Dr. Seuss and Battle of the Books!

I want to thank every single one of you for coming to conferences this week.  We had 100% attendance at conference, and that just tells me that we have a class full of parents who truly care about their child's growth and education.  We had a great time sharing successes and proud moments, and reaching up towards new goals.  So thanks for being, like I always tell my class, the BEST PARENTS of the Best Kindergarten Class in the World!

You are looking at the 2019 Kindergarten Battle of the Books Champions for Alaska Gateway School District!  We brought three teams, and ALL of them tied for first place, with no one missing any questions!

We celebrated the genius of Dr. Seuss this week! We had a different book theme every day!  Monday it was Green Eggs and Ham!

Yep!  It was unanimous! We all like green eggs and ham!  Next we read Yertle the Turtle, did a writing assignment about Yertle, and made pattern turtles.  Here is our stack with poor Mack on the bottom!

Cat in the Hat day was lots of fun with our hats, and Leo the kitten as our mascot!  Eragon got to be the Lizard in the Hat, too.  He was thrilled. 

We did a hundreds mystery picture of cat in the hat to help identify numbers to 100!

And we had lots of fun playing games like Cat in the Hat... to see how much we could balance before we saw "all the things fall!"

We got to help with a special Dr. Seuss lunch.  Thank you Loretta Fitting!  We had fun turning our hands green to make green eggs, and making cat in the hat string cheese!

Little Scientists!

Our Read Around the World read-a-thon has begun!  As a class we will read to earn miles on a trip around the world for the next 7 weeks!  We will mark our progress on this map, and hope to earn one continent a week, which would be equivalent to each student reading 60 minutes a week.  So far the kids have been excited about reading during their free time at school to earn minutes!  They can keep track of all of the minutes that they read or someone reads to them at home, on their reading logs.  We are keeping track at school, too.  We will earn prizes along the way, and get our passports stamped as we "visit" each continent through books!

On Wednesday we had a kick-off event with Mr. MacManus reading Dr. Seuss's "Oh the Places You'll Go".  Then the kids rotated through 3 different stations, visiting Asia, South America, and Antarctica.

Our week revolved around science, as the Science Fair was on Tuesday!  Monday was spent finishing up posters and practicing presentations to the pretend judges.  Then Tuesday the kids were so excited to display their projects at the fair!

The girls had a popular project about fingerprints.  Everyone wanted to come by and get their fingerprint taken so they could see what type of fingerprint they had!  One of our students decided after doing this project that she loves taking fingerprints so much, she wants to work for the FBI when she grows up. :) . 

Here Tanner and Jedediah are talking with Tim Lorenzini from Tetlin National Wildlife Refuge, one of the judges, about their project on temperature and air pressure with balloons!

We spent the rest of the week reading about famous scientists and inventors in reading, and writing about inventions we would like to create!  The kids had such great ideas as a fairy drone that sprinkles fairy dust, rocket shoes, a heated cat bed, and a pumpkin shaped robot that would fill our water bottles and clean up our floor at school!  After reading about Thomas Edison and Ben Franklin we began exploring electricity.  We will delve deeper into electricity and magnetism very soon!

Last, but not least, don't forget about early release on Monday, at 2:15.  Parent-Teacher-Student conferences will be that afternoon.  I look forward to meeting with each of you and your kindergartener!!!  

Crazy for Science!

Last week we finished up our space unit by learning about the different temperatures and colors of stars, and then we made these cool colorful star cookies!

We have also been getting ready for the Science Fair, coming up this Tuesday!  Posters will be upstairs in the mezzanine of the library from 11-3, but we will be by our displays from 2-3 for the judging.  Parents are welcome to attend!

One group is working on a project about air pressure and temperature:

Another group is working on a project about the types of fingerprints in families (and pets!).

We've been focusing on telling time lately!  So this would be a great time to help your child notice the times they do things throughout the day in your normal routine, and what the clock looks like at those times!  

We are doing so great on Popcorn words and reading!  Here the kids are putting together sentences.  Their progress always blows my mind around this time of year... they have come SO far!  It is very exciting for all of us!

The kids earned a party, blasting off all the way from Pluto to the Sun by doing a great job as a whole class.  They wanted to roast marshmallows on the sun... so we did!  

We also got out the anti-gravity bouncy house!