Earth Day

Today we celebrated Earth Day by learning of big and small ways that we can help take care of and protect our planet.  We read several stories and talked about what it means to reduce, reuse and recycle.  The boys and girls sorted pictures of different recyclables into the appropriate category, graphed thier results and then answered some questions about thier graph.  We listened to a song, "What a Wonderful World," and illustrated pictures for a book about the song.  In the afternoon, the kids were given plastic gloves and grocery bags and we went around Bemis and picked up garbage that we found.  We filled up almost 25 bags with paper, snack wrappers, cardboard and plastic water bottles.  Some of the girls from our class made up a Do Not Litter cheer.  We will spend the next few days talking about ways we can make the earth a cleaner and better place to live. 

Partner Retelling

During the month of March, we have been focusing on the fairy tale genre and story elements such as characters, setting, problem, solution, etc.  We created puppets to go along with "Goldilocks and the Three Bears."  We brainstormed things that a quality retelling needed to include.  Children were partnered up and they took turns retelling the story with thier props.  Retelling strengthens our understanding of a story and the sequence of events. 

3-d Shapes

The Kindergartners have been very busy learning about 3 Dimensional shapes in the world around us.  We have looked closely at these shapes and made a chart of what we noticed about each one.  We went on a scavenger hunt around the classroom to find samples of real world cylinders, cones, pyramids, rectangular prisms and cubes. We have also been collecting these in our "Shape Museum." Today each table was given a bag of the shapes, supplies to make a ramp and a recording sheet.  They worked together to decide if the shape could roll, slide, or stack.  Many found that if you turned a shape a certain way or made the ramp high enough it could be manipulated to slide or stack.  They also found ways to combine the shapes to look like things.  For instance putting a pyramid on top of a cube created a "house."  We will continue to study shapes over the next few weeks.  We will build 3-d shapes out of tooth picks and marshmallows, create a 3-d shape informational book and compare and contrast the shapes.  Ask your child to see if they can find some of these at home!

Working with Words

On Tuesday our Boulan Buddies came over to help us working with our sight words.  Each child was given a list of words that they needed to practice.  We were able to give children lists that were specific words that they needed to work on.  The kids cut apart thier word cards and then took their cards around to different stations in the cafeteria to practice them.  We wrote our words in sand, spelled them with play dough, stamped them, strung letters on our necklaces, smacked our words with a word whacker, used magna doodles, chalk boards and white boards.  We also sorted our bag of words into groups and practiced reading them.

Happy 100th Day of Kindergarten!

We are 100 days smarter!  Today we celebrated the 100th Day of School.  We read several stories and talked about all that we have learned.  We did various excercises for 100 seconds. In the morning we got together with Mrs. Summer's class and did some 100th Day centers.  The kids made treats shaped like the number 100, created badges and hats, built structures with 100 blocks and cups and much more.