Making Applesauce and Rainbows

It took all week, but we finally had our applesauce today! We cut up and cooked our apples on Monday, pressed then through the food mill on Tuesday and spiced it up and served it on Thursday. All to rave reviews. Maybe we'll try apple butter next.

We have been measuring with towers of 10 cubes and now are comparing handfuls of cubes and deciding which one is bigger. The photo shows the comparison being recorded on paper. In addition we have begun playing Compare with a deck of cards. The children are using many strategies to determine which number is larger.

We have some photos of children making rainbows in art today. This lesson branched out from their study of lines earlier in the year; wavy, squiggly, twisty rainbows!!

A Leaf Walk

We took a walk with our buddies on Friday to collect leaves. We are pressing the leaves and will use them to make pictures the next time we get together. This is a tradition going back many years and several of the 6th graders still have the leaf picture that they made in kindergarten! We will share these at assembly when they are done.

We had a number of teachers visiting our classroom on Friday to observe and participate in kindergarten math. We were measuring a collection of objects with a stick that is 10 cubes long. We sorted them into bins showing which were longer and which were shorter than out stick.

We cut up apples to make applesauce today and will put it through a food mill tomorrow. We hope to enjoy our homemade applesauce on Wednesday.

We have been talking about beginning, middle and ending parts of stories. Children listened to Bunny Cakes by Rosemary Wells and illustrated the three different parts of the story. Some children wrote sentences to go with their pictures. We plan to do some alphabet sorts and initial sound sorts over the next few days.

Overlays in Art

The children worked on overlaying tissue paper to create new shades of color in art today. They made some beautiful collages with some autumn colors.

We have included pictures of our morning meeting. Today's greeting was a high five.

There are a few shots of recess. The sun was very welcome this afternoon!

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.