Guest Reader

Ms. Lemieux was a guest reader in our classroom on Friday. She read I Have To Go! by Robert Munsch. This was one of the books we saw at the Flynn on Wednesday. It is very silly!!!!

Geography in the Kindergarten

We have been very busy creating and using maps in our geography unit. For the past two days we have been using various shapes to create our own maps of the classroom. Today we used our maps to play a game called Find the Animal. To play this game one student stood just outside our door while a second student placed a stuffed animal toy somewhere in the classroom. The rest of us used a dry-erase marker to draw a line on the map from the door to the animal. We then invited the first child back into the room to follow the path on the map to find the toy!

Fabulous Flynn Show

Our trip to the Flynn was great! We watched in amazement as 5 actors made 6 different books come alive on the stage with incredible music, songs and dancing. The books were

•  Duck For President by Doreen Cronin
• Fancy Nancy by Jane O'Connor
• I Have To Go by Robert Munsch
• Leonardo The Terrible Monster by Mo Willems
• Pirates Don't Change Diapers by Melinda Long
• Baby Mouse the Musical by Jennifer L. Holm & Mathew Holm

For more information you can go to the Flynn web page and click on "student matinee" for the study guide and book descriptions.

Playground Pictures From The Past

Which One Is Covered Up?

 Which One Is Covered Up is a memory game that provides opportunities for students to practice reading numerals to 10 and naming positions, using words and phrases such as below, inside, above, on top, at the bottom, etc. There are two ways to play. In the first version players examine the game board and then close their eyes while another player or teacher covers up a number. They then open their eyes to determine which number was covered. The second version involves covering all the numbers and then giving clues about what number you are going to uncover. For example: "I am going to uncover the number that is more than 5 but less than 7, what number is it?" We played this game as a whole group and then in pairs.

Reading Buddies

 We learned about Martin Luther King Jr. and his message to the world today through literature. Older students read stories to younger students about Martin Luther King Jr. Some of the books were stories about Martin Luther King Jr such as My Brother Martin by Christine King Farris and If You Lived at the Time of Martin Luther King by Ellen Levine. Other books were books about peace, equality, and being kind like Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney. At the end of our time together one of our kindergarten students grabbed her browsing box and read some of her own stories to her older student partner. It was a fabulous way to start our day!

Kindergarten Weather Watchers

 Today was the perfect day for studying the weather! It was cloudy, then snowy, then rainy, then back to snowy! We went outside for our second weather observation, this time with black paper and magnifying glasses to observe snowflakes.

When we came back in we created a list of words to describe the weather and were delighted to discover there were many similarities and differences in the weather today compared to the weather on January 5th.

Our weather words today were: snowy, wet, crunchy, windy, rainy,icy, drippy, soft, slippery, cold, cloudy, slushy, whooshy and smushy!

Community Breakfast

On January 16th you are invited to a community breakfast in the gym from 7:45-8:30. Bring a dish to share.

Echo/Find Letters

 Echo/Find Letters is an activity during Fundations, our phonics program. During this activity students reinforce their skill of matching a letter with a given sound. I say a sound and then students echo that sound, find the corresponding letter on their letter-tile board and move that letter on or off their individual ABC chart. Variations of this activity include having students locate and point to the appropriate letter after hearing a letter sound, students coming up and pointing to a letter for their classmates to find &  move or using keywords as the clue instead of the letter sound. For example: "Move the letter that begins the word bat."

There are many other activities in Fundations including Sky Write Letter Formation, Drill Sounds, Student Notebooks,  Letter-Keyword-Sound, Echo/Letter Formation, Make It Fun, Word Play and Story Time.

Future Fundations activities include Alphabetical Order, Dictation Sounds, Echo/Find Words, Trick Words, Word Of The Day, and Word Talk.

Shape In My Pocket

One of our favorite new games is "There's a shape in my pocket." It is a guessing game that began with a review of the shape cards that we have been using to learn about shapes, attributes and sorting. After we looked the cards over and shared what we noticed about the shapes in the pocket chart I told them one of the shapes was in my pocket. To find out what shape it was students asked questions to eliminate shapes from the chart until the only shape left was the one in my pocket. The questions were guided by our attribute cards including size, color, shape, straight lines, curved sides, and number of corners. By playing this game (over & over :)) we practiced the following skills:

• describing shapes by their attributes
• questioning

• sorting to solve a problem

Guided Reading

We started guided reading groups today! Look for a book buddy bag with a book for your child to read to you.

Snow!

We quickly changed our morning plans when the snow started to fly! Instead of math and writing we launched our science unit about weather by going outside to observe the weather and then to play!!! We used the following focus questions to help us think like scientists.

• How would you describe the weather today?
• What do you see?
• Close your eyes. What does it feel like?
• What does it smell like?
• What do you notice about the sky?
• How much wind is there today?

After our outside observation we came back in to create a shared writing of words to describe the weather. Students then wrote and drew about what they noticed about the weather.

Welcome Back!

We had a great start to 2012 yesterday! We began by writing and talking about our vacations. It was fun to learn about all of the fun activities. During morning meeting we played a ending sound game and enjoyed one of our favorite greetings, "Hello Neighbor!" Writing Workshop gave us a second oppurtunity to write, yielding some 3 page stories! In Math we learned a new game called "Count & Compare Pennies" and got our calendar ready for a new month AND a new year. Our afternoon was filled with guidance, P.E. and free choice time.