Friday News Flash!

I hope everyone had a wonderful 3 day weekend. Even though it was a four day week it was still a busy one. The focus of this blog is going to be on one main area because I can't stop bragging to anyone who will listen!

This week your students became official... wait for it... AUTHORS!!!!

We took our writing to a whole new level this week. Students learned about editing their work (with our special purple pens) and then they got to publish their work while using our "Publishers Toolbox." I think students were most excited about getting to finally use markers! 

The theme of our writing was list poems as we have also started our poetry unit, and most students wrote about things they love or like. After drafting their poems students looked for capitalization at the beginning of their sentences, they looked for finger spaces in between their words and then for punctuation at the end of their sentences. Some students circled one or two mistakes in purple and others, as you will see below, went a little crazy with their purple pens! Regardless, I was so pleased to see that they were looking at their own writing and correcting their papers.

Then came the challenging part, re-writing their work with the corrections. This was a long process for some students but they were motivated by getting to use the publishers toolbox when they were finished. I have never seen such beautiful pictures from students! They loved getting to use the different art tools to decorate their papers and pictures. 

Here are a few examples of the writing. The first picture will be the rough draft and the second is the final draft:

 

 

I like my mom and my dad. I like cats.

I like my mom! I like my rainbow! I like bunnies! I like cats!

I hate spiders! I hate snakes! I hate mosquito's! (got a little excited with the purple!)

I hate spiders! I hate snakes! I hate mosquito's! (Then we got excited with the colors!)

Isn't the amount of change amazing?! I get excited every time I look at all the student work.

A short post this week but rest assured next will be longer. The 100th day of school is next Wednesday and I can hardly wait to celebrate all that your students have learned over the last 100 days!

Smiles,

Miss Adams

Friday Valentine's Flash!

Happy Friday! What a fun filled day of valentine activities! 

But first, a few updates from activities we did this week.

How to make a Hexagon

Students this week learned about the different ways they could make a Hexagon, as well as using our geometry vocabulary to explain which shapes they used and how many! There was some frustration but students persevered and helped each other to find all the ways to make a Hexagon. It was wonderful to see students working together and making some deep math discoveries! We will finish up with 2D shapes next week and begin 3D shapes soon as well! Exciting times in math!

Students built their hexagons with our shapes and then took paper versions
of the shapes to glue to show me their ways.

Winter Friend

Last week I told you about our winter friend project where students drew their snowman, practicing their patience, and then got to write about their winter friends. This week we finished our writing by adding details to our stories. For example many students said "My winter friend is nice." So I had them add why their winter friend is nice. They turned out wonderful and make a beautiful addition to our walls!

My winter friend is nice because he has to be.

VALENTINES!!!

All day today we have had valentine activities going on. It all started with valentine math this morning. Students were given a box of sweethearts and they had to count the amount of each color and graph it. Naturally we had to sample a few afterward. Students also looked at how many candies were in each box. One student had 19 in their box while another had 31! It was a very fun activity that was practicing our counting skills and working on our graphing skills as well.

Then we finally passed out valentines. Students were so gracious saying thank you to their peers and delighting over all the treats they got. I gave them time to open and read their valentines and they loved looking at all they received. They also loved making their valentine bags, some even chose to make their bag a minion with one eye! I am sure we will all be sugared out by the end of the day but what a fun day we had celebrating friendships, kindness, and of course love.

 

 

Happy Valentine's Day everyone!

Smiles,

Miss Adams

Friday News Flash

Winter Friends

As a fun art and writing project your students created a winter friend. We first went through the process of following step by step instructions to draw our snowmen while practicing our patience waiting for the next step! We did a rough draft version to practice our drawings and then a final draft version. Then students had to practice their patience skills again when using sharpie markers to go over their pencil drawing. Finally students were able to watercolor their snowmen but were required to mix watercolors if they wanted a specific color! It was a fabulous project that students thoroughly enjoyed. Here is a final version of a students snowman, I mean winter friend :)

Then we moved on to the writing portion. We brainstormed what traits we like in our friends and what traits we would want our winter friends to have. This is where we came up with ideas for writing stories about our winter friends. Students wrote ideas like "My winter friend is silly" or "My winter friend is kind." The students loved getting to write about their friends, and continuing into next week we will be revising our writing to add more details, such as "My winter friend is silly because he can jump!" Here are a few first drafts of students writing:

My winter friend is small and big!

My winter friend is funny

Geometry

We are off and running with our geometry unit and this week I introduced students to their very own shape books. We are using these books to look at different shapes, their sides, corners and where we see these shapes in our life. Students had so much fun hunting for shapes in our classroom and comparing shapes "Our cubbies are like squares! Well actually they are like rectangles!" Don't be surprised if students start pointing out all sorts of shapes to you! We are on the hunt for shapes everywhere! Here is an example of their math book and a page about circles:

Student Books

This week many students have brought in books that they have made and during choice time have been writing other books! It is the newest trend in our class and students favorite part is getting to share it with the class. At the end of the day I let students read their books to the class and then students give compliments to the author. It has been so adorable seeing students compliment others and support each others work. Even more than that it has been wonderful seeing kids call themselves authors and illustrators! I tell them all the time that all it takes is an idea that you want to share with others and then just drawing it or writing it down. If you notice that your student is working on a project at home, a picture, book etc. encourage them to bring it in to share with classmates! Here is a picture of a book that 2 students wrote together in class:

I can't wait for next weeks post. It will be filled with fun valentine's activities! Cheers to a great week!

Smiles,

Miss Adams

Friday News Flash!

Triangles, Hexagons and Squares. Oh my!

Geometry is upon us and your kids are off to a great start! To open our study of shapes I gave kids one task, make a picture with pattern blocks. It can be any type of picture you want, and students went wild with math. Discussions came up about how to make different shapes such as a square with two triangles or how many ways we could find to make a hexagon. I was blown away by students engagement and their creative pictures. After they made their picture we did a gallery walk so everyone could see each others designs, and then we recorded how many blocks of each shape we had and totaled them. The student with the most shapes used 39 blocks total for his picture! At home you can have students find shapes, draw shapes and using the name of shapes when identifying objects to build their math vocabulary. Here are a few examples of the creative pictures your students came up with:

If I were President...

Presidents Day is just around the corner and this week we learned about two Presidents (George Washington and Abraham Lincoln) as well as looking at what a President does. Students were amazed by the fact that secret service follow them everywhere and that President Obama has his own chef! Students also looked at what a hard job it is trying to make everyone get along and hear everyone's ideas. We finished by making self portraits as Presidents, where they had to draw their features and write their last name, and also wrote about what we would do if we were President. Here are a few adorable examples:

Make friends with everyone.

Everyone clean your room before you have ice cream.

These next few weeks will be busy with Valentine's approaching, 100th day of school approaching and our field trip to see the play Bad Kitty. I will try and post more often but I promise I will at least post on Friday.

Smiles,

Miss Adams

Friday News Flash!

Happy Friday! In class this week we have been going over the rules and procedures again as many students had a hard time remembering this week. We will continue this work next week to make our class run as smoothly as we can!

Thank You Cards 

Next week our cook Gail will be retiring and as a class we made her thank you notes. I was so impressed with how thoughtful the students were! They came up with many great ideas like "We should said that we will miss her" or "can I put love and my name so she remembers me?" They were truly beautiful sentiments, not to mention the beautiful writing and pictures that they drew! Here are a few examples of cards that students were working on:

A student draws a photo of the cook with the kitchen counter.

 

"Thank you Gail! We will miss you!"

Reading at Home

Reading at home is an integral part to helping your child's reading development. As we move toward first grade (I can't believe I am saying that already!) we are really working on students becoming independent in their reading. You can help support this at home by having students sound out unknown words and helping them blend the sounds together, having them guess at an unknown word based off of the picture and simply letting them try and ask them if it makes sense. By helping them practice these strategies they will in turn internalize these strategies so they can do them with their own independent reading. This is such an exciting time for your child's reading development and it is only going to keep getting better!

As I mentioned I spent all last Friday working on report cards and I have to say it was more fun than I thought it would be! It was fabulous getting to look over all your children's work and see how much they have grown. It made me even more proud of them! Thank you for sharing them with me and for your support on their journey through Kindergarten!

Smiles,

Miss Adams

Friday News Flash!

Wow what a busy first week back! Even though it turned into a 4 day week due to ice it was packed with practicing our routines and schedules, and gearing up for more assessments that we will be doing next week for report cards. This week was essentially a big review in terms of classroom behavior and academics. Here are a few fun new things  we did this week that students really enjoyed:

Writing to our Pen Pals

This week we got letters back from our Pen Pals in Mexico and so we decided to send them letters telling them what we did over winter break. I explained to the kids that in Mexico it doesn't snow and it is probably very hot on Christmas so the kids were eager to share about their experiences in the snow and ice! Not only was this a great time for cultural exploration it was also a wonderful way to ease back into their writing. Here are a few examples that students did:

It was snowing at my house.

I was sliding down the deck.

Snowman Tally Marks

In math we have been practicing using tally marks, which you will see in this weeks homework as well, and we learned a new memory game that involved snowmen and tally marks; what could be more fun?! In this game students set up their cards in a grid and flipped cards over trying to match the snowman's number with the tally marks. Squeals of joy erupted around the room as students found pairs and were so ecstatic to come tell me how many tally marks their card had! We will be continuing our practice around tally marks and number recognition in addition to beginning our study of geometry in the coming weeks.

Two students playing Snowman Tally Marks.

I really gave the kids some perspective this week when I said that we are almost halfway through Kindergarten and so we are working toward becoming First Graders! Their eyes got huge, first in fear, but then in excitement as I told them that now they know how to behave in school and will be allowed to do more older kid activities if they can prove that they are ready to behave like First Graders. It's hard to believe, but these kiddos are growing up fast. These next months they will be changing so much in every way and I am so grateful I get to be a part of it.

Smiles,

Miss Adams

Friday News Flash!

Our first full week that we have had in a while and I think the kids were feeling it this afternoon, but we also did some amazing work as a class this week! 

Kindness Project

This week we launched the kindness project where students look for other students being kind and then write that kindness down on a strip of paper. We then put all the strips of paper together to make a Kindness chain showing how much kindness we have seen as a class. Our class has been so enthusiastic about finding kindness, even using their special kindness goggles to notice the kind things people are doing. Our class made a goal that we could get to 100 kindness strips on our chain by our last day before break! We got up to 24 today!

Snowflakes Galore

During choice time this week I taught students how to make paper snowflakes. This was wonderful practice with their cutting skills and they really had to think about how to make a reflected shape, for example making a half heart into a full heart. The kids loved making snowflakes and "donating them" to our classroom to decorate our windows.

Math: One More and One Less

In Math this week we have been looking at patterns in finding one more than a number and one less than a number. Understanding the sequence of counting both orally and with objects is vastly important for their understanding of numbers. This week I pushed them to their limits as they worked with a partner to match a poster with a story that I told. They had to not only work with their partner but make sure they had the parts of the story represented as well. They were rock stars and stuck with it!

Showing math bracelets with 1-10 pieces.

What a fantastic week. I truly enjoyed myself and can't wait for what else is in store before Winter break!

Smiles,

Miss Adams