You're A Shining Star Video

As a way to welcome students to school for the year and in the hopes of kicking off the "shining star" behavior we hope to see each and every day, the H.C.S. staff created a video for our students. Your children watched it on the first day of school and loved it! Please follow the link to watch it here:

 Shining Star Video

It is pretty entertaining, if I do say so myself! (And please, disregard Mrs. Johnson's horrible dancing :) )

Welcome to Kindergarten!

Well, it has been a wonderful first seven days of kindergarten! We have spent a great deal of time establishing a classroom routine, getting to know each other, and developing classroom rules. I follow the Responsive Classroom approach, and much of the first six weeks of school is devoted to building a strong classroom community, in the hopes that this strong foundation will set the tone for a positive and successful school year, full of learning and fun! Your children have been through "guided discoveries" of the many toys and classroom materials available for their use, in the hopes that they will learn how to use each of these things respectfully and safely. We will continue to practice what we have learned over the next few weeks.

A major part of our curriculum early in the year is devoted to learning about appropriate behavior in our classroom and our school. Several years ago, H.C.S. started using the Positive Behavior Intervention System (PBIS). Through this system, we developed the "Be a STAR" program. This is a program that encourages students (and adults) to model the following core values:

Belonging

Sharing

Trust

Accepting Responsibility

and

Respect

Your child may have mentioned that they "earned a star" (or several!) Adults hand out paper "stars" as a way to recognize children who are demonstrating the above core values. If I see a child inviting a friend to sit next to them, sharing his or her toys, helping others, or being respectful while walking the hallway, I may hand them a star and verbalize what it was I saw them do. This, of course, is a great way to reinforce desired behaviors. I've never met a kindergartner who didn't want to earn a star! There are tokens that will be given out when a child reaches 25, 50, 75, and 100 stars, and the three kindergarten classes are working collectively to earn 250 stars in order to have extra recess time. I am so impressed with the number of stars that have already been earned in our classroom!

As a part of developing our classroom rules, we took some time to talk about our "Hopes and Dreams" for this school year. We read a book called Amazing Grace by Mary Hoffman, about a little girl who dreams of being Peter Pan in her class play, even though many tell her she can't do it. She goes on to deliver a wonderful performance, all because she believed in herself. Each child thought of something that he or she hopes to do this year in kindergarten and drew an illustration of this. Take a peek at what everyone is hoping to do this year:

A slideshow by Smilebox

After discussing our hopes and dreams, we talked about how important it will be for us to have classroom rules and how we will all need to agree to follow these rules so that everyone can achieve their hopes and dreams for the year. We came up with the following rules and each child decorated a star with his or her name on it to "sign" the classroom rules.

Mrs. Johnson's Kindergarten Class Rules

• Be kind.
• Be safe with your body.
• Listen to the speaker.
• Do what you are asked to do.
• Take care of our classroom and each other.
• Be a STAR!

We will revisit our hopes and dreams, as well as our classroom rules, regularly!

Please note that we have had a change to our specials schedule. We now have Music on Thursday and Art on Friday. The new schedule is as follows:

Monday: P.E.

Tuesday: Music

Wednesday: P.E. and Library

Thursday: Music

Friday: Art

I am looking forward to an exciting and fun-filled year together! Please do not hesitate to contact me anytime with questions, ideas, or concerns! Thank you for all that you do to support your children and our classroom!

Sea Creature Picture Problems

We spent a lot of time before vacation reading and solving addition and subtraction problems about ocean animals. We then wrote and illustrated our very own picture problems about sharks, whales, and seals. Please visit the link below to view the online book that we created with our hard work!

http://www.storyjumper.com/book/index/4626022/Sea-Creature-Picture-Problems

100th Day of School!

It is hard to believe that we have been in school for 100+ days! It seems like just yesterday that 17 small and anxious children were walking into my classroom door. They have all grown to be such amazing students! Please enjoy this slideshow of their 100th day projects.

It's Been a While....

My apologies for not adding to the blog recently. We have been SOOOO busy in Room 8! I have lots of great photos to add from recent units and activities, and now that I have a free minute or two, I thought I would share them with you! The first video is some photos from our recent science unit on matter. We explored liquids and solids and the differences between the two. Ultimately, children had to be able to classify an object as a liquid or a solid correctly and describe some characteristics of each of these things. The students did a wonderful job and had some hands-on fun with this unit!

Happy Chinese New Year!

Today, we had the opportunity to learn about the Chinese New Year, which started on Monday, January 23rd this year. It is the Year of the Dragon, so we made dragon puppets to use in a special dance. Catherine, Danny and Linni's mom, brought us some Chinese dumplings to try and we had a special lunch in our classroom. We even got to enjoy some fortune cookies as dessert!We learned that the Chinese New Year is a time of great happiness and celebration in China and Chinese communities around the U.S. There are parades, festivals, feasts, and gift-giving to welcome the new moon, in the hopes that luck and prosperity will abound in the new year! The kids had so much fun learning about another cultures' traditions and celebrations, and we even learned a couple of Chinese words!
Gung Hey Fat Choi!

Scientists at Work!

We arrived back from the holiday break ready to learn and explore! Our science unit focused on magnets and how they work. We spent time thinking like scientists and conducted a number of experiments to figure out what makes a magnet a magnet.

Exploring with magnets.

Completing the "Buried Treasure" activity. We used magnets to try to find marbles, nails, screws, rings, and keys hidden in the rice table.

Veronica explores how magnets attract and repel each other!

We did an experiment called "Paper Clip Attraction," where we used three different sized magnets and counted how many paper clips each one picked up. We recorded our observations in our science notebook and discovered that the bigger the magnet, the more paper clips that it could pick up.

We had so much fun exploring with magnets and using our scientific minds! Next up: a unit on the ocean as we prepare for our Flynn Theater field trip next week!