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!

Embracing Winter!

 When in Alaska... do as the Alaskans do, right?  Next month we'll get to the tropics, but for now we are having fun studying Alaskan animals, snow, ice, and all things winter!

We made puffy snow pictures after reading the book, "What Do Snowmen Do At Night?"  The kids got creative with what their snowmen would do at night!  We had fancy dressed singers and snowmen getting warm by the bonfire, and snowmen building snow pets!

We read one of my favorite books of all time about a chilly little man named Chilly Billy that turns the light on in your fridge!  So if you see your kinder trying to sneak past the fridge and open it quietly at the last minute, you'll know why! They are trying to catch Chilly Billy!

We had so much fun with puffy snow paint that we decided to do it again, this time with our Alaskan Animals research unit!  The kids each chose an animal, created a picture, and did research to find out how it survives the winter! 

We learned about how snow and ice form, and went outside to look at beautiful snowflakes under the magnifying glass!  Then on our way back in we scooped up some nice, clean snow to make delicious snow ice cream and slushies with! 

This week we did a unit on animal tracking, with help from the Tetlin National Wildlife Refuge.  We studied different kinds of tracks, and the stories they can tell in the snow.  We created our own plaster casts of tracks too! 

Next week we are doing lots of mid year testing to see how much the kids have grown so far! They will be doing the state wide MAP test, as well as AIMS Web, both of which give us benchmarks in relation to how they did in the fall, as well as how they are doing compared to other kinders nationwide.   Making sure your kinder gets good rest and nutrition will help them come to school ready to do their best on their tests!  Thank you for all you do as kinder families!