Training

Today I was out of the district for training.  I can't wait to see the children again tomorrow!

Dental Health

Three more days and it will be February!  Where has the time gone?  The month of February is dental health month.  This week we are learning what we need to do to keep our smiles healthy.  To begin our morning we charted what we already know about keeping our teeth healthy.  As the week goes on we will add any gained knowledge to the chart. 

Out read aloud today was titled Clifford's Loose Tooth.  Today the children visited three centers.  At one of them they cut out a yellow tooth and brushed it with white paint to make it shiny again.  At Grandma Sue's center the children played the card game war.  Each card had a set of toothbrushes on them.  The children flipped their cards over and counted how many toothbrushes they had.  The person who had the most brushes received both cards.   At my center the children made and read a tooth book. 

Teddy Bear Picnic

The children truly enjoyed our teddy bear picnic.  The idea of a teddy bear picnic is based off of the book by Jimmy Kennedy.  During our picnic the children taste tested Teddy Grahams, honey, and blueberries.  The blueberries were a big hit!  We then graphed which flavor teddy graham they thought tasted the best.  During centers the children listened to the story The Bear Came over to My House with me.  This story worked on rhyming words.  They then played a bear rhyming path game.  With Grandma Sue and Miss Sue the children played the teddy bear toss.  There were five buckets set out with numbers programed on them.  The children tossed their teddy bear into a bucket and recorded the number on their recording sheet.  The children also visited the listening center where they listened to the story Panda Bear, Panda Bear What Do You See? 

Get the Wiggles Out

With the cold weather the last to days more wiggles have entered our classroom.  To get them out we learned "The Cool Bear Hunt" song yesterday.  During this bear hunt the children go thorough a candy factory, swim across a peanut butter river, and walk through a jello swamp.  I have attached a You Tube link for a different version of the bear hunt that you may want your child to do at home to get the wiggles out.http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=you+tube+the+bear+hunt&view=detail&mid=453D25F21A6A412A45AA453D25F21A6A412A45AA&first=0  I have also attached the You Tube video that goes along with the song Who Let The letters Out?  This song is another favorite in our classroom. http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=you+tube+who+let+the+letters+out&view=detail&mid=8380BD712DB5B1F3E3288380BD712DB5B1F3E328&first=0&qpvt=you+tube+who+let+the+letters+out
The last link is for the song "The Number Rock."  This song is sure to get the wiggles out! http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=you+tube+the+number+rock+greg+and+steve&view=detail&mid=9DF021AB219D0DAD09ED9DF021AB219D0DAD09ED&first=0

Hibernation

With today's cold weather we are all feeling the need to hibernate.  To start the beginning of bear week the children found that our books and puzzles center turned into a bear cave.  In the bear cave their are teddy bears that are hibernating for the winter.  We have to use quiet vocies in the cave so we do not wake them up!  It is OK to snuggle with these bearsthough.  In the bear cave there are also bear games that the children can work on quietly.  They can use bear manipulatives to make patterns.  They can also use bear number mats to count bears.  There is even a matching game from the story Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?

Today I read the story Goldilocks and the Three Bears to the children.  During centers the children made a lunchbag look like a house.  They also colored the characters from the story and taped them onto popsicle sticks to make puppets.  We will use the props to retell the story using our own words tomorrow. 

Penguins

On Friday the children learned that there is a bird that does not adapt to winter, it does not migrate, and it does not fly.  This bird is a penguin.  The children visited three different centers on Friday.  With Mrs. Severson the children used cubes(nonstandard units of measure) to measure the length of three different penguins.  They measure the largest penguin, the Emperor penguin, the smallest penguin the Fairy penguin, and they measured a Macaroni penguin.  At my center the children used stickers to make a penguin counting book.  With Miss Sue the children cut out the letter a.  They then colored animals and glued them on the letter.

During play time on Friday Kyra Jo had the idea to play birthday party. I had a play cake, a crown, and candles in storage.  On Tuesday we will expand on her idea by adding invitations to the house center, as well as gift bags, wrapping paper, and ribbons.

Museum Fun

Please enjoy the pictures from today's field trip.  We had lots of fun investigating, climbing, and pretending.

Missing Number

Four afternoons a week I work for the Kiel School District as the Title 1 reading teacher for the parochial schools in the area.  Through this roll I have had the opportunity to assess student using our district's new standardized assessment called AIMSweb.  Three times each year the Kindergarten through fourth grade children are assessed using this tool.  By using it as a Title 1 teacher I have been able to create centers exposing the children to the skills needed to take the assessment. 

One of today's centers had the children find the missing number in a sequence of numbers.  This skill is one of the skills that will be assessed in kindergarten using AIMSweb.  To Begin the center the children played the following game on the smart board.  http://www.primaryonline.co.uk/sitetour/pol/findra.html  They then used dry erase markers to fill in the missing number on sets of cards I made.  To practice this skill at home you may want to write strings of numbers on a dry erase board or chalkboard and have your child fill in the number that is missing.  For example:  4, ___, 6 or _____, 8, 9 or even 52, 53, _____.

Another skill that will be assessed in kindergarten is when given two numbers can your child pick out the one with the most value.  For example:  if your child sees 8 and 4 can they conclude that 8 is the largest number.  To practice this skill in a fun hands on way you may want to play the card game called War.  When you first start to play you may want to take out the face cards.

War for two players

In the basic game there are two players and you use a standard 52 card pack. Cards rank as usual from high to low: A K Q J T 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2. Suits are ignored in this game.
Deal out all the cards, so that each player has 26. Players do not look at their cards, but keep them in a packet face down. The object of the game is to win all the cards.
Both players now turn their top card face up and put them on the table. Whoever turned the higher card takes both cards and adds them (face down) to the bottom of their packet. Then both players turn up their next card and so on.
If the turned up cards are equal there is a war. The tied cards stay on the table and both players play the next card of their pile face down and then another card face-up. Whoever has the higher of the new face-up cards wins the war and adds all six cards face-down to the bottom of their packet. If the new face-up cards are equal as well, the war continues: each player puts another card face-down and one face-up. The war goes on like this as long as the face-up cards continue to be equal. As soon as they are different the player of the higher card wins all the cards in the war.
The game continues until one player has all the cards and wins

Migrating

Today's lessons focused birds.  We learned that some birds like the Robin migrate in winter, while other birds like Cardinals and Juncos stay in Wisconsin and adapt to the cold weather.  Our two read alouds were titled Why Do Geese Fly South in Winter? and Birds.

During centers today the children followed four steps to make a pine cone bird feeder.  When your child brings their feeder home please help them hang it up outside.  By doing this they learn compassion for other living things. 

At Miss Sue's center the children cut out five geese.  They then used a mixture of shaving cream and glue to make a cloud on a piece of paper.  They used their finger to make the letter v in their cloud.  Lastly, they placed the geese they cut out on the v to make it look like they were flying in a v formation.  At closing circle we pretended we were geese and we flew in this same formation.

Adaptation

To end the week our centers and read alouds focused on how animals survive in winter.  Today's story was titled Animals in Winter.  Have you ever seen a butterfly in the snow?  Probably not. Butterflies can't survive cold weather, so when winter comes, many butterflies fly to warmer places. They migrate. Woodchucks don't like cold weather either but they don't migrate; they hibernate. Woodchucks sleep in their dens all winter long.   Some animals like snowshoe hares and squirrels have to adapt to winter by storing food.  Other animals like deer adapt to winter by eating the berries and bark on bushes.


During today's centers the children played a number recognition spinner game.  They each took a turn spinning. They identified the number the spinner landed on and dotted it on their squirrel recording sheet.  The first squirrel to collect all of its nuts for the winter won.  The children also cut out a tree trunk.  Glued it onto a piece of paper, and added a squirrel and nuts inside.  The tree provided the squirrel with shelter and a food storage space for winter.

Today the children also voted on their favorite animal from the story The Hat.  The animal that received the most votes was the pig.  Receiving the fewest votes was the goose and the hen.

 

Today the weather was on our side.  The sun came out just as we were getting ready to go outside.  This was great news, for we were able to go sledding as a reward for filling up our warm fuzzy jar as a class.

Winter Clothes

To begin this week we will continue to focus on winter clothes.  Today our read aloud was titled Froggy Gets Dressed.  Rambunctious Froggy hops out into the snow for a winter frolic but is called back by his mother to put on some necessary articles of clothing.

One item of clothing that we tend to wear in winter is a sweater.  For one of the independent centers the children went on a sweater search.  I hung sweaters around the classroom.  Each sweater had a matching capital and lowercase letter written on it.  The children had a clipboard and recording sheet that they used to keep track of which sweaters they found.  For the children who know all of their letters I glued three pictures on the sweater.  They listened for the beginning sound of the pictures and recorded the letter that they started with.

At my center the children cut out a jacket.  We worked on making the connection that jacket starts with J,j.  The children then cut out a circle face and drew facial features on it.  Lastly, they used pom poms to make a pattern and glued them on for buttons.

We did not get to make our hat graph today, for I am waiting for the laminated animals to come back from the district office. 

The Hat

Today our read aloud was titled The Hat by Jan Brett.  She is the same author of the story The Mitten, which we read yesterday.  While reading the story today we compared the characters in the two stories.  Some of the children noticed that there was a hedgehog in both stories.  Another child noticed that there was a horse in The Hat, but not in The Mitten.  The following is the link to Jan Brett's website.  Here you can find wonderful coloring pages to download, as well as a list of her exceptional stories.  http://www.janbrett.com/index.html

With the beginning of a new year I have planned some changes in our route.  Most days we do two centers.  Because the children are more efficient then in the beginning of the year, on some days I am going to add a third center.  This center will involve the children in letter and writing work.  Today some of the children played an alphabet bingo game with Mrs. Palmer.  With Mrs. Severson the children visited starfall.com.  We did have a power outage that has affected our computers, so the children worked in pairs at this center.  We hope to get the glitches out soon.  At my center the children sounded out the words I can and wrote the letters that matched the sounds that they heard.  They then completed the sentence with a word or two that they can do.  At this point we are just beginning to learn to write the letters for the sounds that we hear.  Not all children are ready for this stage, so my center will continually change to meet the needs of the children.

 

I have had a glitch in my blog's ability to upload pictures.  Please checkout yesterday's blog for the newly added images!!

The Mitten

Boy does it feel good to be back!  The children had a great day.  They fell right back into the classroom routine without a glitch.

To begin the month our centers will focus around the theme winter clothes.  Today we read the story The Mitten Jan Brett.  This story reminded us of the story Gingerbread Baby, which we read in November.  When a child reads we ask them to make connections.  We want them to connect the story they are reading to something familiar in their lives, another story, or even an event that has happened in the world.  We call the connections we make to other books text-to-text-connections.

After reading the story the children were broken into centers.  One center they visited was called Mitten Match.  On the wash line I hung mittens with the capital letters on them.  The children worked cooperatively to match lowercase mittens to the capitals.  When they were done they practiced writing the letters on a dry erase board.  At Miss Sue's center the children sewed a mitten together.  At one of the independent centers the children colored the characters from the story The Mitten.  We will use both the mitten and the characters to retell the story on Monday.  At my center the children journaled their age and what they like to do in school.  They then drew a self portrait.  I will use this journal to assess if they are able to draw a picture with six traits.  I will also compare it to the picture that they drew the first day of school, to see if their is growth.