G is for Garden

The kindergarten friends have been enjoying time in our school garden. We put in lettuce plants that we can harvest before school is out in June.

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F is for Fox in Socks

This week we are celebrating Dr. Seuss with a week long Seuss-a-thon. Each day we are listening to stories and completing fun activities. Today was Fox in Socks day. We wore our crazy socks, listened to the story and are our own Fox in Crazy Socks!

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S is for Solid Figures

We have started to study 3D shapes, also known as Solid Figures. We are focusing on four figures: sphere, cylinder, cube and cone. There is a great video we watch to help us understand the figures. For a challenge, students can also try to identify rectangular prisms and pyramids. Look around your house, especially the kitchen. What figures do you see? A soup can is a cylinder, and ice cube is a cube, an orange is a sphere. What else can you find?

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O is for One Hundred Days of School

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We had a perfectly wonderful 100th Day of school celebration. In the kindergarten room we have been leading up to this day by keeping track of each day on a number line. We practiced counting to 100 by ones, twos, and tens. We learned about a hundreds chart and how to recognize patterns in the numbers. For our celebration we dressed up like we were 100 years old.

We made portraits of what we might look like when we’re 100 years old.

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We added numbers to a hundreds chart on the iPad.

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We listened to a story with Mrs. Kramer about doing random acts of kindness.

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We played all sorts of games that counted up to a hundred.

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G is for Groundhog Day

Groundhog Day is a fun day for kindergarten to enjoy. There are so many lessons we can learn: weather, seasons, predictions, geography, folklore, reading, writing and so on. We heard a few groundhog stories, then made predictions about what we thought the groundhog might do in 2012. We used KidPix on the computer to draw our groundhogs.

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We wrote predictions for our groundhogs. We talked about what a prediction is and came up with synonyms such as guess and hypothesis.

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We wrote the beginnings of a story about a groundhog. This is the first time the students have written in story form versus narrative form. It was quite fun.
We also checked out the official Punxsutawney Phil web site to see what the prediction would be for 2012. Phil saw his shadow so we will have 6 more weeks of winter. However, we learned that Phil is only 39% accurate so he is not very reliable.

Next we practiced a new skill: identifying the who, what, when, where, why and how in a story. This is a very important skill and one we will be practicing often. It’s a good skill to practice when reading together at home as it builds comprehension skills. You can even ask for the evidence by asking your child to tell you where in the story that information is found.
Here’s our chart from the SmartBoard:

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Finally, we had to celebrate Groundhog Day with a special groundhog cookie during snack. What a fun day!

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C is for China

Sam and his family moved to China for a few years. They left in early January and have settled in to their new home and school. Today we had a chance to Skype with Sam to see how things are going and to ask questions about his new school.

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The students were very excited about the opportunity to talk to Sam. They prepared a few questions the day before.

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Since this week they are celebrating Chinese New Year, Sam and his brothers were off from school.

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In order to talk to us at 8:50 A.M., Sam had to stay up until 11:00 P.M. We learned a little bit about why we have such different times in preparation for our Skype call.

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Sam told us that his school is much, much bigger than our school, they have around 1800 students. His kindergarten class has just 15 students, and his day sounds a lot like ours. He goes to art, music, the computer lab, recess, but he doesn’t have Spanish, he has Chinese class instead!

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Hopefully we will have another opportunity to talk before school is out. We had a lot of fun using Skype to communicate around the world.

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H is for Hot Chocolate

Grace said, “We did marshmallow math.”

Daniel said, “We made a hot cocoa project.”

Carter said, “We drank hot cocoa.”

Sebastian said, “I drank some hot chocolate.”

Chrissy said, “Today is Wednesay and today we had hot chocolate.”

Julia said, “Marshmallows melt in hot chocolate today.”

Tatum said, “We drank hot chocolate.”

Amanda said, “We like hot cocoa today because we had it today.”

Levi said, “Hot cocoa is yummy and. Had a good time.”

Charlotte said, “We had hot cocoa at school with 5 marshmallows in it.”

Pleroma said, “It looked we were drinking coffee.”

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L is for Laugh

Overhead during the pledge:
“…with liberty and justice for all. And to all a good night.”

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Z is for Zoo Borns

In our writing we have discussed and written about animals. We discussed habitats, traits, food and so on.

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This is from Miss Grace’s writing notebook. She is becoming a great writer. As part of our thinking we looked at baby animals born in zoos. I shared with the students the website Zooborns. I think you might enjoy a visit to this site, talk about what endangered means, how we know if an animal is a mammal or not, have fun exploring!

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S is for Snow

We had our first true snowfall last week so we bundled up to go for a little walk and enjoy nature. We used all of our senses to explore the world around us.

We saw:

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Animal footprints in the snow.

We heard:

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Children.

We tasted:

Snowflakes.

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We felt:

Cold!

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