Are you still with me???

I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas and New Years!  It has been WAAAAY too long since I posted!!  I apologize deeply!  I have so much to show and tell about, so this will be quite long :)  We begin with our Day 50 celebration all the way to our trip around the world visiting different countries and learning about what they celebrate at this time of the year!  Here we go!

We had a fantastic time on the 50th day of school!!  We drank Root Beer floats, had a sock hop and danced to 50s music, played on a record player, of course! We got our ideas from Sprinkles to Kindergarten!

November was Literacy Month!  We had a Royal Reader from Central Office read to our class :)

Here are some pictures of Daily 5 time.  We have Title I support come in and do a Double Dose of Fundations.  They love Fridays when they get to feed the Old Lady different sounds!  They love to grab clipboards and Write Around the Room or find Rhyming Words with this activity by Mrs. Lirette's Learning Detectives.  They also like to pick new books on their own for Read to Self time!

We learned a new game in Investigations called Roll and Record.  I am sure you saw MANY of these pages come home!  They LOVED rolling the dice and seeing which number would "win"!!  **TIP**  Use a face cloth when rolling dice.  They won't roll all over the place and it is much quieter!!

During Fundations, we have been working on writing sentences properly and tapping out words to spell them correctly.  The children are getting very good at tapping and we haven't even fully gotten to that unit yet!

We read some books about the first Thanksgiving and what Thanksgiving is all about.

Then we made this book by sharingkindergarten.com about comparing things people had or used during the first Thanksgiving and things we use now.  We also wrote about what we were thankful for this year.  The children helped me make these charts showing what we were learning about :)

We also read this VERY old version of Stone Soup.  The children brought in vegetables to share and we made a very delicious soup!  As you can see from the chart, almost every loved it!  That was not the case before they ate it.  The chart would have been the other way around if we charted if we thought we would like it :)  The one child that said he didn't like it, did not try it, so we may have ended up with 100% love for the soup, if he had just tried a bite :) 

I found this activity on Bloglovin and since it has been so long since I've blogged, I can't remember who posted it!! We read some nonfiction books about Squanto and how he helped the Pilgrims.  We made this tri fold activity to help the children retell his story of how he used fish to help the corn grow :)

We read some books about the difference between night and day.  We made a couple of charts that I found on different blogs about what is in the sky and what is not.  Also about different sounds you hear in the day and night and also different jobs people have in the day and night.

My son had made this bracelet in school when he was 3 and I thought it would be a great hands on way to remember the story of the First Thanksgiving!  They had a lot of fun building the bracelets and that afternoon, my son came home with another one this year!

Now onto our trip around the world!!!  Caitlin Clabby has the BEST ideas and I use A LOT of her stuff!!  Here is where we traveled to!

First, we put together our suitcases and began our trip.  Each day, we found out how much our tickets would be to travel to each country.  Then we would go onto Google Earth and "travel" to wherever we were going that day.  We read the booklet that Caitlin put together for each country to describe their holiday in children language! We would fill out our journal page each day to give one fact about each country's holiday, we colored the country on a map and added stickers to our suitcase and passport.  The kids LOVED this week long activity!

First stop...Holland!  They left gifts in their shoes :)

Next stop...Israel!  We had already made a menorah during Hanukkah, so we added that to our suitcase.  we made a little emergent reader book and wrote in our journals!

We had one of my former student's grandparents come talk to the Kindergarteners about Hanukkah and they each received a dreidel and a sugar cookie!  It was very cute! 

Ok, so I dropped the ball on pictures for the next two countries, but we then traveled to China and made Chinese lanterns that we saved for Chinese New Year!

Then we went to Mexico and made beautiful poinsettias! 

Last stop...Germany!  We made very cute Gingerbread men to represent their holiday.  We played a few literacy and math games from each country as well.  This had to be my most favorite unit so far this year!!  Thank you, Caitlin!!!!!

We did some writing about what we wanted for Christmas!  They did such a nice job and it is really nice to see the children starting to transfer their beautiful writing to paper, not just on lined white boards!!

I love these finger puppet activities!  We made another one earlier in the year to retell the story of Christopher Columbus.  This one was a poem called "Five Little Ornaments".  They put the ornament puppets on their fingers and remove one for each line of the poem!

And what would SES be without the Annual Reindeer Races!!!  My kids did fantastic!!  It is a tradition that lives on every year in December!

So I ask, how am I supposed to teach with this happening outside???  I think I had to close the shades that day so they would listen to me and not stare out the window all afternoon :)

We're almost there!!  Here are a few pictures of what we will be continuing after our extended Winter break in Investigations.  We have begun exploring measurement with unifix cubes.  The children worked together as teams to sort things longer and shorter than a stick of 10 cubes.  We will do more measuring when we return!

I didn't take many pictures the week before Christmas, we were quite busy!!  But I did get one of the fun gingerbread cookies we decorated!  They had a lot of fun with these and Mrs. Dunn allowed them to have some extra sprinkles for being so good!!

I can't wait to DRA the children when we get back next week and officially start reading groups!!  Books will start going home and families will be able to see a huge transformation in their child!  

Happy New Year, Everyone!!

And I promise to blog more often now that the hustle and bustle of the holidays is over :)

Mrs. Farrell

A little bit of everything!!

Well, I just realized I haven't posted anything for a while, so I need to go back a few weeks.  We covered a lot of things in the past few weeks from spiders to pumpkins, fire safety to monsters and migration to sleeping bears!  Let's get started on what we've been up to in Kindergarten!

  We read the book "Amazing World of Spiders" by Janet Craig and learned about what spiders can do, what they have, and what the are.  We filled out a Top Down Web about spiders and the children wrote their own (from mine) to take home and tell their families what they learned.  I was very impressed with how they were able to copy from my Top Down Web onto their own paper that I found as a freebie.

 We also did some more on the life cycle of a pumpkin from a Pumpkin Mini Unit by Mrs. Ricca.  They really loved this unit!

 We had some new Daily 5 activities out.  We have started doing Listen to Reading.  They are very excited when they get to go to this area!  Thank goodness I have a TON of books on tape :)   So I now have 4 out of the 5 Daily 5 components up and running!!!  I am holding off on Read to Someone until after Christmas.  I want them to be able to read a little better so they aren't just fooling around with a buddy.  They love these Find a Letter pages.  Unfortunately, I found these a month ago and can't find who I got them from.  If you recognize anything I can't find a link to, please message me below and I will fix it :)  The sight word practice comes from a Fall Literacy Freebie from Jennifer Elliott.  Some of the children did a great job reading the words.  Some were just at the copying stage, but that was fine too!

 We also celebrated Fire Safety week and week late.  Our local fire department came to speak to the Kindergarten and First Grade children.  They were so excited that they brought the ladder truck with them!  When the presentation was over, they lifted the ladder up over the kids and the school!  It was pretty cool!

 I wanted to post some picture of Fundations.  We do Fundations every day and the children are doing so well with proper letter formation and remembering the story for each letter (ex. a, apple, /a/)  We played a game where each child had either a key picture or a letter.  They had to find their match and put their puzzle together and say the story together.  We also do Echo Find Letters.  I call out a sound and they need to point to the matching letter on their magnet boards.  We also practice our vowel sounds and stretch them out to really hear the sounds.  I was very excited with their mid unit results.  One child even scored 100%!!!

 We read "Go Away Big, Green Monster" by Ed Emberley and then made our own big, green monsters.  I guess I figured out a way to cover their faces for the website! :) We also made these booklets to add to their reading boxes!  We used the interactive pocket chart that is included with the booklet, I just forgot to take pictures of it.  They LOVED the chart!  I have pictures of another one coming up.

 To finish up our unit on 2D shapes in Investigations, we played a game where I chose a number and they had to use pattern blocks to make a design with ONLY that many objects.  They were very creative!!

 On to Halloween!  My team dressed up as Pete the Cat from 4 Groovy Buttons!  We each had a different number of buttons and held up our groovy button sign in our school parade!  I love my new team:)

We started talking about Hibernation and Migration last week.  We started off by watching some videos on youtube about hibernation.  I never knew how many things you can find videos about on youtube!!  The children got to watch a cartoon-like video explaining where different animals hibernate.  We watched one showing a real bear family getting ready for hibernation.  You could hear a pin drop in the room!  We made a 2 column notes poster showing which animals hibernate and which migrate.  We then completed a sort for the children to take home.  My favorite part was our sleeping bears.  They came out SOOOO cute!!!

 In our new unit in Investigations, we made a Counting Book.  The children had to draw 1-6 of the same object on each page.  We had ice cream cones, flowers, trees and cars!  They did a great job and will be available to see at Conferences.

Here is the other interactive pocket chart I have out right now.  They love these and I hope I can find more of them!  They get so into acting them out!  This one is 5 Little Monkeys.

And lastly, a tribute to our heroes.  The children brought these home to fill out with their parents.  We made a bulletin board in our wing to hang them all up.  I have only hung up ones from my class and it was already very full!  I will post pictures of it next week when we have more heroes up on the wall.

Happy Veterans' Day weekend!