Happy Holidays!

During this busy holiday season, we have been hard at work in our kindergarten classroom! We have just wrapped up a unit on Holidays Around the World, learning about Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and Christmas in a number of countries. Hopefully, you enjoyed the projects that came home, including the egg-carton menorah, the kinara, the Christmas tree, and the ornaments for your homes!

In literacy, we are practicing alphabetizing letters and we are reviewing uppercase letter formation. We are also working hard on beginning sounds of words and, after vacation, will move to listening to the ending sounds of words. We worked on early reading skills in small reading groups with some "just right" books (hopefully your child completed his or her "homework" and read you the book they practiced!)

We also started Writer's Workshop a few weeks ago, and the children are always anxious to write just like real authors! During our writing time, we practice the following steps of the writing process:
1.) Think of something that happened in your life.
2.) Draw your idea.
3.) Write letters, sounds, words, or scribbles about your picture.


The children look forward to Writer's Workshop and I am always impressed with how much they can put on the paper, even in kindergarten! Over the next few months, we will continue to learn more about the writing process and how to "publish" a favorite piece.

In math, we have learned about comparing quantities, growing patterns, and we have been practice numeral writing. Enjoy this picture of our Ladybug Growing Pattern!


On Tuesday this week, we had a visit from our fifth grade reading buddies. Together, we designed and decorate gingerbread houses (and maybe even ate a little candy!!)

Make a digital slideshow

Thank you to everyone who sent in the yummy food for our Holiday Breakfast! We had a fabulous day together and your children have been positively giddy with excitement about the coming holiday celebrations. I hope you enjoy their enthusiasm as much as I have! Have a fantastic, relaxing, and cheerful vacation with your families!

Reminders

I hope you all had a wonderful and relaxing Thanksgiving holiday! The children came back refreshed and ready to continue our great learning. Everyone is abuzz about the upcoming holiday season!

Important Reminders for the Coming Weeks:

*Holiday Food Drive: Now-Mid-December Classes will be collecting non-perishable food items to donate to our local food shelf. Please send in cans and boxes of food with your child. There is a box in our classroom for food collection. Thank you in advance for helping families in need at this time of year!

*H.C.S. Open House and Dinner: Wednesday, December 8 5:00-7:00 p.m. Please join us for dinner and take some time to visit our classroom and see what goes on here all day long! Children will be excited to share their hard work with their families. I look forward to seeing you all there!

Halloween Party Sign Up

On Friday, October 29th, we will be celebrating Halloween with a costume parade and a party! Children are invited to BRING their costumes to school with them on Friday (please do not send costume accessories such as wands, swords, etc., as they have a tendency to get lost!) We will change into our costumes before the class party and participate in a Kindergarten Costume Parade! If you are able to sign up to send a treat in for our party, it would be greatly appreciated! Follow the link below or send me an email to let me know what you can send in. Thank you in advance for your help!

Halloween Party Sign Up

Our Many Colored Days!

We just wrapped up our exciting and fun "Color Week!" On Monday, we had a terrific field trip to the Flynn Theater to see Harold and the Purple Crayon. The show was filled with amazing actors, funny moments, and a sense of magical adventure and all of the children were thrilled to watch the show! Thank you to the parents who chaperoned the trip. We can't wait until our next field trip!

During Color Week, we completed many activities to learn about colors. We read some great books about colors, completed a painting activity to learn about color mixing, voted for our favorite colors (red was the winner in our class!), played Color Bingo, and completed a Color Scavenger Hunt. On Friday of last week, we finally enjoyed the greatly anticipated "Rainbow Jell-O." Each day, we made Jell-O in our color of the day. By Friday, we had a rainbow in our cups and our jiggly snack was so much fun to eat! Please enjoy the photos of our special snack here:
Thank you all for helping your children dress for our Color of the Day! We had so much fun celebrating some of the beautiful colors in our world and using them to create beautiful artwork!

Our Busy Weeks at School

Wow! It is hard to believe that it is already almost the middle of October! We have been hard at work in our classroom learning and playing together. Your children are quite comfortable with our classroom routines and expectations and I am already amazed by the growth I am seeing, academically and socially!

Our literacy time is focused on learning what it means to be a good reader and practicing how to take care of books. We have learned many letters as a part of the Fundations program, including: t, b, f, n, m, c, a, i, and r. We practice these letters each day, learning what they are called, a special word to help us remember the letter, and the sound each letter makes. We also practice proper formation of the letter using our special lines: the "sky line," the "plane line," the "grass line," and the "worm line." Ask your child what these lines are and how to form some of the letters we have learned! Also during literacy, we are practicing recognizing and producing rhymes, as well as syllabication.

Math is a well-loved time of our day, with children often asking how long until we will begin this block! The children especially love the math workstations that we use. These workstations offer children a chance to explore with math manipulatives and practice the concepts that we have learned about with a number of games and activities. Some of current math workstations are: Pattern Blocks, Geoboard Shapes, Bucket of Bugs, Unifix Cube Patterns, Polydrons, and Which Bug Will Win?

Also during math, we have spent time making a class quilt. Our "Shoo Fly Quilt" is hanging outside our classroom if you would like to come and take a look. We used triangles to create the quilt squares and then discussed the patterns that we noticed. Please enjoy this photo of our beautiful creation!


Here are some of the observations that the children made about our quilt:

“It’s in a pattern. It goes orange on the inside, green on the inside.”

~ Aidan

“It’s like stairs. Orange, orange, orange.” ~ Shaunna

“The stairs are diagonal." ~ Sam

“It’s a pattern on each row.” ~ Mario

“There’s different rows and different colors and I like the pattern a lot.”

~ Connor

“The pattern can go across and upside down. The quilt is a rectangle.”

~Thomas G.

“The orange triangles are touching in a special way.”

~ Calder

“It’s like an elevator. It goes up and down.”

~ Nolan

“I noticed if you turn your head a little, you see a square.” ~ Sophia

“We made our quilt squares with triangles. Some look like upside down triangles.” ~ Desiree

We have also spent a great deal of time sorting objects be one or more attributes. We started exploring this concept using shapes and recently moved to sorting bugs by a characteristic. Here is a photo of the poster that we created when we sorted bugs into groups of bugs with spots and bugs with no spots.

Thursday we were able to visit the Hinesburg Fire Station to celebrate Fire Safety Week. We had a wonderful time exploring the fire trucks, meeting the firefighters, and learning about how to stay safe if we are ever in a fire.

On Friday, we took a top secret trip to peek in the windows of our new classroom! The room is looking wonderful and should be ready any day now! The children were impressed to see a sink and our very own bathroom attached to the classroom! We are so excited to move into our new space and make it our own.

Next week we will be learning about colors and will complete many fun activities to do so. Please help your child dress for the special "Color of the Day." They are as follows:

Monday 10/11: RED Day
Tuesday 10/12: ORANGE Day
Wednesday 10/13: YELLOW Day
Thursday 10/14: GREEN Day
Friday 10/15: BLUE Day
Monday 10/18: PURPLE Day
Tuesday 10/19: BROWN Day
Wednesday 10/20: BLACK Day

Please check back for photos and descriptions of all of the fun things we do to learn about colors!

Shelfari

I enocurage you to take a look at the bottom, right-hand corner of my blog. Here, you will find my Shelfari Book Shelf. This is an online tool that I have added to my blog to showcase some of the books that we are reading in the classroom. Some of the books are our story bit books, some are read alouds that support our social science themes, and some are just my personal favorites that I enjoy sharing with the class! If you would like, you can sign these books out of the school or town library to share them again with your children. Remember: you can never hear a good book too many times! Happy reading!

The First Few Weeks of School

Wow! It is hard to believe that we have been in school for almost four weeks already! I am happy to report that I am lucky to be working with an energetic, curious, and capable group of kindergartners! They have already become very comfortable with the school, the classroom, the routines, and the expectations of being at H.C.S., and the learning has already begun! We spend time each day engaged in literacy activities, math exploration, and discussing various social science themes. Currently, we are learning about a favorite fall treat: apples! We enjoyed the autumn story, Lucky Leaf, as our story bit last week. Ask your child to retell this funny story using his or her cutout leaf story bit to remember what happened.

Early this week, as a part of building our classroom learning community and establishing rules and expectations, I asked each child to identify his or her "Hopes and Dreams" for this school year. Please enjoy reading through the varied responses that I received!

My hope and dream for this year is:
*to meet a lot of people!
*to go on the swings!
*to earn stars!
*playing games with my classmates!
*playing with people inside and outside!
*learning about a T-Rex!
*to learn more about my family!
*to make necklaces!
*sledding down the hill near the park!
*learning my ABCs!
*to enjoy the sunshine!
*to share a book at the library!
*to write home!
*learning more new letters and numbers!
*to learn about dogs!
*to get a lot of stars!
*to learn about wildlife!

I explained to the children that, if we all work hard to follow our classroom rules, we will all be able to achieve the "Hopes and Dreams" that we came up with!

By now, you have probably heard about the "Be A STAR" program. This is a way for children to learn and remember our school-wide behavior expectations. Be A STAR stands for:

Belonging
A
Sharing
Trust
Accepting Responsibility
Respect

Adults around the school spend time each day "catching" children practicing these core values. If a child shows one of the core values, he or she may earn a star: a paper voucher for a special sticker to be placed on the giant poster in the main hallway. I have found that this program encourages adults to be more positive and proactive in their approaches to managing student behavior, and children are encouraged to behave appropriately in all areas of the school. So far, I have an amazing group of "star" students who are earning more stars than I can count! Take a peek at the cool photo that was taken at last week's Be A STAR celebration:


I look forward to an exciting year with your little superSTARS!

Goodbye Kindergarten...Hello First Grade!

It is hard to believe that it is finally here....the very last day of kindergarten! It seems like just yesterday that your bright-eyed, curious, somewhat nervous children joined me in September to begin their school experience. We have spent the past 180 days working, playing, learning, laughing, problem-solving, and growing together. We have created a bond similar to that of a family and it was incredibly hard saying goodbye to each one of them this afternoon. Each child has brought amazing skills and strengths to our group and added to the cohesiveness of the group as a whole. I have spent time this year documenting our experiences through photographs and I created a photo story to share with all of you here. The children had a chance to view it with me, and can fill you in on what was happening in each of the photos. I hope you enjoy watching the slide show as much as I enjoyed creating it!



I hope you all have a wonderful, fun, and safe summer with your FIRST GRADERS!!!! Thank you so much for sharing them with me this past year!

Miranda

Lovely Ladybugs!

Wow! What a whirlwind the last month has been (and I predict the next month will be just as wild!) We have had a vacation, started our final weeks of kindergarten, and done lots of great work, too! You have probably heard from your kindergartner that there will be some changes in the upcoming weeks. Due to the renovation of the Primary Wing, we will be relocating to the library for the month of June. The children have begun to see me packing boxes and organizing materials, as the classroom must be empty by May 28th to prepare for our move. They have had lots of great questions, but seem to be looking forward to our new adventure and I believe that we will be able to make the transition to our new space relatively smoothly. The kindergarten team is planning many fun activities and field trips so that we will not be spending too much time in the library, but we will also attempt to keep some sort of routine to our days, so that we can minimize anxiety and behavior problems. I will keep you posted about important dates and exciting happenings as we decide on them!

Since we returned from April vacation, our classroom has transformed into "Ladybug Land." We ordered ladybug larvae from a company in California called Insect Lore, and the larvae arrived on May 10th. We have begun our in-depth exploration of the life cycle of a ladybug and are enjoying observing the larvae. Yesterday, we found that our first larva has started the pupa stage of the life cycle! Within the next week or so, we will watch for signs that a ladybug will be emerging from the pupa. The children have been very engaged in this new unit and have shared their prior knowledge about these lovable insects and have asked many wonderful questions about them, as well. We have done and will continue to do many projects and will eventually release the ladybugs when they have all emerged from their pupas.

I have included here a slideshow of the ladybug number stories that the children wrote and illustrated during math. Each child created an addition or a subtraction story and then painted a gorgeous watercolor picture to accompany their problem. Feel free to stop by our classroom bulletin board to check out their work in person!

Digital slideshow personalized with Smilebox

I have spent the last several weeks completing spring assessments with all students. I am truly amazed at how much learning and growth has taken place over the last nine months! Teachers are still working on placements for first grade. Families will be notified of your child's new teacher in early June.

Please mark your calendar for the following important dates:
Friday, June 4th: Shelburne Farms Field Trip
Monday, June 7th: Mt. Philo Hike (***Chaperones still needed!***)
Friday, June 11th: Move-Up Day
Wednesday, June 16: Last Day of School (1/2Day 11:30 Dismissal)

As always, please contact me by email (mjohnson@cssu.org) or phone (482-6205) if you have any questions or ideas.

Tasting Party

We will be having a Tasting Party next Friday, April 23rd, to celebrate the end of our Five Senses unit. My hope is that the children will be able to try a variety of foods: some sweet, some sour, some salty, and some bitter. We will do "blind" taste tests and try to determine what food we are tasting. Please visit the sign-up sheet if you are able to send something in for the party next week.

Sign-Up Sheet: Tasting Party

If the link does not work for some reason, please feel free to email me or send a note in your child's homework folder letting me know what you can send in. Thank you in advance for your support of this fun culminating activity!

Important News and Events

H.C.S. has moved to a new email system. We will now by using Gmail for all of our email correspondence and all staff members now have a new email address. My new email is mjohnson@cssu.org. Please be sure to use this new address to contact me from now on. Thank you!

Next week is Spirit Week here at H.C.S. Each day will have a different theme and you can feel free to help your child dress according to the theme each day. The schedule is as follows:

Monday: Tropical Day (Hawaiian shirts, capris, shorts, sunglasses (no bathing suits, please)

Tuesday: Mismatch Day

Wednesday: Twin Day (Children can plan with a friend to dress in similar outfits to look like twins!)

Thursday: P.J. Day (Children may wear their pajamas to school)

Friday: Charlie Fortin Day (Charlie Fortin is our beloved head custodian, who is retiring on Friday, April 23rd. Children are encouraged to dress like Charlie! Denim pants, suspenders, and work boots is Charlie's normal attire for a day here at H.C.S.)

Please have fun with Spirit Week and feel free to be as creative as you and your child would like!

Spring Fever!

While it has been a rainy week, the kids can certainly sense that "spring is in the air" and are looking forward to some sunshine and warmer temperatures! Before we know it, our favorite kindergartners will be big old first graders! Yikes! We continue to be busy here in Room 5, with lots of special happenings and exciting activities! On Monday, we were fortunate enough to have a guest teacher during Writer's Workshop. Leah Mermelstein, an author and expert on teaching writing to young children, visited H.C.S., and our classroom was selected for her to do a teaching demonstration in! The children were thrilled to learn that "famous" Ms. Leah would be coming to see all of the fabulous writing that they have done. While Leah was in our classroom, she taught a lesson on how to begin our small moments stories, as a way to show other teachers in our building different strategies to use during Writer's Workshop. The wonderful writers in Room 5 knocked everyone's socks off with the amazing work they can do! All of the adults who gathered to observe the lesson were impressed with how engaged and focused the children were on their work. Leah conferenced with several students about their writing and the children were thrilled to share their work with her! Check out the article in the next Hinesburg Record about our time with Leah!


We have had several guest teachers this week, as I was unfortunately out sick for a couple of days. Changes to the routine can always be challenging, but it sounds like most children handled their time with the substitutes well. I am enjoying getting back into the swing of things. A big thank you to Mrs. Pelkey and Mrs. Twarog for working so hard and helping the children while I was gone!

I am beginning to assess students' progress in all academic areas for third quarter report cards. I continue to be pleased with the remarkable growth and learning I am seeing and I can't wait to share this information with you at parent-teacher conferences on April 15th and 16th! Please return the paper that I sent home in your child's homework folder today to let me know if the conference time that I scheduled for you is a convenient one. If it is not, please let me know a time that may work better for you. At our conference, I plan to share your child's report card and also to discuss the placement process for first grade. I truly value parent input during this process and would like to make the transition from kindergarten to first grade as stress-free as possible!

Today was very exciting, as we wrapped up our ocean unit. The children have been incredibly engaged in learning about all things sea-related and they don't seem to want the unit to end! We have spent time reading many great fiction and non-fiction books about the ocean, each child completed a research project on a sea creature of their choosing, we have made a classroom under the water mural with many ocean-dwelling animals, and we had a great time at our beach party today! Check out the picture of our class mural here!


Over the next several weeks, we will be spending time learning about our five senses and how they help us to navigate the world around us. This is always another favorite unit with lots of fun activities to complete!

Enjoy the wonderful weather with your kindergartners!

Kindergartner, Kindergartner, What Do You See?

During our Eric Carle Author Study, we became familiar with his stories and his techniques. We made our own painted papers and used these papers to create collages of animals. The result was a stunning class book, Kindergartner, Kindergartner, What Do You See? Each child was very excited to be an author and illustrator and I am excited to be able to share their hard work with you here. Please enjoy the video version of our class book. Listen closely: you will hear your child's voice reading his or her page! Thank you to Mrs. Hoeppner for helping us make this video!

Welcome Back!

It is so nice to be back into the swing of our routine here in Room 5! It sounds like everyone had a restful and enjoyable break, but they all see very happy to be back at school! We are forging ahead with our curriculum and a new theme and the children are very excited about all of the new information they are learning. We are doing an author study of the fabulous Eric Carle, exploring his technique and style in preparation for our field trip to the Flynn Theater on Monday. Click here for a link to Eric Carle's official website, filled with great information. Today we spent some time making paper that we will use to make our very own collages for a class book. We got messy and enjoyed trying different painting techniques!
I hope to post parts of this class book to the blog once it is complete! Keep your eyes peeled!

In literacy, we are continuing our work with reading simple words and using these words correctly in our writing. We are also practicing more high frequency words and using different elements of a sentence correctly when writing (i.e., capital letters, spaces, punctuation). We are focusing on the problem solving process during math. We spend time using "math thinking" to solve word problems and show our thinking on paper for people to understand how we solved the problem. The children are working to remember to make a diagram, include a key, and circle their answer. The goal is that someone looking at their paper will be able to understand their thinking and the strategies used to solve the problem. I am amazed at how well they all are doing with this process and they seem to love doing it! They ask me regularly if we will get to do problem solving that day!

100th Day of School and More!

On Monday, we were so excited to celebrate our 100th Day of Kindergarten! We had a fun-filled day of activities, challenges, and a one hundredth day museum around the primary wing. Each child brought in a very creative collection of one hundred objects. Please enjoy the slide show of the projects here!

Make a Smilebox slideshow

We also did some estimating and played some counting games. Here is a picture of our estimation activity. Students had to decide which of the three jars had 100 M&Ms in it. Which one do you think? Ask your kindergartner whether jar A, B, or C was the correct guess!

On Wednesday, we attended the annual Hinesburg Reading Celebration kickoff. We participated in the school-wide silent reading and heard a fabulous story, read aloud by Mr. and Mrs. Lasher! You should have received a Reading Minutes Tally Sheet in your child's homework folder. This is to keep track of the amount of time that your child spends reading or being read to at home. We will also keep track of our time spent reading here at school. If you return this tally sheet to school by next Friday, February 19th, your child will be entered into a drawing for some great prizes and they will also help the school earn "reading minutes." I will be sending home a "bonus" tally sheet to keep track of the time spent reading over vacation. Watch for this yellow sheet next week and happy reading!

On Friday, we had a fabulous pizza and ice cream party with the other kindergarten classrooms to celebrate Valentine's day and our friendships. We opened our special valentine cards from each other and did some fun activities to celebrate this holiday. I asked each child, "what is a friend?" Here are some of their responses:

"A friend is someone who you play with."

"A friend is somebody who knows you and likes to play with you."

"A friend is a person who's lonely and then another person wants to be his partner."

"A friend is a person who likes you and helps you and you play with them."

"A friend is someone who helps you."

"A friend is someone who likes to play with you and they like you."

"A friend is somebody that you play with."

"A friend is someone who is nice to you."

"A friend is somebody who you like."

"A friend is a great person that I love and I love to play with and I love him no matter what."

"A friend is somebody that you really like."

"A friend is someone that helps you."

"A friend is a person that you love and you always want to be with."

"A friend is someone who you like to play with a lot."

We are lucky to have such a great group of friends here in Room 5!

I hope you have a great weekend!

Japan Study and More!

Wow! It is hard to believe that January will come to a close this weekend! We have been working hard all month long and have learned so many new things. We spent much of this month involved in a country study of Japan. We have learned about the culture, the people, and the land, and have been comparing Japan to our own country. We have completed many projects, including Japanese carp flags (celebrating Boys' Day-see photo at right) and we decorated paper fans (in honor of Girls' Day). We have also learned a number of songs, including the Japan Song and the Japanese Number Song. Please enjoy as you listen to our class sing both of these songs here!

Japan Song:


Japanese Number Song:


We will continue to learn about Japanese food and customs next week.

In literacy, we have been taking our knowledge of letters and sounds to learn how to "finger tap" simple words. Students use their fingers to "tap" out the sounds of a simple word and read it (for example, if they see the word mat in front of them, they say and tap /m/ /a/ /t/ and blend the sounds together to say "mat.") The children are very excited because they know that this is an important step in learning how to read. I am encouraging students to notice words around them and to try to read them using this strategy. It is also a great way for them to sound out and write words! We are also practicing sight words (also known as high frequency words): words that can not be sounded out because of their irregular sounds and must therefore by memorized or instantly recognized. Some words we have worked on this week include: the, I, a, me, and it. We will continue to add more words each week, and I encourage students to use these in their daily writing, as well.

In math, we continue to add more work stations and practice more complex skills. Some of our new work stations include, "Beat You to 20," "Ten and More," "Bucket of Sea Creatures," and "Beat You to 20 Cents." We are working on recognizing and using coins, grouping, sorting, patterning, and the concept of more than and less than. In the coming weeks, I will be introducing the children to the problem solving process using story problems.

I hope you all were as pleased as I was with your children's progress on the quarter 2 report cards. The entire group continues to impress me daily with their knowledge and great thinking skills. Before we know it, they will all be big first graders!

Welcome Back!

Welcome back from what I hope was a relaxing and fun-filled break spent with family and friends! The children seemed well-rested and thrilled to get back into our routine. We have not wasted any time getting back into the swing of things and are forging ahead with new content in all areas! In literacy, we continue to practice letter formation of uppercase letters. This unit will wrap up next week and we will then begin focusing on blending sounds to read and write simple words. During math, we are spending time on subitizing. I told your children that this is a very fancy math word and to ask you if you know what it means! Subitizing is the ability to instantly recognize dot patterns (i.e., the dot patterns on dice). We will play a number of games this week to help your child practice this skill. As you play board games with dice at home, I am sure you will notice their improved ability to recognize the dot patterns, instead of counting the dots.

In preparation for our field trip to the Flynn Theatre next Monday, our theme for the next couple of weeks will be an author study of author and illustrator Tomie dePaola. We will read a number of his books (he has written and/or illustrated over 200!) and complete activities to help us understand his style and will work on reading comprehension skills, as well. On Monday, January 11th, we will travel to the Flynn to see Strega Nona performed on stage. We are very excited about our first field trip and have been enjoying this book as our story bit this week! We will also spend some time next week learning about winter, which finally decided to make an appearance here in Hinesburg!

Please enjoy the picture slideshow below of an activity we completed related to subitizing. We read the book Ten Black Dots by Donald Crews and created our own dot pictures based on what we read. Enjoy!

Make a Smilebox slideshow