Winter Wonderland

We are still in the midst of winter here in Ohio, and this year the weather has not disappointed with snow.  To celebrate this wonderful phenomenon, we made snowflakes, and hung them in the window at school.  We discussed how no two snowflakes are exactly alike, just like no two people are exactly alike.  On the Smartboard we made a bubble map of activities that we can do during the winter season.  Our snowflakes are hanging in hallway window, you can see them if you drive by the lot on our side of the building.

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More Fire Safety

This week we continued our fire safety unit.  We did literacy centers where we wrote words to label fire fighting tools, and letter identification with cute fire fighter frogs on the letter cards.  Two new words were added to our word wall, including: to and my.  To practice sequencing numerals we completed a fire engine puzzle but laying the pieces in number order.  For a craft we made fire fighter hats.  (See the cutie posted below for an example!)  Since next week is the end of our first quarter we also completed some assessments.  It has been a busy week!  Thanks for reading!

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More Apple Fun

This week we continued our unit learning about Apples.  We create a stained glass apple window by using contac paper and tissue paper.  We also identified what apple trees look like during each of the 4 seasons, and used tissue paper, paper hole punches, bingo dotters, and cotton balls to decorate a tree for each season.  Check out the pic below to see how our work turned out! 

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Earth Day Crafts

Since our school was on Spring Vacation on Earth Day, we are celebrating now after we have returned. We made 2 crafts to celebrate taking care of our Earth. Here are some pics of the finished products. The first is an Earth sun catcher, or necklace. The second is a "litterbug" that eats litter to help our Earth. The kids loved both of these crafts, and they turned out pretty cute. Here is the link to the instructions I got from Enchanted Learning.

http://www.enchantedlearning.com/crafts/earthday/litterbug/

http://www.enchantedlearning.com/crafts/earthday/glue/

Cute, cute litter bugs

Our class will be making Litter Bugs next week when we return to school. If any of my parents are checking in on the blog during vacation we could use as many empty egg cartons as we can get.

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!!!

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! :)