Our Busy Week!

Wow! Having the hundredth day of school and our Valentine celebration fall during the same week of school certainly makes for an exciting week! We had so much fun celebrating these special events! Please enjoy these pictures of all of the action!

Celebrating 100 Days of School!

We stuffed the administration office with 100 students!

Building a structure with 100 cups.

Stringing necklaces made with 100 Fruit Loops.

Playing "Roll to 100."

We wrote about what we would do if we had $100.

Levi shows off his Fruit Loop necklace.

 100th Day Projects!

Liam's 100 fish.

Harper's 100 buttons.

Theo's 100 flags.

Jos' 100 Cheerios.

Ruby's 100 Cheerios.

Eliza's 100 chocolate chips.

Sawyer's 100 piece puzzle.

Violet's list of 100 fairies. 

Levi's 100 cotton balls.

Rian's 100 stickers.

Allyson's 100 sprinkles.

D'Marcus' 100 M&Ms.

Eli's t-shirt with 100 googly eyes.

Michaela's artwork with 100 beans.

Violet wears her 100th Day glasses!

Celebrating our friendships for Valentine's Day!

We sorted and graphed with conversation hearts.

We practiced our reading strategies with the book, "Valentine, Valentine, What Do You See?"

We played Valentine Bingo and practice tapping and reading words.

We listened to a fun Valentine story at the listening center!

 We had so much fun and practiced important skills at the same time! I am so thankful for the sweetest kindergarten valentines around! Thank you to everyone who helped make our celebration a success with the sweet treat and yummy fruit!

A Sneak Peek at Math Time!

We have just started our next math unit and will spend the next several weeks exploring with two and three dimensional shapes. We will sort, count, compose, and decompose shapes, as well as continue to compare quantities and practice rote counting, number recognition, and number writing skills.

Unit 5 Parent Letter

We've already had lots of fun sorting pattern blocks with our math partners and counting and comparing how many of each shape we had. Take a peek at some of our fun here! All of these pictures are from our math block on Friday, where each partnership received a handful of pattern blocks. After students had a few minutes to explore and build with their shapes, the partners had to decide how to sort the blocks. We then recorded how many of each shape we had and created graphs of this information on our counting mats. It was wonderful to see students so engaged and to hear their impressive math language as we talked about our mathematical observations. Ask your child if he or she can name the six pattern block shapes for you!

 

 

 

Follow this link to an online pattern block game that will support your child's learning throughout this unit. You can also help your child notice two and three dimensional shapes in the world around you as you spend time together. Happy shape hunting!

Holidays Around the World

I am sure that by now you've heard about our whirlwind trip around the world with our pal, Globe Trot Scott, as we learned all about holiday traditions around the world. Scott, our tour guide, sent us a package each day filled with information and souvenirs to help us become familiar with the holiday customs and beliefs of different cultures.

The package that Globe Trot Scott sent to us from each country.

Our passport with our information and a page for each country that we learned about.

We learned about the winter holidays in Germany, Italy, Mexico, Sweden, England, Russia, Australia, Israel and finished with sharing the traditions of our own families here in America. For each country, we read a traditional holiday story, read an informational text about holiday practices for that country, and we made a craft to help us remember each country. We even had some special guests visit to teach us about their families' traditions.

Violet's mom, Ashley, dressed up as La Befana and taught us about holiday traditions in Italy.

Mrs. Archer, the school secretary, shared artifacts from Sweden and taught us about the holiday traditions there. 

Traditional Swedish decorations.

Take a look at our crafts here:

A traditional note left inside a napkin in Italy.

A poinsettia flower, a symbol of the holidays in Mexico.

Eli models his crown for St. Lucia Day in Sweden.

Gingerbread ornaments are traditional in Germany.

A sandman (since Australia doesn't have snow at this time of year!)

A Russian Matryoshka doll. 

We also spent time during the month of December practicing for our Kindergarten Holiday Sing-A-Long. Thank you to everyone who attended the show! The students were so excited and proud of their hard work (and they looked absolutely adorable!)

This month has been full of wonderful learning and special activities. One of our favorites was Polar Express Day! We got to wear our pajamas and enjoy the classic story of The Polar Express. We also enjoyed some yummy homemade hot cocoa and popcorn as we watched the movie.

We spent time on Friday before vacation learning about reindeer. We read the story of the most famous reindeer of all (Rudolph, of course!) and also read an informational text about reindeer and compared and contrasted the two. We even turned ourselves into reindeer!

Friday afternoon was filled with another sing-a-long and our class celebration. Thank you to everyone for making this extra special for our class! We had so much fun together!

 I hope you all had a wonderful and relaxing holiday spent with family and friends! As wonderful as vacation was, I was thrilled to get back to my favorite kindergartners to continue our learning and fun together!