We started "Daily News" this week.  Each student has a day of the week when they will be able to share some "news", which I will write on our chart.  This is a great chance for me to model "things that good writers do".  As the year goes on we also use this time to look for letters, count the number of words in a sentence, talk about punctuation, etc.  Here is the schedule...in case you want to talk with your child about the "news" they could share:
Monday~Addison, Damien, Laila
Tuesday~Cheyenne, Conner, Jackson, Baron
Wednesday~Danny, Henry, Lilly, Sadie
Thursday~Zachery, Mariah, William
Friday~Rylee, Tyler, Cooper

We also did an EXPERIMENT today.  It was super exciting :)  We put drops of food coloring in a pan of milk.  I touched the milk with a q-tip and we observed what happened. (nothing...) THEN I dipped the q-tip in Dawn dish soap and touched the milk/color again, and VOILA!  Magic happened :) I wish I could have taken pictures of everyone's faces.  

The directions for this experiment are in your child's folder if you would like to try it at home.

Have a great weekend!!

Happy Fall!  We welcomed fall today by going on a leaf hunt around the classroom and graphing the colored leaves we collected.  We practiced using "math talk" words like MORE and LESS.  We also made a torn leaf tree to hang in our room.  "Fall" will be our theme for the next 3 weeks. (If you want to send in any fall items for our science display-colored leaves, nuts, mini pumpkins, gourds, etc.-we will collect them through October!)

We've also been working with our friends doing literacy activities at center time.  We are playing letter games and practicing handwriting strokes, as well as learning to use the resources in our room to be "independent" workers!  Here are some pictures from last week...

Today was the 10th day of kindergarten!  Can you believe we're already 10 days smarter?  :)
While we were eating lunch, "Zero the Hero" visited our room and left a special surprise.  Since his favorite number is 0, he left us gummy lifesavers.  We can't wait to see what he leaves for the 20th day of school!  (I'm hoping for mini donuts...)

He also left us special counting books....

We finished reading the story "Monster Mess."  Everyone worked so hard coloring the monsters, and finding the matching color words.  Then we did an experiment with playdoh to see if colors really do change...and THEY DID!

Welcome to our class blog!  I will use this space to share pictures of activities we do in the kindergarten classroom.  Hopefully, this will give you an idea of the concepts we are working on, and some ways you can practice/reinforce this learning at home.  Stop back often to see what we do!

Yesterday, we started learning the color words.  These are the first words we want our kindergarteners to learn to read by "sight."  We made a list of things that are red, then started a book page of red things to color.

We've also been doing A LOT of name activities.  We've made 2 books to help us learn to read our friends' names, and we also made rainbow names to hang on the wall.

As a special treat, the PTO gave ALL the students at Pineview a freeze pop to cool us off.  We've been sweating this week. A lot :)

THANKS PTO!!

We've also been doing a quick intro/review of the letter names and sounds.  We will work on letter sounds and writing all year.  Today our focus letter was "e" and we "elbow painted" in our ABC art book.  

As a special treat, we talked about coconuts (after reading Chicka Chicka Boom Boom).  We made a list of describing words, and tried to problem solve "How do we open a coconut??""  Thank goodness Mrs. Leatherberry had a hammer ;).   We tried coconut, then graphed if we liked it.