Day in the Dark

What a fun day!

Our second grade buddies came for a visit and played a math game with us.

ECO

We had a sunny, cold visit to Harrison Field and Forest on Thursday! We are focusing this month on how animals get ready for winter by migrating, hibernating, or not hibernating. The children pretended to be squirrels and collected pine cones and berries to "store for the winter". A squirrel needs to collect a lot of food to survive the cold. If a kindergarten child was a squirrel, he or she would need to eat 3.5 pounds of food each day! We brought our collection back to school and weighed it on a scale to find out that we gathered enough to feed one and a half children. No wonder squirrels are so busy in the fall!

Thanksgiving Lunch and Muffin Making

Here are a few pictures from Thanksgiving lunch and our muffin and butter making day. Thank you to Sara and Rena for helping to make the corn muffins! We also had fun making butter from cream as we recited two poems to make the task fun.

Kinder Math

Our daily math lesson includes many skills and concepts with a primary focus on number sense. The children are working on counting by 1's and 10's to a given number, writing one digit numbers, counting objects to 20, and decomposing numbers equal to 10 (5+5=10, 4+6=10, 8+2=10) or less than 10 (2+5=7, 4+1=5). We are also learning to identify two and three dimensional shapes and use language to describe their similarities and differences. We have learned a "3-D Shapes" song to help us remember the names of a sphere, cylinder, cube, cone, and pyramid. Ask your child to tell you more!

Veteran's Day and ECO

We were lucky to enjoy two beautiful days for these special events. We had a great time cheering on the Union students who marched in the parade and honoring our Veterans. On our ECO day, we exploreded the woods looking for evidence of animal habitats and played a fun tag game. Thank you volunteers for your support!

Kindergarten Writers

After "publishing" our favorite writing piece for October, the children shared their stories with each other and their second grade buddies. We decided to bring our books to the school library for other children to read and for Sam, the library mouse. For the past week, we have been working on planning our stories by telling them out loud, then touching each blank page in a booklet and saying what we plan to write and draw on the page. The children worked today on adding details to their pictures and words. We say, "If you're done, you've just begun!" to help us remember to keep adding to our stories. My next few teaching points will include lessons on stretching out words by saying them slowing and writing the sounds we hear, and bringing our stories to life by adding dialog and speech bubbles. We will continue to write true stories about events in our life for the next few weeks. Ask your child what story he or she is writing about, and help them brainstorm ideas for future stories by talking about things they have done recently.

Our Week in Review

We had a great week in Kindergarten. Here are a few highlights! On Tuesday, we met our second grade buddies. The children from Mrs. Quinn's class came to our room to be paired up with a kindergartner from our class. The second graders were very excited as this is the first time the were the "big buddies" to a younger student. They brought a book to read to their partners and the kindergartners shared their recent writing piece. Throughout the year, we will meet with our buddies to do various activities. On Thursday we joined Heather Bate's class for our second ECO day. We reviewed our "Three Cares" (I take care of myself, I take care of my friends, I take care of the earth), played a fun tag game on the field, and broke into small groups to discuss the parts of a tree and sketch one. Friday we celebrated "Pumpkin Day" with various activities that incorporated math, literacy, and art. A highlight for many was pumpkin bowling. It was a great way to end the week!