Heart Attack!

Happy Late Valentine's Day!  We had so much fun spreading the love!  

First, we made a big list of all of the people we love at Tok School that help us so much every day.  Then the kids worked REALLY hard to write a Valentine Love Note to ALL of these people!

We took off around the school to excitedly deliver our notes and hugs.  The kids were excited to give "heart attacks" to everyone!

In the morning we got to have a Book Buddies Valentine's Party!  We had made Valentines for our Book Buddies, and they had made some for us, so we had a Valentine exchange and read a secret admirer mystery book together!

Then it was off to the library to have a candy heart hunt and read some stories together.

Back in the classroom we played games and decorated cookies.  What a great day to show our Book Buddies how much they are loved!  

We did candy heart math and candy heart STEM challenges next!  Graphing our candy heart colors, making tally mark charts, and trying to pick up candy hearts with "chopsticks" (try it... it is very difficult!) We had kids get very creative with how this was done, and also stick with it until the very end.  I was proud of them!  

We had a candy heart tower building contest!

At our Valentine's Party in the afternoon we exchanged Valentines with each other in the mailboxes we had made,

Played with magnetic hearts,

and played with play-doh.  

 It was a super fun pink and purple whirlwind of a day! Thank you to everyone who brought Valentines and snacks.  We 💖our awesome kinder families!!!

My Trip to Space...

February has SO many holidays!  It keeps our winter interesting!  We learned about Chinese New Year last week, and this week we began with Ground Hog's Day.  Next week Valentine's Day and Presidents' Day!  We watched the video of Puxatawny Phil and found out that he did not see his shadow, and predicted an early spring!  Yay!  Then we had lots of fun playing with shadows!

Then we traced our shadows to make silhouettes!  Can you guess who is who?

The kids helped me experiment with doggie treat recipes for our Dog Mushing Extravaganza after school on Monday.  Everyone got to take some home, so hopefully you read the label on the baggie and didn't think they were oatmeal cookies! 

In math we are working hard on place value and hundreds, tens, and ones.  We are really digging into numbers and understanding what each digit means.

We began our preparation for the SCIENCE FAIR, coming up Feb 26th!  I will send home details soon... you are invited to come and see our project displays! This week we learned about the Scientific Method.  We played a game to put the steps in order.  Then we began the process by asking questions and coming up with hypotheses and designed our experiments.  We'll continue to work on these at school and make displays for the fair!

We are also finishing up our unit on Space.  We went through all of the questions we had at the beginning of the unit to see if we had answered them.  The kids were excited about how much they had learned!  But we found a few questions that we had not answered yet.  SO... we divided up into groups and did some research, wrote down our answers, and then shared our reports with each other.  

We also had so much fun playing in our rocketship and imagining we were going to space!  The kids wrote their space stories this week, with the prompt "Where would you like to go in space?"  First they wrote the stories, illustrated them, then published them online with Book Creator!  Check out these fun e-books!

Addy: https://read.bookcreator.com/lZIPpxMmwJab6NFqp6eWEx5NS703/k9CdEstWQcu0fj_VM2wh-Q

Saylor: https://read.bookcreator.com/lZIPpxMmwJab6NFqp6eWEx5NS703/202dQAgERPG90CZbNHXXfw

Jena: https://read.bookcreator.com/lZIPpxMmwJab6NFqp6eWEx5NS703/di350JnLTmq3cY6UNSzk9A

Jedediah:https://read.bookcreator.com/lZIPpxMmwJab6NFqp6eWEx5NS703/wzte-aX3TZa0OiGzZhliRw

Noah: https://read.bookcreator.com/lZIPpxMmwJab6NFqp6eWEx5NS703/amEegdORQiSyAZWGiUPfzA

Tanner: https://read.bookcreator.com/lZIPpxMmwJab6NFqp6eWEx5NS703/gc8-awYpSSGCaE1ptdLoFQ

Samantha: https://read.bookcreator.com/lZIPpxMmwJab6NFqp6eWEx5NS703/qL7HRisPREixZs-D_09WtA

100's Day!

A hundred days can seem like a long time, especially to a kindergartener!  So celebrating Hundred's Day is a BIG deal!!!!  I am so very proud of my students.  Not only was this week Hundred's Day, but it was also the Winter AIMS Web testing week.  The progress they showed on their tests of literacy and numeracy was amazing!  I met with each of them to conference about their results, and when I showed one of my students the graph of her results, and told her how much her scores improved, she said, "Of course!  I am 100 days smarter!"

We made crowns, got Smarties, certificates, and had fun walking through our door hanger all day long!  

We did a Hundreds Chart mystery picture, wrote our name as many times as we could in 100 seconds, and took 100 steps on the way to lunch!  

Thank you to everyone who contributed to our yummy 100's day snack!  There were 800 pieces of snack in there!  And we ate it all gone!

What does 100 of something look like?  We found out at our 100's Day show and tell!  We had 100 toys, 100 cars, 100 pennies, 100 linking cubes and tower blocks, 100 markers and crayons, and even a 100 cm pizza!  

We wrote stories about what we would do with 100 dollars!  Lots of toy and candy buying....

There were a couple of other big events this week as well.  Forgot to send home a permission slip for this field trip, but we went to space.  Hope you don't mind.  :) . I brought them all back again safe and sound.  We made some huge boxes into a spaceship and space station.  We packed our space packs with snacks and water, and blasted off and hooked onto our space station for snack time!   We did some space math as well, since astronauts have to be really good at math!!!

We also watched some videos of real rockets blasting off into space! 

Last but not least, the other big event of the week was Chinese New Year!  We had an awesomely noisy dragon parade all around the school to scare away the bad luck and ring in the good luck for the year!!!