Hoping to Win

There is a giveaway at Ladybug Teacher Files for a Dr. Suess themed Blog Design. If you look below to our Dr. Seuss blog entry you will see that his birthday is my favorite day of the whole school year, there is never enough time to get all the activities in that I would love to share with my students! I am really hoping to win this giveaway so that I can get my blog redesigned with this Dr. Seuss theme! Here is the link for entry to this giveaway:

2 Giveaways

For my teacher friends out there, who couldn't use a $100 gift to the Container Store??? I know I could! There are so many cool things it would be hard to choose! If you want a chance to enter the giveaway head on over to this blog: What The Teacher Wants, click the button below. Good luck to each of us!



After you enter to win that contest head on over to the Second Grade is Splendid blog for a chance to win $10 to use with Amazon! Wow, what great ways to help teachers!

Guided Reading Books

If you are looking for good patterned text books to read with your children/students I love, love, love the printable books from Hubbard's Cupboard! The books are listed in several different groups, alphabetically, seasonally, by word family, etc. They are so easy to make, just print, cut in half and staple together. I would highly encourage you to visit the website and use these books for practice!

www.hubbardscupboard.org

Graphing Names by Syllables

Today we were introduced to syllable counting. We clapped out syllables in lots of words, wrote them on the board with boxes around each syllable, and then we each clapped and counted the syllables in our own name. Next we took our name card and placed it on the graph in our pocket chart. Since we are also working on our number words as sight words we graphed them underneath the number word representing how many syllables we had in our name. Two syllables was the obvious winner for our class this year.

Learning our Number Words

This week we have introduced number words zero through ten as our new sight words. We have practiced with flashcards, matching and reading stories. Our favorite story for this lesson was "I Knew Two Who Said Moo" by Judi Barrett. The words and the pictures made us laugh! While I was gone our teacher assistant helped us make flash cards with the number words, then we played memory with partners. Who knew learning number words could be so fun?

Guided Reading Groups

I have finally finessed my observation note page to where I love it!!! I am so excited to run my guided reading center and keep accurate, easy notes that I may forget when it comes time to assessments or for planning remediation. I have been researching different teacher's ways of this record keeping and took a little bit from here and there and added the things that I wanted to make this graphic organizer just the way I wanted so that it would help me the most. It includes a place to enter students most recent scores in reading so that I can quickly see what areas I want to be sure to hit in each group where they are all needing some extra help. I want to share it with you in case you are teaching and want some ideas to take away and add to your own, or feel free just to use mine. I was happy to get the cover and side labels for my binder at the following blog:


http://kindergartenworks.blogspot.com/2011/01/guided-reading-guided-setup.html


I also printed the reading log there to keep a list in my binder of books I have done a running record on for each child. Then I also revamped a running record documentation page. I wanted something where I could see the student's actual reading and comprehension progress on the same page. Again, if you want to take any ideas or use the page in its entirety please enjoy!



Guided Reading Observation Documentation Form


Guided Reading Group Notes -



Running Record Form


Running Record Form -

Buddy Reading

On Friday our Kindergarteners had a special treat from the 3rd graders. They came down to our classroom to buddy read with us! We all had lots of fun hearing some Dr.Seuss stories read to us by the big kids. Thank you to Mrs. Armeni and her class for sharing your time and talents with us!

Dr.Seuss's Birthday

This is by far and away my favorite day of the year! I always enjoy a day when I can share one of my favorite authors with children! Of course we never have time to do all of the fun activities that I would like to do, but we do get in a lot of them. We read lots of stories including: The Cat in the Hat, Yertle the Turtle, Too Many Daves, and My Many Colored Days. Since our school is creating our own Dr.Seuss Day next week we will get a chance to finish up some of the things that we didn't get to. Our crafts included a Dr.Seuss hat, and turtles. We worked on writing numbers from 1-30 on hats, a worksheet shared from the Kindergarten Hoppenings blog - see the link on the right. On Friday some of our 3rd grade friends are planning to visit and buddy read more Dr.Seuss stories with us. We love Dr.Seuss!!!

President's Day

For president's day we learned that both George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were known for their honesty. We discussed the importance of always telling the truth - no matter what. Our bulletin board displays the silloheuttes of our past leaders - Washington and Lincoln - and our own silloheuttes as the leaders of the future. Seeing as how we have 30 silloheuttes up on the board, they would not all fit in the picture. We also discovered that the president's pictures are on the penny and the quarter. For a science experiment we predicted how many drops of water would fit on top of a penny and a quarter, then we used an eye dropper to find out the answer. This was a very fun experiment! We enjoyed learning about these important leaders of our past.

100th Day

Since some people have not be able to come into our class to view some of our fun projects that we did on the 100th day I wanted to post pictures of some so you can see them here, even though it was almost a month ago - where has a month gone??? What a fun, fun, fun day, even though it was delayed by 2 days due to our days off for snow. Of course everything we do on this day, we did in 100's. We practiced counting to 100 by 1's, 5's and 10's, did 100 exercises, wrote one letter of the alphabet 100 times, estimated how long it takes for 100 seconds to pass, chose an adjective to describe what we hope to be when we are 100 years old, created a school of 100 fish, made 100 day celebration crowns, and drew pictures of what we would look like when we reach the age of 100. Our bulletin board displays our 100 collections brought from home, and our ice cream cones with 10 scoops, which we used to count by 10's to reach 100. The second bulletin board shows our stars, on which we wrote and drew about an item we would like to have 100 of. Congratulations class on 100 great days of learning in Kindergarten!

Not so "plane" shapes

As we transition from learning about plane shapes to 3-D shapes we are making yarn shapes. Students describe the shapes by telling how many straight sides there are on each shape. We practice our phonemic awareness by sounding out some of the sounds when writing the name of each shape. Then we fold a large sheet of construction paper into 4ths. Each box is labeled with the name of a shape and how many sides it has. Before we glue on the yarn for each shape we draw the shape in the box. (This is easier than making the shape with glue - I learned this the hard way the first year I tried this.) Kids love making this shape craft, and bonus for teacher - it is not too messy! :)