Halloween

It is getting very close to Halloween and we are getting very excited thinking about all of the fun we will have.  We have been working very hard during our first 50 days of kindergarten and now it is time to have a little holiday fun!  We have made some really cute things this year to get ready for Halloween. We have tried to contain our excitement and take Halloween a piece at a time.  Here is a snapshot of what we have been doing...

Five Little Pumpkins

This is always one of my favorite Halloween stories- it is cute and predictable so the kids love it.  We worked together in committees to retell each page of the story.  I was very impressed with how well they were able to plan and work together.

Pumpkin Estimation

We estimated how tall we thought our pumpkin would be and how big around.  We had a few people who guessed correctly!

Mummies

We read the book, I Want My Mummy and made text to self connections after we read the book.  We also made our own mummies and had a delicious mummy snack.

Boo Who Are You?

We made trick-or-treaters to get us in the Halloween spirit.  The kids had fun guessing who everyone was.



Shape Monsters

 We read the book I Need My Monster (so funny) by Amanda Noll and made our own monster glyphs.  They turned out even cuter than I imagined.

Go Away Big Green Monster!

We read Ed Emberly's book Go Away Big Green Monster! and made our own monsters to go along with it.  We also worked on our color words to fill out our monster key.

Jack-o-lantern Bar Graphs

We graphed the ways that we would carve our pumpkins and talked about the results.  It turns out that most of the students in my class would carve thier pumpkin with triangle eyes and a triangle nose with a regular smile (no teeth).

Candy Corn

Each child traced the pieces of the candy corn, cut them out  and glued it together.  They are so simple, but they look so cute hanging in our room.

Bats

We have learned all about bats.  We read Stellaluna and discussed what we knew about bats.  made a   They each wrote one fact that they learned about bats and soda can bat to hang in our "bat cave" in the hall. It think they turned out pretty cute :)

Pumpkin Sequencing

We read the book Pumpkin Pumpkin by Jeanne Titherington which tells about the life cycle of a pumpkin.  Next, we made our own pumpkin life cycles.  We folded our paper to make our pumpkins into pockets for our sequencing cards.  Here is the link for the great little cards.

Fall is in the air (well, almost)

The weather may not feel like fall in Alabama, but I am definitely ready to bring the fall activities in my classroom!  We got started today by reading one of my favorite books about owls by Gail Gibbons simply called Owls.  We followed it up by making an owl gyph (yay-another one) by Shari Sloane.  If you have not checked out her website yet- you need to!  Here is the link for the big glyph key and the student glyph key as well (why recreate the wheel). I think they turned out pretty cute!

Maps

We have just finished our study of maps.  To begin our study, we made a KWL chart to figure out what we already knew about maps and what we wanted to learn. 

 We have read lots of great books to help us learn all about maps.  We have also practiced making maps of our Kindergarten hall, our school and our bedrooms.

                
We also made a great map based on the book Me on the Map by Joan Sweeney.  We mapped ourselves from our house all the way to our planet Earth. 



Nutrition

We just finished a two week study of nutrition.  We talked about all of the food groups and making healthy choices.  We also made some really cute crafts during our study of nutrition.  As you will see, we had a blast learning about nutrition.

 It Looked Like Spilt Milk- they really used their imaginations and came up with some great ideas.

Pizza Glyph- another glyph from Shari Sloan used to represent information about ourselves.  We also read Pizza Pat  by Rita Golden Gelman and learned how to make our very own, delicious pizzas for special snack.  (English muffins, pizza sauce, mozzarella cheese and pepperonis)



Apple Day- We spent a whole day doing apple activities.  One of our favorites was the apple graph!  We all lined up by our apple colors and took a picture holding up our apples.  We analyzed our information and found that most people in our class like mixed apples.

Hot Dog Graphing- We read The Pigeon Finds a Hot Dog! by Mo Willems and graphed how we like to eat our hot dogs.  We found that most people like them with ketchup.  Mo Willems' website a a great game to go along with this book.  Click here to play!

We also learned a song to put in a pocket chart- Five Little Hot Dogs
Five little hot dogs frying in a pan.
The grease got hot and one went BAM!
Four little hot dogs frying in a pan (and so on....)

Grain Day- We read On Top of Spaghetti by Tom Glazer and made Spaghetti Man- he eats the pasta right off the plate!

Tops and Bottoms Flipbook- activity done following Tops and Bottoms by Janet Stevens

Shopping for Healthy Choices From Each Food Group

Healthy vs. Not Healthy- students looked through magazines to find all of their pictures



Pete the Cat

If you have not read the Pete the Cat books yet- you HAVE to put it on your to do list!  It is super cute and so much fun! The author of these great books is Eric Litwin and he has a wonderful website.  You can download Pete "walking along and singing his song" here.  I love these books because Pete takes whatever comes his way and does he complain?  "Goodness no!"  It is a great lesson for my little ones to learn early on :)

We made a cute craft to go along with our stories today.  I will say that it was very time consuming, but we sure had fun creating it.  Everyone chose their favorite color for Pete's shoes and put the sentence together with the color word to match. 

Also pictured is one of Pete's very own "Rocking School Shoes!"  They were so impressed!  I found this pencil pouch at Staples for $5- well worth it for the reaction I got :)

New Beginnings

We are about to start a brand new school year and we will be making lots of exciting changes in kindergarten.  Our room has a new look to accommodate our shift to facilitating a more independent learning environment.  Yes-I will be actively working toward making 5 year olds independent in THEIR classroom.  While this is not a HUGE shift for our kindergarten team, given that we are very child-focused in the first place; we are placing much more emphasis on it through two new programs- Investigations and The Daily 5.  I am really looking forward to seeing my students take ownership of their learning and learn as much from the thinking of their classmates as they learn from me :)

In order for my students to be independent, my room has to be organized and labeled.  We also have to practice our routines to establish muscle memory, so everything has to be opened up to create lots of space for learning.  Below are some pictures of my classroom this year.  It looks so bare- I can't wait to fill it up with lots of great student work :)

Math Center

Community Circle

Book Boxes and Reading Area

Loft and Home Living



Behavior Management

 Classroom Shots