Halloween Week

This week our centers were Halloween themed! Take a look at all of the fun activities we did.

Be on the look-out for this super fun book. When you see this book come home with your child, ask them to tell you the story of the chocolate chip ghost! This is a great oral comprehension activity as well as a great opportunity for your children to practice re-telling a story.

They did an amazing job with our long a/short a sort . This was a great activity to teach them to listen for the sound in the middle of a word.  This week, the students learned about "magic" or "silent e" and the cool trick it can do to a word! Ask your child to tell you about "magic e". 

This was a fun pumpkin book where students explored emotions while practicing reading.  On each page "Jack" had a different emotion. The students practiced making the face to match the emotion and then drew a picture of a pumpkin expressing that emotion. In doing this book, they also discovered that our sight word "you" and our short vowel sound "a" as well as the long vowel "a" were hiding in the pages!

Remember "Brown Bear, Brown Bear"? Well, this is our Halloween spin on that classic story. On each page, the students discovered many sight words and were able to practice reading this "frighteningly" repetitious book.

We studied our bones! The students engaged in conversation discussing how many bones they thought they had. They were surprised at their findings!

After learning about their bones, the students made these noodle skeletons!

Finally, they played a game of "Memory" with animals bones. So much fun to be had this week!

Bats and Spiders and Pumpkins Oh My!

This week we studied bats and spiders and also did more fun pumpkin activities.

Our sight word this week is "the". After reading and singing "The Itsy Bitsy Spider", the students made their own houses and spouts that the spider could crawl up! Mean while they practiced writing our site word "the" 8 times!

Hooray for our first vowel "a"! We learned how to build short a words. We learned about the "an" word family and the "at" word family by building many words.

After much practice building words, we transferred our learning onto this spider! This is our "an"/ "at" spider. Each set of legs has words that belong to the "an" or "at" word family.

We have read many informational books, watched many informational videos and read the classic fictional story of Stellaluna this week. The students made their own informational text about bats. 

We made cute, little clothespin bats.

We read an informational text about spiders and students made their own book by comparing their own bodies with the bodies of spiders. They also discovered that our site word "have" is in every page!

We practiced our site words "have" and "can" in this class book.  Students made their own pumpkins and cut out their own choice of eyes and phonetically spelled what they created. This student wrote " But I want the pumpkin with the circle eyes". He did an excellent job spelling "circle" phonetically!

Our adorable pumpkin faces were so much fun to create! We mixed yellow and orange paint to give the pumpkin a nice texture. We also mixed green and yellow to give the stem and leaves texture as well. The students designed the entire pumpkin on their own. Each pumpkin is so unique and special, just like our students!

Pumpkins, Pumpkins Everywhere!

This week our centers were all focused on our theme of Pumpkins! The students learned about the pumpkin cycle and how pumpkins grow and they created their very own Pumpkin Life Cycle! We also acted out the life of a pumpkin starting as a tiny seed and growing into a big Halloween pumpkin.

We read the story of the Five Little Pumpkins and each student made their own book to re-tell this story. We also learned about ordinal numbers when we sequenced the pumpkins - first, second, third, fourth and fifth.

We made Pumpkin faces using shapes that we know - the kids had a great time choosing what kind of face their pumpkin would have.

We also have a "tear art" pumpkin patch growing in our classroom!

Team work!

Today we learned what it truly means to work as a team! A concept that even adults can struggle with; these Kindergartners got a great awakening of what it means to work collaboratively. First, I explained that each table was a "company" and they were my "employees" and I was their "boss". They had to work together as a team to follow my instructions. I introduced the concept of sorting shapes as a whole group and then they got into their "companies" to sort the shapes as a group. I gave STRICT instructions that they MUST do a GROUP sort and not individually sort the shapes. After sorting by color, they had to sort by the number of sides each shape had. I saved the biggest challenge for last! After they proved that they could work together as a team, they had to have a meeting to discuss what kind of design they wanted to make as a "company". My only rule was that it had to be ONE design that the entire group participated in TOGETHER. We repeated the word "TOGETHER" about 5 times before we began this task. I was incredibly impressed with how well they worked collaboratively. Working collaboratively is such a critical skill for children to master, as they will use this tool for the rest of their lives in the "real world".

Their temptation was to sort in their own individual piles (not as a group).

Now, they got the hang of it! Team work!!!

Here, they sorted by the number of sides each shape had!

 

 

 

 

 

Five Senses

This week we are studying our five senses. We are having so much fun experimenting. Check out our centers this week!

After playing a game where students had to use their sense of "touch" they created a "hand" that includes the various textures they experimented with.

Using our sense of "touch" can get messy! We practiced writing our sight words with shaving cream!

Students played a sight game where they had to memorize what objects were missing from a tray! After, they went on a "sight walk" and documented what they saw.

Students read "Polar Bear, Polar Bear What do you Hear?" and made their own "hearing houses". They also listened to many different animal sounds on the ipad and had to use their sense of hearing to guess which animal made each sound.

What's that smell? It's our smell jars! Students had to use their sense of smell to guess what was in our smell jars, then they got to create their own!

This brave friend was one of many students today who got to explore our tasting center! We tasted and discussed how our tongue can decipher salty, sour, bitter, and my personal favorite; sweet!