Ms. J's Kindergarten Class: Can I take your order?

Last week was all about Community Helpers. We discussed different occupations, including paramedics, doctors, dentists, and chefs and how each job helps people in different ways. So I have a side story to share with you...on Friday we learned about chefs and cooks. I had the class pretend that they were chefs and in charge of their own restaurant. Restaurants need menus so they each created a menu for costumers to order from. The kids came up with so many yummy ideas and illustrated them on their menus. During the writing process, I reminded the class to put drinks down too because people get thirsty when they go out to eat. I saw many interesting items after I suggested beverages...take a look

I about died...TOO FUNNY! When I asked these students what these "grown-up" drinks were, their responses were even funnier. One said, "Mom and dad ALWAYS get this when we go out to eat." No worries parents, I didn't hear any inappropriate stories... I know that we adults enjoy our beverages now and again. :)

I am really happy to see that all of my students are becoming more confident in themselves as writers. I know earlier in the year, some really struggled to put their thoughts down on paper because they wanted to spell the words right. I give as much positive encouragement to my kindergarteners as I can to just do their best! Ultimately, that's what I care about. I'd rather have the words be spelled wrong than having students sit there and not even try. If we are always correcting children on their writing, they are going to crush their spirit and they're not going to want to even write. But if we encourage freebased writing, they are going to want to do it more. Go out and buy them a notebook and markers, crayons, etc and have them go to town! It is SO good for them to express themselves through writing and drawing.

Here we are sharing our menu items with one another.

They pretended to order items off each other's menus.

Community Helper Stations

They used mirrors to read sight words

Trash or Treasure words (reading real vs silly words)

Unscrambling sight words

Short, tall, or letters with a tail

Writing number words

Solving subtraction sentences

Tallying

Writing addition sentences

Telling time to the hour

Taking surveys "What do you want to be when you grow up?"

This craftivity was more centered around Valentine's Day, but hey we can talk about love year-round! I read Love, Splat and had the class make their own Splat the Cat. Such a goofy story book character; if you haven't read a Splat book yet, you should! The kids love him and his books. The class had to think of times when they feel loved and wrote their responses down.