It's been TOO long!

 Oh my have we been busy! These months have gone by so quickly and I have not had a minute to sit down and blog until right now. We have done so much and learned TONS. 

The last week in October was Red Ribbon week. One of the days was to dress up as your favorite book character. I was If You Give a Cat a Cupcake. (Behind me are our "Silly Pumpkins." The kids had so much fun making these!)

 My sweet friend Caitlin was If You Give a Dog a Doughnut.

That Friday, we went to The Oil Ranch in Hockley, Texas. It is one of the best days of the whole year!

There was horseback riding. 

 A train ride around the ranch. 

 Fun times to be had! 

 We went on a hayride and got to feed the cows and donkeys. The kids LOVED it!

 Some of our crew on the hayride. 

 My super sweet class and I at the end of the day. It's ok to be jealous of how wonderful they are!

 They got to get up close and personal with the animals. 

Here is a slideshow full of pictures we have taken over the past few weeks. 

We have:

-Painted with apples after our study of apples.

-Gone to the Oil Ranch

-Had a harvest breakfast on Halloween. We made butter and I made jack-o-lantern orange pancakes. 

-We had our Pumpkin Celebration. Our celebration was pretty much the PROM of kindergarten. It was FABULOUS. We had amazing parents help with the event and our kindergarten coordinator was just fantastic. We had face painters, each kid got their own pumpkin to decorate, they got to decorate a cookie, they got to see and touch real live spooky animals (hissing cockroaches, an iguana, a snake, they also got to look at tarantulas.) There was a HUGE bounce house and a HUGE slide in the outside area. There were several more things such as prizes, contests, and FUN!

-Our readers workshop has now expanded to about 25-30 minutes. When the kids start to get antsy, we partner up with our reading buddies and we refocus! I have such an amazingly smart class. 

-HOPE YOU ENJOY-

Here's what we've been learning...

Math- Counting to 100, calendar things, patterns, one to one correspondence, 

addition and subtraction to 5.

Reading- What is schema?, Readers have Superpowers, Building our reading stamina.

Writing- Writing about a small moment. Stories have a beginning, middle and an end.

Science- 5 senses, weather, seasons

Social Studies- Being kind to our friends and about holidays. 

It's been a while!

 Last week was a little too crazy to blog! I started a bootcamp last week and had lots of work to do for grad school. Today, I just HAD to blog! I wanted to blog about a few things that we do in the classroom. 

For reading workshop last week, we talked about how to care for your books. Yesterday we took pictures and made an anchor chart titled How Good Readers Take Care of Books. 

Here are the pictures!

We hug our books like friends.

 We turn the pages slowly and gently after reading the whole page!

 We put our books back in their home!

We LOVE technology in kindergarten! Here are some pictures of the kids using our iTouches and the Smart Board! 

A few kindergarten teachers wrote a grant for iPods and we got 16! The kids LOVE them. We have TONS of educational apps! (I'll have to blog tomorrow about all of our apps!)

We use the SMART Board for EVERYthing! The first few weeks of school our SMART Board didn't work several days. Last Friday, the fabulous technology fairy brought me a NEW projector. Here are pictures of our letter study!

We practice writing the letter.

 We sort pictures of objects that start with that letter and that do not. 

More writing practice.

Way to go! 

Another thing we do on the SMART Board is our name study! Each day we have a king or queen of the day. We find out their favorite things and then we each practice writing that persons name then we draw a picture of them or their favorite things. At the end of the day I send home a book with each person's paper and a picture of them with their crown. Here is our name study! Then some pictures of us practicing writing!

Here are some of our station pictures!

Pocket Chart

Last week our shared reading was Who Stole the Cookies from the Cookie Jar! This week we are practicing putting each friends name in the poem and reading it! 

I got this idea from Pinterest!  They pull a lower case letter out of a bag and then they highlight the uppercase letter! Brilliant! 

Hope you're having a great week! Tomorrow will be a GREAT day!

Math Time

  Last week and the beginning of this week we really have just explored all of our math manipulatives. It's been fun, but, it's also been a little crazy- so- I needed to actually teach a LESSON! Yesterday, we talked about sorting and what the word sorting actually meant. They decided it meant to seperate things together that were alike.

To practice this skill we sorted by girls and boys and then by the color they were wearing.

The next thing we did was take of our shoes (to give our toes some wiggle room) and then sort shoes. Here are some pictures from the fun!

First we sorted by shoes that tie and shoes that don't. Then shoes that have velcro or shoes that slip on. Then lastly, by color.

Then I just had to take an adorable picture of them all together. Cutest picture EVER! Love them!

Happy Weekend!



Kindergarten Workers!

My smart board FINALLY got fixed today. It was out for a day and a 1/2 and it felt like a LIFE time! We did lots of fun things today in class. And, let me tell you, that I LOVE my group of kids to the moon and back! They are GREAT!

Reading Workshop

  

So, we've been talking about the "listening" part to reading workshop for a while, the past couple of days we have "tired," which includes going to our tables with books and practice "reading" quietly and then returning the books to the correct basket... NEATLY, and today we talked about sharing and what that should look like. I took some pictures to capture each section and then we made an anchor chart to close the lesson. 

The listening picture is one I took the 2nd day of school- they were sitting on their squares, hands in their laps and looking at the speaker.

These are some "trying" pictures.

These are some "sharing" pictures. We talked about how you sit and listen to each other. There were some great conversations going on about favorite parts and coolest pictures. 

Tomorrow I'll post our math sorting lesson! YAY!

Welcome Bulletin Linky Party

Typically in kindergarten we do our door in Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. This year, a teacher had a great idea in which we each did a different book that we would read in kindergarten! I love the idea. This is my door/ Welcome Bulletin to our classroom!