Learning SO much!

Another full week has gone by! Last week, much of our focus was on our Hopes and Dreams: what each student wants to personally accomplish by the end of the school year. It can be academic or social related. I printed off students photos and put their Hopes and Dreams on their lockers--a good place for them to be reminded of their hope every day when they come to school. The kids LOVED it! I put each of their photos up during rest time, and seeing their reactions when they saw their photo was PRICELESS. They felt very special and recognized, which is so so important to feel in the classroom! My students are really starting to feel like the classroom is their own--which it very well is. 

Along with our Hopes and Dreams, the class and I have been discussing school EXPECTATIONS. In order to achieve our hopes and dreams, we need expectations to help us learn, be successful academically and socially, and have fun in school. I introduced expectations by reading David Goes to School and David Gets in Trouble by David Shannon. Kindergartners love David because he is relatable and a big troublemaker! His antics are very entertaining. 

Here we are cutting and gluing our own Davids! There were a LOT of steps involved so good listening and following directions was necessary. 

A completed David. We signed our names saying we are a PEACEMAKER!

After reading the books, we had a thorough discussion on what our expectations should be in school. I had the students come up with a list of anything they could think of that we should abide by. 

Throughout the week, we came back to this list and turned the negatives into positives. For example, no pushing changed into keep hands to ourselves. No fighting over toys turned into sharing. Don't drop food on the floor changed into clean up after yourself. The huge reason why I wanted to change it into things we all SHOULD do is that it gives students a pathway on what good choices are. Yes, we can say don't do this or you can't do that, but what's missing is what students should do instead. Some kids honestly don't know so by telling them specifically what to do helps everyone be successful and do the right thing. 

We started sorting our list of expectations into three categories: responsibility, respect, and safe. Some expectations involve everyone's safety, others entail showing respect, and the rest are about being responsible.  We will learn more about these three categories next week.


Academic Learnings
We are continuing to add onto our ABC journals. Each day is dedicated to a letter of the alphabet. If you have time, check out the song Aphardy or Vowel Bat on Youtube. Both are children's songs all about letter sounds. 

To go along with learning the alphabet, we have a class ABC Letter Bag. Each night, a different student gets assigned a letter and takes the letter bag home. They have to find 5 things that begin with their letter then bring it back to school the next day to share with the class. Not only is it solidifying their letters and letter sounds, but it's also excellent talking time for students to come up and communicate with their peers. The kids love it! 

Here's Miriah sharing her letter items that she brought from home.

Her assigned letter was J: jelly beans, jewelry box, juice box, and jet

An empty ABC Letter Bag...wonder who will get it next!

In reading, the class is learning that readers can read a book three different ways. 1) I can read by using the pictures. 2) I can read by using the words. 3) I can re-read the book and retell the story in my own words.

On Friday, we got to learn how to retell a popular Eric Carle book, Brown Bear Brown Bear, What Do You See? 

We colored each animal their appropriate color. 

Then we got to cut the animals out, retell the story in our words, and put them in a paper bag. 

Here we are retelling the story as a whole class!

 In Math, we discussed where we see numbers in every day life.

The class was also introduced to math trays! We will be using these often with our math curriculum--along with the trays, we have math boxes where we get to use lots of different manipulatives.

Here we are working with numbers 1-5. We learned how to show a number lots of different ways using blue and red squares. Along with representing a number in a variety of ways, it is just as important to talk about the process of getting there and the product. We call this MATH TALK. This will help with students math vocabulary.

 Also in math, we completed our names poster from the week before. The kids did a great job and they just love seeing their names up there!

In science, we talked about what science is. Basically, in a nutshell and in kinder friendly words, science is learning how the world works. We started working in our science journals. As an introductory activity, we drew ourselves as scientists and what kinds of specific science things we want to learn more about. 

Alexis wants to learn about bugs and plants.

Savannah wants to learn about horses and animals.

Erik wants to learn about dinosaurs and fossils.

Evan wants to learn about volcanoes.

Gavin S. wants to do science experiments.

Gavin L. wants to learn more about bugs.

With science lessons at Jeffers Pond, we have access to a wide variety of outdoor learning areas. On Wednesday when it was Green Ribbon Day, the class and I went outside and picked a tree to observe and draw in our science journals. We learned that scientists observe carefully and closely and try to draw exactly what they see. It won't look exactly like what we see in real life, but we do want to use similar colors in our drawings. Some of the students wondered if we could use purple or pink in their drawings; this is okay for when we are doing free exploration drawing! With science-y things, we want to keep it close to real life as possible otherwise it wouldn't be as accurate.

The tree we picked is the one with the thin trunk on the bottom.

 

Other Odds & Ends
I started doing Celebrity of the Week. Each week, I pick a boy or girl to be the Celebrity. Each day, the celebrity gets to do or share something special. For example, one day they get to bring in a poster that is ALL about them and discuss it with the class. On a different day, they share photos of their family and friends. Each day covers something special! We've had two celebrities so far--they were amazing and their famous Celebrity Star is hanging up in the room (similar to the Walk of Fame in Hollywood). 

Alexis

Evan

Stay tuned for next week! We are getting more into the academic stuff now. :)