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.