Monday, March 21, 2016

Rainbow Day

St. Patrick's Day has come and gone, but BOY did we have fun!  Our morning started with finding the gold the leprechauns left for us in the classroom.  We found a handful of gold coins and they were actually chocolate!  What a treat!  Those leprechauns must have hidden them in our classroom during the night.

Then we moved on to Rainbow Roll and Write a Word.  Some kids chose to write their words in color too.  We rolled the dice and wrote the sight word that had the number we rolled.


As we were writing our rainbow sight words and had just finished finding our gold, one of the kids yelled, "There's a rainbow on the ceiling!"  I ignored it at first because I thought he was just playing around since we had just been talking about rainbows, pots of gold left by leprechauns, and rainbow writing.  Suddenly, the whole class was standing under the rainbow that was actually on the ceiling, jumping up and down, and shouting that the leprechauns must have left them a rainbow.   It happened again, later in the day, and we discovered that when the sun came in the window, at just the right spot, it hit our class jars and mirror and made a rainbow on our ceiling.  This is the first day that this has ever happened, so it was SUPER cool that it happened at the very moment we were working on rainbows, colors, and finding gold at the end of the rainbow!


We have been working on reading, writing, spelling, and singing about our color words this week.  We practiced writing each word and then used Fruit Loops to fill in the rainbow.

Overall, it was a great day in kindergarten!

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Tuesday, March 8, 2016

Wondergrove

We had a special guest in our classroom yesterday.  Miss Lilly is back in our kindergarten class!  Miss Lilly is our school counselor and she was in at the beginning of the year to talk with the kids about making good choices when we are working to get along with our friends.  Now, she's back with lessons for the kids on being good members of our classroom LEARNING community.  She will be coming in on Monday mornings for the next few weeks to work with our kids.  I will also be in the room during this time, but she will be presenting the lessons.  

Miss Lilly is using a program called Wondergrove Learn.  It's a web-based program that has mini video clips to go right along with it.


We also have mini books that the kids are able to take home.


There was a story about this program on King 5. Here's the link. http://www.king5.com/story/news/local/2016/03/08/former-rugrats-ceo-getting-kids-animated-learning/81501624/

Wednesday, March 2, 2016

Writer's Notebooks in Kindergarten

We've been making writer's notebooks in kindergarten this week.  To begin with, these notebooks are places to hold memories that we hope to write about.  Writer's notebooks are MUCH more than that, and kids will be learning more about their purpose as the year goes on.  I wrote about the purpose of these notebooks on my literacy blog, if you are interested in reading more.

The kids were thrilled with all of the tape, stickers, and permanent markers that we used to personalize our notebooks.

Once they were personalized, we spent time gather ideas for stories.  I modeled what this looked like in my own Writer's Notebook.  


We spent time indoors reminding ourselves that there is so much to write about that happens in our classroom.  Then we went outside and gathered ideas about things we love to do outdoors and on our playground.  

***We need your help!  If your child does something fun in the evening, over the weekend, or even over the upcoming Spring Break, please have them save something to add to their Writer's Notebook.  It could be a movie ticket stub, a photo, a pressed flower, or really anything that would serve as a reminder of a fun event or time in their life. You can send these to school any time and kids can tape or glue them into their writer's notebooks.***

As I mentioned before, a writer's notebook is not just about memories.  It's also a place to try things out.  Kids will be trying out different ideas for story titles, writing down fun sound words (we call this onomatopoeia) that they might want to use in a story, or collecting feelings they have.  It's a great way to help kids become more mindful and appreciative for things around them!

Happy writing!