Our Busy Week!

Make a Smilebox slideshow

I hope you enjoyed the slideshow of our explorations with our newest math workstation! We have been busy copying pattern block designs three dimensionally with blocks and then creating them two dimensionally with paper pattern blocks. As you can see, the results are quite stunning! We have made many designs, including the "Oddly Made Ostrich," the "Perky Pattern Puppy," the "Swimming Shape Turtle," and some of us even created our own pattern block designs! Ask your child about the shapes used to make these designs. All of the children can identify the triangle and square, and many remember the names of the hexagon, the trapezoid, and the rhombus.

We also spent time this week reading lots of great books, including our story bit book, Guess What? by Mem Fox. This is a wonderful story that describes characteristics of a spooky lady named Daisy O'Grady, who turns out to be a friendly witch. The three kindergarten classes wrote our own versions of Guess What? and read them to each other on Thursday. Ask your child what black, furry, bug-eating creature of the night our book was about!

We had some messy fun on Tuesday practicing numeral writing with shaving cream! Each child gets to use his or her "shaving cream paper" to form numbers. We have catchy rhymes to remember how to properly form the numbers. Some of the favorites are "around the tree, around the tree, that's the way to make a three!" and "a little line down and a big fat tummy, put the hat on and it looks pretty funny!" for the number five. I often hear the children whispering these rhymes under their breath as they are writing numbers throughout the school day. Sometimes we will use shaving cream to practice writing letters and sight words, too. Not only is it fun, but our classroom smells wonderful afterwards!

Today (Thursday, November 11th) was the H1N1 vaccination clinic at H.C.S. I came to school prepared for nervous children and a lot of crying! I am happy to report that all of the kindergartners were SUPERSTARS at the clinic! They were brave and barely made a peep as they received the shots. I was totally impressed with how cool, calm, and collected they were. From what I heard, the middle schoolers could have learned a thing or two from your kiddos about how to handle shots! We all earned stars and yummy lollipops for our great attitudes! We will be receiving the second dose (which is required for this age group) in early December.

We have spent time this week adding up all of the money collected from the "Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF" campaign that many of you participated in on Halloween. So far, we have counted over $150.00 that your children collected to send to children in poverty-stricken countries. It is amazing how far this $150.00 will go and we couldn't have done it without your support! Way to go, Kindergartners!!

Hopefully this catches you up on another busy week in Room Five! I will be attending a workshop tomorrow (Friday, November 6th) so there will be a "guest teacher" in for me. I hope you all have fantastic weekends with your fantastic kindergartners! I look forward to seeing them on Monday!