More Gingerbread Man

We loved reading so many different versions of The Gingerbread Man.  After we read each story we filled in our story map.  The kids loved discussing how they were the same and how they were different.  So fun!!As you are reading strories to your children at home it so important to ask them questions about the story.  Some great questions would be; What happened at the beginning, middle and end of the story?  Who are the characters in the story?  Where did the story take place.  These kiddos love to be read to!  It is about the only time of the day I can get them all quiet at the same time :).

After reading many different versions of the Gingerbread Man we decided to see what would happen if the Gingerbread tried to swim across the river by himself.  The kids thought it was so fascinating to see how he changed.  We decided it would not have been a good idea for him to swim across on his own.

Gingerbread Unit

I was a terrible blogger in the month of November!  I will do better this month.   We started the month off with our Gingerbread Man unit.  This is one of my favorite units we do all year!  So far the kiddos are loving it too!

It all started on Thursday when all of kindergarten got together to read the story, Gingerbread Baby, by Jan Brett and then made our own gingerbread man.  We put him in the oven to bake and asked our secretary to keep an eye on him, but NOT to open the oven.  Of course she just couldn't help herself and she peeked before the time was up.  Our Gingerbread Man ran away!!  The next day we decided we needed to make wanted posters to show our families. 
We are so excited to read the postcards that have come in from different family members that have spotted our Gingerbread Man.  He has been all across the United States and has even left the country a couple of times. 

Today we decided we needed to know why everybody wants to eat the Gingerbread Man.  So we did a graphing activity while eating these little gingerbread men.  Everyone got a cookie and took just one bite.  Let me just tell you it was not easy to get them to stop after that first bite :).  Before we ate the rest of the cookie though we needed to make a graph of what part everyone bit first.   

We are having so much fun with our Gingerbread Man unit!  I can't wait to paste more for you on Friday!

Halloween

We had so much fun on Halloween!  It was such a crazy day but the kiddos sure loved dressing up.  What a bunch of cuties!

We used candy corn to help us review what we have learned in math so far.  We counted, sorted, graphed and patterned the different kinds of candy corn.  I am continually amazed at how much your children are learning and most importantly how much they are remembering!

Opera by Children

Apples and Graphing

During our apple unit we got to try three different kinds of apples; red, yellow and green.  After tasting each kind of apple the kiddos colored in an apple to show which one was their favorite.  Since we are learning about graphing in our math program we made a pie graph to see which color of apple our class liked best.  Red was the clear winner!

After learning all about apples and Pumpkins We made a venn diagram to compare them.  We did this together at the carpet and the kids got to use our clip boards.  They love using clip boards!  They think it is so cool they don't have to sit at their tables while we work.  After lots and lots of practice we are finally starting to get the hang of segmenting words.  As we decided what to write the kids would say all the sounds in the word and we would write down those sounds together.  Most of the words were not spelled correctly but you could still tell what they were.  This is a huge step!  In kindergarten we want students to spell phonetically, which basically means we want them to write down any sound they hear in the word.  I always tell them that right now we are not worried about whether the word is spelled correctly or not as long as we are writing down all the sounds we hear.  So as your child brings home work with misspelled words, remember this is a good thing.  We are happy they are beginning to write!

Building Sight Words

Letter Songs

We love singing! Especially when singing helps us remember what we are learning. The letter songs we sing can be found on youtube. The kiddos LOVE singing these songs because they are fun. I love the songs because they reinforce the letter and the sound. This is an example of the letter Ww song. You can find these videos by typing, "have fun teaching" in the youtube search box or by typing, "letter ___ song" just fill in the blank with the letter you want to sing. I hope you have fun singing these songs with your children at home.

More Reading Centers

Yes, this is another post about our reading centers. I just had to tell you how amazing your children are at reading centers! We have added, read to someone, word work and listen to reading to our centers. They work so hard and are learning so much. Right now the class favorite is listen to reading. The kiddos are learning to use our mp3 players and absolutely love listening to stories.

The kiddos have 4 different basket to choose from. Inside each basket there are 3 books to listen too. They really like being able to choose which book to listen too and so far they can find them pretty easily on the mp3 player.

It is a little hard to tell in this picture but the screen shows a picture of the book. I love this, my old ones just said the name of the book and it was so hard for the kiddos to find the right one. I love technology!!

They are Loving it!! And so am I! They did two 15 minute rotations of centers today. That is AMAZING!! It is hard to believe we have only been coming for four weeks, they have changed so much!

Reading Centers

We have been working so hard this week! We have been working hard to learn our reading centers. Our reading centers are different learning areas the students go to to practice reading and writing skills. We have 5 different centers at this time. Our focus this week was read to self. At the read to self center students choose a book to read. We learned there are 3 ways to read a book; read the pictures, read the words and retell a story. Most kindergaten students are not ready to read the words, but they have learned that the pictures tell a lot of the story and that they can read the story by examining the pictures. They have also learned that even though they may not be able to read all the words they can look for words they know.



The first day we practiced read to self we only did it for 3 minutes. We have been practicing and building up our stanima all week and now we can read for 9 minutes! I am so proud of them!



Each day we go over what our Reading Centers will look like and sound like and then we practice. In a few weeks when we are done practing I will be able to use this time to work with small groups of kids on an individual basis. Here is a picture of our anchor chart that reminds us what we should be doing during centers.

Parents, I hope you find these posts helpful. I want for you to know what we are doing in the classroom and to be able to see all the fun we are having. Please feel free to comment. Let me know if there are specific things you would like me to blog about.

More School Rules and Routines

Can you believe we have finished our second week in kindergarten! Time goes by so quickly. These little kiddos are learning so quickly, they don't act like the same kids that came to school 2 weeks ago. We spent a lot of time this week talking about school rules and routines. We also introduced our behavior clip chart.

These are the kindergarten rules. All three teachers use them and so far they work great. They are positive so the students don't feel like there are a lot of things they can't do and they cover everything. The kiddos love showing me what kindergarteners do!

Our clipchart is working really well too. As I'm sure you can imagine, the kids love moving their clips to purple. I love that it is a behavior system that lets me focus on the positive and not just the negative. These little kiddos thrive on positive attention and praise.

We have also been doing a lot with names agian this week. Look at the cute Silly Sally book we made, base on the story Silly Sally, by Audrey Wood. We have some great artists in this class

Next we will be starting our color days. To review, and reinforce our colors. It will be a great week!

First Week of School!

Yay! We made it through our first week of school! We had so much fun and are learning so much. A lot of our time has been spent learning rules and routines at school and in our classroom. We made an anchor chart of the things we need to do when we come inside in the morning. Please help your child remember to do these things each morning.









We have also been working very hard on recognizing and writing our names. Here is a picture of one of the name activities we did. We will continue doing name activities until we all recognize our own names and begin to recognize the names of our friends in our kindergarten class.






We were so busy this week I did not have time to take a lot of pictures! I will try to take more this week and post them as we continue to learn so many fun things.