Tiger's Candle Day!

You've read about them, we talked about them at conferences, and thanks to Tiger and his mom Xioamin, our class experienced their first Candle Day!  A Candle Day is a time for your child to be in the spotlight and to highlight something about their life outside of school- maybe a hobby, a family or cultural tradition, or a retelling of a trip they've taken.  Tiger's mom shared all about Chinese New Year with our class and Tiger helped to show the importance of wearing red to "scare away the monsters!"  (Don't worry, they are just pretend).  Xioamin brought grapefruit and special candies for us to try and gave each child a red envelope with a little something in it as part of the tradition for the Lunar New Year.  Happy Year of the Monkey!

 

Super Cool Smoothies with Farm to School

On Friday, February 5th we made smoothies as part of a Farm to School Lesson.  After reading a story about a garden and discussing how fruit is grown, Miss Lizzie and her friend introduced our crew to a bicycle powered blender!  Everyone helped to either add some fruit or turn the peddles and afterward a berry smoothie was enjoyed by all.

Guidance with Mrs.Grey

In addition to the mindfulness work we do each day to help us stay calm, quiet and ready to learn we're enjoying a series of lessons with Mrs. Grey in which we're learning more about how our body and mind are connected.  Mrs. Grey used the image of a shaken snow globe to help us picture what's happening in our brains when we're over excited, angry, or rushed and overwhelmed.  Here you can see the class practicing some belly breathing to get in touch with the feeling of calmness.

Super Readers have Pointer Power!

Touching or pointing to each word as you read is an important strategy for beginning readers.  It helps them to focus on beginning sounds in words, recognize known words (or parts of words) and make reasonable guesses about unknown words.  It also helps insure words won't be omitted or added.  Recently in Reader's Workshop the children used popsicle stick pointers to reinforce the importance of this strategy.  Here you can see some of the partners practicing back to back before they turn knee-to-knee to read aloud to their partner.

Math Update

Last week the children engaged in several activities that focused on number sense.  These activities are designed to strengthen the children's understanding of number sequencing and 
relationships between numbers as well as gain confidence with concepts such as before/after, counting backward/forward and greater than/less than. Take a look at the number line we built collaboratively.  All that was known at the start was that 20 would be the highest number.  The children had to estimate where their number should be placed and adjust the numbers as new ones were added.

Here are some photos of the partner game "Crazy Mixed Up Numbers".  This was fast paced, partner fun!

Learning Buddies

I know you hear about them at home but I want you to see how much fun we have with our fifth grade buddies.  In weeks past our fifth grade friends have assisted us in writing addition and subtraction story problems and in putting together a take-home book about Dr.Martin Luther King Jr. But this week, we thought we'd take it easy on our buddies since they worked so hard on a fantastic production of The Lion King (hope you got a chance to see it).  Here are some pictures of the buddies playing together!  We learned that fifth graders like Legos, blocks, puzzles,the dollhouse and marble structures too.

What do we do when our "have-to's" are finished?

I thought it might be fun for you to see how clever and self directed your kindergartners are even AFTER they have completed their two literacy jobs.  The system in our class has the children organized into groups and they are able to make literacy based choices according to what activities are available for their group that day.  Take a look at these students continuing to challenge themselves.  They are busy designing with word stamps, choral reading from poetry journals and making superstar sentences with magnet words!