!

Then we went outside with our buddies and painted snow!  Some of the kids even made a garden of snow flowers.  Winter in Tok lasts a loooong time.  So, we decided to make the most of it!  It was a very fun, snowy week!!!

Back at it again!

Kindergarteners just know how to enjoy life.  Really!  They are so inspiring to be around!  While the rest of the school is complaining about coming back to school, the Kinders are so excited to be with their friends again and play!  It was so nice to come back on Monday morning to a bunch of hugs!

We had a short week, so not a lot of pictures, but we did have a couple of exciting events this week.  First of all, inflation hit kindergarten, so now instead of pennies for bringing back folders and blue slips, the kids earn nickels.  Which they can then exchange for dimes and quarters.  (See how sneaky this is?  They think they are just earning money, but really they are learning coins and making change! ;) . Of course, the raise in wages means a raise in prize card prices too.  Hey, that's life.

So we spent quite a bit of time this week playing with money, getting used to our new coins, and identifying and sorting them.  We even played a blind money ID game... trying to identify the money just by feel!  That might be a fun thing to try at home, too!

The other BIG event was that we earned a class party this week by "blasting off" all the way from Pluto to the Sun.  The class earns a blast-off by doing awesome stuff like working really hard on reading centers, or walking in a great line to lunch.  

We had a cookie pizza and bouncy house in our room!