Tuesday, September 13, 2011

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!

Friday, September 2, 2011

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!


Thursday, September 1, 2011

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!