Creating Counting Books

We are busily working on 1-12 counting books in math. We use stencils, rubber stamps, stickers and markers to represent each number on its own page. Sometimes we do tricky things like show 3 cars, 3 teddy bears and 3 hearts all on the three page. Just to make sure you know it's three, we then color in 3 cubes.

We are working in the counting jar. When we have 3 blue tiles and 5 red tiles, everyone is fairly clear that we have 8 tiles. But we're not quite sure if the answer stays the same when we count the red tiles first. Maybe when we count the blue tiles first things will change! Math is sooo tricky in kindergarten.

We managed to slip outside to make a sketch of a sunflower growing by our classroom on the only dry moment we've had this week. We brought our sketches in to water color. We hope to get them on display next week. We are so appreciative of BZ's parent volunteers who spend their Wednesday mornings displaying art work around our school.

We began Second Steps social curriculum by looking at pictures of children's facial expressions and describing how their eyes, mouth or body posture look when they feel happy, sad, scared, mad, surprised or disgusted by a situation.

We are adding lots of new sounds in Jolly Phonics and practicing many letters in Handwriting without Tears. We are reading simple predictable stories and learning sight words.

Butterflies

Lunch with our Buddies

Children looking at a butterfly

We released the first monarch that hatched yesterday and watched it soar up into the air and disappear over the building. The children were pleased to see it take flight.

We had a great discussion in math today. We have begun our second unit of study in
Investigations today on counting and numbers. The children began counting how many days we have been in school this year. Children noticed the weekend days and holidays, as they debated whether every day counted or only some of the days. One child mentioned that we could not count Thursday, because that had not happened [it is tomorrow]. Many children were convinced that since there was no day marked with a number after September 30th, that must mean kindergarten was over and they were going to First Grade. Kindergartners have lots of great ideas to discuss. We read Anno's Counting Book, discussed some of the pictures in the book and began making our own counting books.

The best part of the day was eating lunch with our 6th grade buddies. we found out who our buddy was today and many children seemed to get along well with their buddy. We will meet with them again on Friday and will finalize the pairing of the children. We hope to have pictures to post in a day or two.

Open House

Many thanks to the parents who attended Open House. We viewed a slide show of some of the activities the children have engaged in this year. Parents had a chance to see the materials their children are using and an opportunity to ask questions about the curriculum. If anyone has questions about the handouts we sent home, feel free to call or email.

We are still learning new activities, like easel painting and making collages. Using corks was very popular as we glued down our creations this afternoon. We are listening to stories on headphones and learning sight words to put in our sight word envelopes. We started working in our math workbooks today, drawing a picture and counting things.

Monarchs Have Hatched

The children found monarch butterflies on our windowsill when they arrived at school today. Two have hatched and one more looks ready to hatch on Tuesday. We put out sugared water for them, but haven't been able to get them to drink yet. We hope we will have a warm day soon, so we can put them in the garden!

Caterpillars, Caterpillars!

Scarves and balls in phys ed with Mrs. Taylor this week.


Look for the portraits in our classroom that BZ had the children make in art last week. They studied their faces carefully as they put together collage materials. They are very cute.



We've had a busy week in kindergarten. We had our first lesson on the Smart Board. Children listened to The Very Hungry Caterpillar and named foods, counted fruits and ordered the days of the week. All on Smart Board.

We drew pictures of caterpillars and also made our own caterpillars with plasticine clay. Some kids chose to make caterpillars and some made chrysalises.

We have also been working on simple rhyming stories about butterflies where children fill in a word on every other page to complete a rhyme.

We are conducting surveys in math to collect data that we can talk about and continuing our counting jar books. We will have our first visit from Polly, our math coach this week.

We are adding new letters and new sounds every day. We plan to start building simple words this week using some of the sounds we have learned. We also began reading our first story, a book with no words.

Children were delighted to check out their first book in library this week.