Relaxed Week

This week in kindergarten was pretty chill and relaxed (as calm as kindergarteners can be anyways!) Next week, we will start to do more Thanksgiving and Veteran's Day related activities. The pictures I took are a mixture of random things. 

SMART Room

Each month, the kindergarten and first grade teachers change the stations in the SMART room. Because it is now November, we have brand new stations in the SMART room. The class is super excited!

Tracers: Students have to cover one eye with one hand and use their other hand to trace the lines on the posters. 

Balancers: We have 3 different balancers. One is like a teeter totter. Another has a ball that kids have to try to get around the full circle. And the last one (not pictured above) has a little maze with a ball in the center that they have to get through the maze.

Steppers: Kids have to read the word family words and odd/even numbers. As they say each word or number, they have to step up with one foot. Then alternate with the other foot. I'd have to say this one is the trickiest--a lot of them lose balance and fall off! We hope to get stronger as the month goes on.

Birds in a Nest: Students carry a stuffed animal bird as they walk along the balance beam. When they reach the end, they drop the bird into the "nest" or basket.

Creep Track: There are sight words along the track. As kids crawl, they have to put their hand over each word and say it out loud.

10 On 10 Off: Kids have to use one hand to clip 10 clothes pins on the bottom of their shirt. Then they alternate hands and use the other hand to take 10 off. This is a difficult station for some students. Some of them want to use both hands when working with the clothespins! They can only use 1 hand though.

Playtime Fun

Whiteboards

Play-Doh

Paper blocks

Foam blocks

Big whiteboard

Kitchen station

K'Nex

Reading Corner

I create a slideshow via Powerpoint so students can visually see what stations they can choose during playtime. 

Academic Highlights This Week

We are working hard on learning how to blend sounds together to make words (an important reading strategy!). This picture is of "Sound Boxes." This is a great visual for students so that they can isolate the beginning, middle, and ending sounds in a word. Sometimes, kindergarteners will say each letter sound correctly, but when blending the sounds all together into a word, the confuse the ending sound with the beginning. So instead of saying "cat" they say "tac" because "c" is the last letter they remember seeing. The more we practice, the stronger they will get at blending the sounds appropriately into words. 

During our independent reading time, we chart how long our reading stamina is. This means every student is reading the WHOLE time for an allotted amount of minutes without getting bored, distracted, or chatty. It's a great way for the class to see how well they're able to read for a period of time. Check out the progress we've done so far! We actually made it to 11 minutes later on in the week. Absolutely amazing.

Here we are "shopping" for books to read at school. Personal selection in their books is important to having a love for reading. 

During calendar time, we discuss how many days we've been in school. We use the hundreds chart (pictured above) to count aloud and to write addition sentences. 

One way I review sight words with the class is showing them in different fonts. I say the word and have students come up and find it using the Smartboard pens. 

This week was Mrs. Becker's last visit with us for Junior Achievement. We really appreciated all of the stories and valuable math lessons that she discussed with us over the past month. We made a special Thank You card for her and each of us signed our names inside. 

Read-a-Thon News: Congratulations to our own Allen for raising the MOST amount of money for our school fundraiser last month. He raised over $2,000 in donations. He was awarded an i-Pod touch at our all school meeting Friday afternoon. 

To end this week's post, I wanted to share this very cute (and hilarious!) note from a student. My class knows how big of a Packer fan I am. We talk about who won the games and how a lot of us like different teams (we have a mixture of Vikings, Bears, and Bears fans). Earlier this week, one of my students, Logan, came up and handed me this note first thing in the morning. 

I got such a good laugh out of this! When I asked him why the sudden change of heart, he said he liked Packer's colors more. (OR did it maybe have to do with his teacher's preference?) We may never know...

Enjoy your weekend!