Celebrating Pope Francis

Counting & writing & reading our numbers has been the name of the game lately.  :)  We have an interactive notebook that the students do work in, and they love it!  This week we worked on our number words.  

We also are working hard on our letter/number formation, and always starting our letters from the top.  I heard a cute story while on our field trip the other day:  a parent had told me her daughter was practicing her numbers and said "Now, tell me if I'm doing it right," and then proceeded to tell her, "no, no I didn't do it right, I started from the bottom."  I had to laugh because after I show the class how to write a number /letter, I'll ask them to watch me and tell me if I'm writing it correctly.  Sometimes I do, and sometimes I do not--they love to tell me when I do not. :)  Here, we are practicing some more number writing.  

This week brought a lot of discussion about Pope Francis, The Holy Father, and his visit to the United States.  We made welcome signs for him and took a class picture with our #FlatFrancis.

We learned some fun facts about Pope Francis that the kids were anxious to quiz their parents on.  

Parents, #FlatFrancis will be joining you at your house soon for shared prayer time.  Feel free to take a picture with him and send it to me.  We can make a class book in Religion class. :)  

Color me happy!

It was all about the colors of the rainbow this past week.  Color words in general, actually!  Here is a look at some of the things we did this past week:

In the above pictures, we have some students working on finding something that color in the classroom then drawing/coloring a picture of it, and some were coloring a color word for morning work, using our crayons displayed in the classroom to help them figure out what color word they were looking at.

We also worked in our Interactive Alphabet Notebook.  They love this!   This week was letter Mm:  Mimi Mouse.

We finished our Creation mobiles this week.  I love this art project, and it is a great visual for them.

Meet ROY G BIV!  He helps us remember the colors of the rainbow!

August: let the adventure begin!

We have started off a new school year!!  I am excited to share with you some of our pictures of what we have been up to.  

One of the most exciting time for the Kindergartners is meeting their 8th grade buddies at the beginning of the year.  Their buddies come in and talk with them, share stories, hobbies, ask them questions, etc.  Here are some pictures of their first meeting.  

I love children's literature!  I especially love some of the "back to school" books that are out for kids.  One of my favorites is Chrysanthemum.  We read this book and have several activities going along with it.  We  talk about the letters in our name and graph how many letters we have in our name.  We talk about that graph and share what we notice.  

In short, the book is about a girl named Chrysanthemum, that goes to school and gets made fun of b/c of her long name.  We also throughout the story talked about how unfriendly her classmate, Victoria, was being to her.  We took that a step further another day, by making  a heart, then showing that everytime someone hurts us or is mean to us,  we wrinkled that paper heart.  In the end, we showed that even when someone says they are sorry, our heart will never get back to unwrinkled.  We talked about being the kind of friends that do NOT wrinkle hearts.  

In the first few weeks of school, we have also worked hard on how to manage our small groups in our centers.  They love love love center time!  Here are some pictures of things going on in those centers.

On the tablets they are spelling words around the room with a magnetic alphabet app.

Matching capital and lowercase letters.

Bee hives to bears--more capital and lowercase matching

Tracing the alphabet with Playdoh

more magnetic letter fun

Stamping the alphabet

They are so eager to find a book when we are finished with our work--I love that!

We are having lots of fun learning new things and building our brains!  So much fun in fact, that sometimes Kindergarten just tuckers us out.  :)