What a Wonderful Winter Week!

It seems that, just as we knew it would, the snow has finally made its way to our area! The children are thrilled to be playing in it at recess every day. Thank you so much for remembering to send your child to school daily with the necessary items to fully enjoy his or her recess!

Again, we have had a busy week here in Room Five! We started the week off on Monday with a Hands on Nature lesson, presented by Mrs. Frazier and Mrs. Twarog. We learned about beavers and muskrats, and the adaptations these animals need to survive and thrive in the environment. The children enjoyed the puppet show, helping to dress me up like a beaver, viewing a slide show of beavers and muskrats in their natural habitat, building their own beaver lodges out of play dough, sticks, and rocks, and we even took a walk to the stream behind the school to see if we noticed any beaver activity! In just one hour-long lesson, we all learned a great deal of information about these interesting animals. Thank you Lee and Kitty!



















On Wednesday, we had a special guest visit us to teach us about Santa Lucia Day, a holiday celebrated on December 13th in Sweden. Eva's Mormor (grandmother), Mrs. Manning, grew up in Sweden, and she brought in many beautiful items and costumes to teach us about this holiday, a day when the oldest daughter of the family wears a crown and delivers special cookies and breads to her town. We also learned about how Christmas is celebrated in Sweden and we learned that reindeer are common in that country. People have farms with reindeer and gather milk from them, just like cow farms here in Vermont! We also learned some Swedish words and enjoyed a traditional Swedish cookie. Thank you to Mrs. Frazier and Mrs. Manning for sharing your knowledge with us!

I have been completing our December assessments this week with each student. I am very pleased with the great progress everyone is making! Each child is making strides in many areas...I ask the kids all the time if they are sneaking off to first grade and learning without me, because they are such smarty pants!!! I look forward to continued growth as we move into the second half of the school year and more challenging content!

H.C.S. is participating in a food drive to benefit the Hinesburg Food Shelf. From now until the holiday break, we are collecting non-perishable food items in our classroom to contribute to the school-wide drive. There is also a coin drive to benefit Maxx Broderick, an H.C.S. student who was paralyzed in a car accident earlier this year. If you would like to send your child to school with some coins to help with Maxx's many expenses, please do so. There is a daily collection that takes place. Thank you in advance for your generous support of both of these worthwhile causes!

Reminders:

• Tuesday, December 15th is a Half Day of School. Students will be dismissed at 11:30.
  
• Thursday, December 17th: 2nd H1N1 clinic. Children will receive the second dose of the H1N1 vaccine. If your child was absent for the first clinic, they will be able to get their first dose on this day. Please contact Nurse Shelley if this is the case, or if your child was vaccinated by your pediatrician. Please send the yellow vaccine records back to school if possible for this clinic. If you are unable to locate it, the clinic will provide you with another one. Please remember that children should wear layers of clothing, with a t-shirt underneath for a quick shot! Thank you!
• Thursday, December 17th 12:30-1:00: Kindergarten Holiday Concert. The kindergarten classes will perform a variety of holiday songs. Reception to follow in each classroom. We hope to see you there!
• If you are able to, please remember to sign up to send in a treat for our holiday party on December 23rd. Please visit the link labeled "Holiday Party" in the blog entry from Friday, December 4th. Thank you!
  

We're Famous!

Check out your famous writers in the latest issue of Hinesburg's town newspaper,The Hinesburg Record! Click here and go to page 10 to take a peek at our published writing!

December Info.

December is shaping up to be a busy month for us here in kindergarten! We will spend the next several weeks learning about Holidays Around the World, and this experience will culminate with a holiday concert on Thursday, December 17th from 12:30 p.m. to 1:15 p.m. in the H.C.S. gymnasium. We will follow this concert with a small reception in each kindergarten classroom from 1:15 until 1:30 or 2:00. We hope that you all can join us to hear your children sing the many holiday songs that they have been practicing during our unit!

Families often ask about holiday gifts at this time of year. We recognize that the current economic climate is a challenging one for many families and we hope that you do not feel in any way obligated to send in holiday gifts. If you do wish to send a gift in, classroom gifts are a great option, as we all are able to benefit from and enjoy them! Some ideas for useful classroom items are:

Arts and craft supplies (i.e. glitter, markers, etc.)

Kleenex

Cotton balls

Story books

Board games

Dress up clothes (old clothes)

Card games

Drawing paper

Baby dolls and/or doll clothes

Colored paper

Toy cars

Play dough

Stencils

Gently used toys that your children have outgrown

These are only suggestions. If you have other ideas, feel free to use them instead! If you choose to send a gift in, please wrap it and put a tag on it with your child's name so that we know who it is from. We always have lots of fun opening exciting new things for our classroom!

We will be celebrating the holiday season with a small party on Wednesday, December 23rd (the day before the holiday break begins). If you are able to send in a treat for us to share at this celebration, please sign up at the link below. Thank you in advance for all of your support in helping to make this holiday celebration a special one for your children!

Link to Sign Up Sheet for Holiday Party:
Holiday Party

Happy Turkey Day!

It was a pleasure meeting with all of you over the last week and sharing your child's great progress and work with you. I appreciate all of you taking the time out of your busy schedules to attend parent-teacher conferences. I am so thankful to have such supportive parents on board!

We have finished up our unit on Native Americans. You should have received all of the great projects your child completed during this unit. Please enjoy the slide show of their hard work!

Make a Smilebox slideshow

We spent time over the half days of school learning about Pilgrims and Thanksgiving. We talked a lot about what it means to be "thankful" for something. Each child wrote in his or her journal about this topic. Here are some of the responses:

"I am thankful for my friend."

"I am thankful for my mom and dad and lizard."

"I am thankful for my phone."

"I am thankful for my dad and my baby brother and my whole family."

"I am thankful for my cats."

"I am thankful for my family and my mom and dad."

"I am thankful for turkey."

"I am thankful for the water on the Earth."

"I am thankful for macaroni and cheese."

"I am thankful for my family."

"I am thankful for my teacher and my family and my house and my food and my pets."

"I am thankful for pizza."

"I am thankful for food."

"I am thankful for turkey."

I hope you all have a chance to enjoy these wonderful children over your Thanksgiving holiday. I know I am very thankful to have each of them as a part of my life! Thank you for sharing them with me!

Happy Turkey Day!!!

Good Morning Song

We have a new favorite morning greeting song that we have been singing at circle time this week! Here are the lyrics....ask your favorite kindergartner to sing it with you!

Good Morning! (To the tune of: If You're Happy and You Know It!)

Good morning, __________ (Child's name)

How are you?

Good morning, __________ (Child's name)

How are you?

How are you this special day?

We're so glad you came to play!

Good morning, __________ (Child's name)

How are you?

This song is a great way to start our day, and it also helps the children practice reading each others' names, as we display the song with name cards in a pocket chart. Today we discussed the many ways you could respond when someone asks you how you are. The responses were varied, and included: splendid! wonderful! awesome! fantastic! great! good! marvelous! superb! fine! happy! super! We will practice these new vocabulary words when we sing our new favorite song next week!

Have a splendid, wonderful, awesome, fantastic, great, good, marvelous, superb, fine, happy and super weekend with your families!

Wacky Wednesday!

It's only Wednesday, and we've already had a busy and productive week! You probably heard about our visit to "Germ City" yesterday afternoon. We had the opportunity to meet with Nurse Shelley and her intern, Nurse Amanda, and learn all about germs and what we can do about them. The children got to use Glitterbug Potion to simulate germs and then went into "Germ City" to look at where the germs were on their hands (inside the blackened room in the photo below there were black lights and the "potion" would glow in the dark.) We then learned about proper hand-washing techniques. Your child knows to:

1.) Wet their hands.
2.) Get some soap and scrub!
3.) Rinse their hands.
4.) Dry their hands.
5.) Turn off the water with a paper towel.

We then went back into Germ City to see if they successfully removed all of the germs. Most of us were surprised to see that, even after washing, there were spots that we had missed, including our fingernails, our wrists, and the backs of our hands! We washed our hands again to make sure they were extra-clean. I think this small workshop came at a great time of year and we will continue to practice this important skill multiple times a day in the classroom! Check your child's homework folder for some activity sheets and a magnet from the workshop.

During math, we continue to enjoy our workstations, including "Pattern Block Designs," "Beat You to Ten," "Bucket of Frogs," "Geoboard Shapes," "Hungry Caterpillars," and our newest, "Count and Compare Butterflies." We are practicing all kinds of skills, including shape recognition, patterning, counting, comparing, and more! We completed a second quilt this week, as well. We call it our "Star Quilt" and it looks absolutely stunning on the wall outside of our classroom. Take a look at this picture!
I asked children to take a look at the quilt and tell me what they noticed. Here are some of their responses:

"We're doing a pattern: squares, stars, squares, stars."

"The blue squares are going diagonally."

"It looks like stairs."

"There's yellow and blue."

"There are 25 quilt squares. 13 patchwork squares and 12 stars."

"There are more patchwork squares in the top row than there are stars."

If you get a chance, stop by and see your child's great work!

This morning, we made dreamcatchers with our Reading Buddies. Each child did a super job of weaving yarn around their dreamcatcher and decorating it with beads and feathers. Native Americans made dreamcatchers to "catch" the bad dreams of children and allow the good dreams to reach them. I will be sending these home before Thanksgiving so your child can decorate your house with his or her dreamcatcher!

We continue to learn about Native Americans and will wrap this unit up this week. Next week we will discuss Pilgrims and Thanksgiving. I look forward to seeing you at our conference over the next week!

We have been asked by the cafeteria supervisors to encourage you to check your child's backpack for lunch leftovers. We are finding that there is an EXTREME amount of food being wasted and they have started bagging any leftover sandwiches. This will also be a nice way for you to get an idea of how much your child is eating at lunchtime. Please let me know if you have any questions.

Reminders: Book Orders are due Friday, November 20th!
Monday and Tuesday of next week are HALF DAYS (11:30 Dismissal)
NO SCHOOL Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday.

Writing Celebration and More!

On Monday of this week, your wonderful writers had the opportunity to celebrate their hard work at our Author's Celebration. We invited Miss Lass' class of first and second graders over to hear us read our pieces. Each child did a wonderful job and our audience was very impressed with all of our hard work! I hope you had a chance to enjoy the slide show of our work above. We will begin our next Writer's Workshop Unit, "Small Moments," on Monday of next week!

Our new theme for the next few weeks is Native Americans. We have learned about the Northeast Woodland tribes and the tribes of the Plains. We completed a few projects about these tribes, including making Iroquois masks and we designed our own tipis like the ones that the People of the Plains lived in. Over the coming weeks, we will be learning about tribes from other regions of the United States and will complete more projects! Ask your child about what life was like for the Native Americans we have learned about so far. How were they similar or different to us?

I have spent time this week assessing each child's progress in the literacy and math areas. I am looking forward to sharing this information with all of you at parent-teacher conferences over the next two weeks! At this conference, I will present your child's report card to you and we will discuss his or her strengths, challenges, and needs. This is also a time for you to ask any questions or share concerns that you may have. You should have received a reminder notice about your conference time. If the time listed is not convenient for you, please contact me as soon as possible to reschedule.

Have a great weekend!

Parenting Class at H.C.S!

The PTO and Hinesburg Friends and Families have arranged for a parenting specialist to come to HCS.

Vicki Hoefle of Parenting on Track (www.ParentingOnTrack.com) will be discussing her popular parenting program in Hinesburg. She has brought her program to most schools in Chittenden County. She will discuss her practical approach to parenting. She is a passionate parent educator with 5 children of her own. You are guaranteed a fun evening with lots of laughs.

November 18th at 6:30. HCS Gym. Register at

http://www.parentingontrack.com/hinesburg-elementary-school/

As of November 1^st we have over 50 parents signed up. The more the merrier!

Childcare available. Contact Kelli Brown at 482-2723

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!

Fairies and Horses and Shadow Troopers, Oh My!

Wow! It was wonderful to see everyone in their fantastic Halloween costumes on Friday afternoon. We had a fun-filled day of storytelling, costume parades, and yummy treats! Throughout the week before our celebration, we did a variety of Halloween projects, including these great wind socks. Hopefully your child's didn't get blown away in the wild wind we had this weekend! We also had a number of guests come to our classroom, including Hinesburg's own Mr. Tom Stamp. Preschoolers from the Hinesburg Nursery School and the H.C.S. Preschool joined us for some fun stories and songs. During this storytelling assembly, we had a surprise visit from "Detective Stanley," (a.k.a. Mrs. Stanley, our school librarian.) October was "Mystery Month," and we all listened to a mystery story during our library time. Detective Stanley came to do a raffle drawing and the winner just happened to be from our class! The winner received a gift certificate to Brown Dog Books to choose some more great mystery stories to read!



















I hope you all had a spook-tacular Halloween with your little ghosts and goblins! Thank you to everyone who helped to make our celebration a success!

Writer's Workshop

As we begin to finish up our first unit of study, "Launching the Writer's Workshop," it is amazing to see the skills the children have learned over the last six weeks in practice. Each child has internalized the writing process they have been taught. They know that writers:

1.) Think of a topic they know about or enjoy.
2.) Make a plan in their minds for the drawing and writing of their story.
3.) Draw and write their story the best that they can.
4.) Edit and "fancy up" their story.
5.) Publish their piece at our author's celebration.

At this point, each child has chosen a piece and is working on "fixing it," by checking to make sure it makes sense, fixing it if needed, adding to it if needed, and fancying it up. In this photo, you can see a child correcting some spelling mistakes to make sure his readers understand what he was writing. "Fancying up" our writing is a favorite step in the process, because children get to make their writing beautiful, just like real authors and illustrators. In the photo below, you can see this student doing just that in preparation for publishing.


We are looking forward to our author's celebration on Monday. We will celebrate with each other our hard work by reading our pieces and enjoying a special snack together. After this celebration, we will begin our next unit of study, "Small Moments," where we will continue to learn more about being writers!

Five Little Pumpkins

We had so much fun on Wednesday decorating pumpkins with our 5th and 6th grade Reading Buddies! We spent time deciding if our pumpkin would have a happy face, a mad face, a scary face, or a sleepy face and then worked together with our buddies to draw our face with markers. As you can see, the finished products were great! Hopefully these festive creations will help to decorate your homes for the upcoming Halloween celebrations! Thank you to everyone who sent in a pumpkin or two or three for this fun project!

Welcome to the Room Five Blog!

Thank you for visiting my new classroom "blog." I am hoping to use this online tool as a way to communicate with all of you the exciting things that are happening in our classroom. Eventually, this blog will replace the bi-weekly classroom newsletter that I write. I believe that this blog format will provide you with a glimpse of the daily activities in Room Five and can serve as a great conversation starter for you and your kindergartner. Enjoy exploring this site and peeking into the wonderful world of kindergarten!