What an excited week we have had.  On Tuesday we received a container which houses six painted lady larva.  We will be able to observe the complete life cycle of a butterfly by the end of the school year.  It has only been three days and there is a marked difference in the size of the caterpillars!  We can’t wait to see them on Monday!

We earned another Gem Party and will be celebrating all of our hard work next Wednesday!

Here are a few sentences we made using our two new snappy words, “little” and “give.”

Grace – My little brother is little.

Dan – My cat is little.

Gabriel – He is little.

Brandon L. – My sister is little.

Insung – The sign is little.

Luke – My little brother is four years old.

Brandon B. – My brother is little.

Conor – At Mount Olympus, this rollercoaster is little.

Nora – My little brother is little.

Lily – My little sister is funny.

Chloe – My book is little.

Devin – I like to give presents to Giovanni.

Quinn – I give chocolate to Grace.

Leona – I like to give candy to my grandma.

Giovanni – I give hugs to my grandma.

Justin – I give candy to Brandon B.

We are well on our way to being Daily 5 masters!  The kids are now able to read consistently and independently for up to 15 minutes and we are continuing to build stamina each and every day!  The pictures show the children “reading to self,” “reading to someone,” “writing the room,” and “listening to reading.”  Next week we will add “work on writing” to the choices during the Daily 5.

Science – For the past three weeks we have been exploring the states of matter.

Math – We just started a unit on counting and measuring.

Earth Day – We are celebrating Earth Day this Friday!

Today was Art in Action.  We are going to tell you all about it using our very own words.

Nora – We drew pictures of circus animals and circus persons.  I painted a baby girl.

Brandon B. – I did… you squirt paint from a bottle and spray it onto the paper. (airbrushing)

Daniel – We made pictures of crazy cats.  They were weird.

Conor – We painted a birdhouse.

Chloe – We make cup. (pottery)

Insung – I painted a leopard.

Devin – We did airbrushing.  I made a hot wheel.

Luke – I went dancing.  A lady taught us a dance.

Quinn – I made a bracelet out of beads.

Gabriel – I was with Daniel and we made cats.  I named my cat, “X.”

Grace – I made a bracelet with Quinn.

Justin – We made a telescope out of Pringles boxes.  I wrapped it up with tinfoil. (photography)

Giovanni – We painted a birdhouse.

Brandon L. – I made one of those things that you twisted… and there was a little poke hole… and you put it up to the sun… and the trees were upside-down. (photography)

Leona – We did pottery and it feeled funny.

Lily – I danced on the stage.

A special thank you to all of the Art in Action volunteers!  We had a fabulous morning trying new and different types of art!

That was the question we answered this afternoon during social studies! With a blown up beach ball globe, we rolled the ball to a friend. When we caught the ball we looked to see where our right thumb landed. Was it on land or water? 12 of the 16 times we caught the ball, it landed on water. It was a fun way to find out the answer to our question!

Go figure… Beach Day happened on the first snow-filled day we’ve had in weeks!  It didn’t stop us K kids, though.  We built “sandcastles” out of shapes, read endless books about the beach, and even got to eat on our beach towels on the lunchroom floor!  Here are a few pictures from the day.

Even two days later we were still celebrating Valentine’s Day with some more fun activities!  Yesterday we played number crunch using two pictures of children holding valentines.  The object of the game is to ask yes or no questions to figure out the secret number, which is chosen by a classmate.  No hints allowed!  We simply ask questions to limit the possibilities of what the secret number could be!  Here are a few sample questions:

Is it odd?

Is it greater than _____?

Is it less than _____?

Is it a multiple of 2? (I’m not sure that one came up, but it could have!)

We also played a probability game, where the letters in the word, HEART, were cut up and placed into a bag.  We predicted the number of times we would have to pull letters out of the bag before getting ALL of the letters to spell HEART.  We also practiced using tally marks to record which letters we pulled.

It was such a short week due to parent/teacher conferences, but we had fun!

Happy Valentine’s Day to my darling kindergarten class!  We had such fun at our party eating treats and passing out valentines.  Everyone worked so hard on decorating their valentine boxes at home… they looked great!  You all worked so hard on writing your classmates’s names on each valentine.  It was evident that you took a lot of time to make each one special.  I am so proud of you all!

XOXO,

Mrs. Zebro

Our mapping skills are being put to the test! In Social Studies we are learning the cardinal directions: north, east, south and west. We learned a funny way to remember the order in which they go, “Never Eat Soggy Waffles.” How could we forget?

We have a new addition to our classroom… a beautiful new sand and water table! We had a blast playing with it during free choice today.
In Social Studies we learned the funny saying, “never eat soggy waffles” to help us remember the order of directions (north, east, south, west).