5 Little Pumpkins Fingerplay

The class was VERY excited when I told them that they were now famous because we recorded a song! This is one of our favorite fingerplays to sing…take a listen!

Tools of the Mind

This year our town adopted a new kindergarten curriculum, "Tools of the Mind." It pretty much revolves around teaching self-regulation to the children which will in turn make them better students and ready to learn. The first four weeks of school our theme is "fairy tales" we do a different fairy tale each week. On Monday, we make props for that fairy tale and Tuesday-Friday we dramatize the story. Each day one group goes to a different center and era to dramatize the story using different props. After we finish the fairy tales unit we move onto the "Magic Tree House" book series. We do books 1-12. Each book we take on the theme of its time and place for three weeks. The first week we build background knowledge about that time and place, reading non-fiction books to learn facts about that time and place and we make props each day to support the book. The second and third week we read one chapter a day of the Magic Tree House book and dramatize the story in our centers each day.

Here we are making or props for the second Magic Tree House book "Knight at Dawn."











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The Numerals Game

We added new "Frankenstein" counters to our "Numerals Game" . One person, who has the hand mediator card picks a number and counts out that many counters, the person with the check mediator card takes the counters and checks them using the numerals board and puts one counter on each dot. Then they tell their partner if they counted the right amount of counters and we switch mediator cards!



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Writing on the iPads!

Today we practiced writing on the iPads! The kids l o v e d getting to see what we were writing up on the projector screen, they also loved making shadows!






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Buddy Reading

Today we started using our mediator cards in Buddy Reading. When it's your turn to have the lips mediator card, you're the one that gets to read the story and your buddy who has the ear mediator card is listening, then we switch!


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Ocean diarama's

We painted our shoeboxes blue then we painted the bottoms and added sand! We made some seaweed out of brown and green construction paper and some gray clay and this super cute hermit grab out of shell pasta, a puff ball, googly eyes and pipe cleaners for arms...how cute is he?








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Happy Teacher Appreciation Day!!

Today the students walked into the class each holding their own flower to give to me. We put them all together in a beautiful bouquet after! It was so sweet and thoughtful! The parents also put together a really cute picture book from Shutterfly with all different pictures from throughout the year. It was by far the nicest teacher appreciation gift I have received! The PTO also put up quite the spread for lunch for all the teachers, it was delicious! They even volunteered their time to cover our class for an hour so we could sit down and enjoy our lunch without having to shove food into our mouths and go, like how lunchtime usually is. :o) It was a great day!!


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CVC Write the Room

Today we did a CVC write the room center during workboard. The kids love doing different write the room centers and it gets them up and moving so I like it too :o) I will post my recording sheet for you to use, and I'm trying to find the link to the CVC cards to stick up around the room...so stay tuned!

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Plant a Sight Word!

To go along with our "plants" unit, we were building word wall words with Lima beans that had letters written on them! First, we had to build the word then we had to write the letters in the seeds on the paper.

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Planting Lima Beans!

We started learning about plants today and we each got to plant our own Lima Bean plant! Everyone really l o v e d getting a turn to plant, very exciting! We will keep an eye on our plants and record what we see in our Lima Bean plant journals.

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#PrayforBoston

My thoughts and prayers go out to all of the innocent families injured and killed by the horrific events that happen on Marathon Monday in Boston. I was actually in Boston at around mile 25 about 1 mile away from where the bombs went off. All of a sudden all of the people running in the marathon just stopped right outside where we were watching from. They had no idea what was going on, one of the businesses inside the building where I was watching from, Boston Center for Oral Health, Dr. Morreale and his wife were so kind to the marathon runners, opening their business to them, letting them use their landline phone to call their loved ones since the cell towers were all down and no cell phones were working. They as well as the Back Bay Fitness owner were bringing water out to the runners who were stopped outside. Inviting them in to use the restrooms and even giving them the coat off of their own back to keep them warm. It was so heart warming to see kind people willing to help others in such a tragic time. Since all of the subways were shut down my boyfriend, myself and a couple friends decided it was best to try and get out of the area so we started to walk back to my apartment about 5 miles away. Safe and sound back home watching the news seeing these horrific pictures of these poor innocent people is just so sad and it doesn't even seem real yet. I hope they find out who did this and bring them to justice. #PrayforBoston


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Field trip to the police & fire station!

We completed our "Community Helpers" unit this week by taking a field trip to the police and fire station! We were v e r y excited to get the chance to check everything out! We had a lot of questions to ask the police officer and fire fighters, we were just so curious! We saw a lot of different police vehicles, we got to go inside an ambulance and a fire engine!

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Pretending to be Firefighters

I brought in my grandfather's old firefighter helmet and an old nozzle to a firehose that he used to use for the kids to look at and try on. They were so excited! They were pretending to spray the kids on the rug with the hose! :o)

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Mass Audubon and Pollination

We had the Mass Audubon Society come in today to teach us about pollination and which insects are pollinators. They gave each of us a picture card of one of three different pollinators to put us into groups to go through each of their 3 stations.





At the first station we looked at and found seeds in different pieces of fruit and vegetables then we learned about the different parts of a flower and what each part does.








At the second station, we got to pretend that we were either a daffodil, a tulip or a bee. The kids pretending to be flowers had a cup of pom poms that we were pretending was pollen. The bees were supposed to buzz around and get some pollen from each flower (cup) and bring a couple back to their hive and then bring the others to the different flowers. This is how the flowers can grow new seeds.





At the last station, we got to create a class mural of the different types of pollinators that we learned about and our favorite flower. We had so much fun and we learned a lot too!

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15,000 Steps on Fitbit!!

My new obsession: fitbit. It's this cute little pedometer that will keep track of your daily steps, calories and how many miles you've walked/ran. You get little badges for different milestones like your first 5,000, 10,000, 15,000, etc., daily steps. You can log in your current weight and the food that you eat, any exercises that you do daily online and it will help you reach your goal weight. You can link up with other friends who also have a fitbit and compete against eachother. I bought my mother one for Christmas because she is a walkaholic and she LOVES it! I think she was one of their top walkers, she walks SO much. They sell a more expensive one that you can wear while you sleep and it will track how many times you woke up and how well you slept/when you reached REM sleep and how long.

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Word Family Eggs!

Today, at a workboard center we made words in the -en word family using these "spring" eggs! The kids loved getting to use the fun colorful eggs!

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20% off Easter Sale!!

I'm throwing a 20% off EVERYTHING in my TpT store for Easter, hop on over and grab your favs!!
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Love from my old Kinders!

One of my former students brought this down to me today. I love when I get things like this, it makes me fall in love with teaching all over again! :o)

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Sorting 3D Shapes by Attributes

Today we experimented with different kinds of 3D shapes. I propped up a whiteboard on a block to make a ramp and we tested the shapes to see which ones would roll, slide or both. Then we had to sort them using the hula hoops. The kids had a blast doing this and it was fun to see them make predictions and then test it out. They thought it was so funny that I put my can of soup that I was going to have for lunch in the box of shapes to use! :)
Thanks to The Mailbox for the great idea!

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Building 3D Shapes

For our "Fun Friday Art Project" last week we built cubes out of tooth picks and mini marshmallows! Whenever I use food for an activity in class I always tell the kids that "I dropped them all over the floor!" So we can't eat any of them, they think I'm soo clumsy because I've dropped so many things this year ;)

Our following “Fun Friday Art Project” was to make cones! We had fun decorating them and pretending the were party hats & ice cream cones! :oP

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Exploring with Magnets!

We continued learning about magnets this week, today we got to explore and experiment with all different kinds of magnets. The "floating magnet" was a big hit! It was so cute to see all of their faces when the magnets were floating on top of one another! Another favorite was putting the magnet wand under the table and moving the magnets that were on top of the table, they thought they were magicians!

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3D Shapes Posters

Just hung up these cute 3D shapes posters I found from Tessa Maguire at Tales from Outside the Classroom
There is one poster for each 3D shape that we are learning about and a cute saying to go along with it!


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Community Map

       We started our "Community Helpers" unit this month and we start it off by reading the story "Me on the Map" by Joan Sweeney. This is a really good book and great for kinders. It starts off in the girls room, then her house, then her street, then her town, then her state, then her country, and finally her planet. It is really cute. Then we start our whole class mural that we make and it will eventually be our version of a map of our town. We started today with the roads. Next week we will make the houses, then the stores and other essential buildings. Finally, we will add the finishing touches with things like trees, cars, people, lakes, etc. The kids love working on this project together and it lasts a few weeks so its a great center!

This week we added our houses to the map. I had to make a few suggestions to my Kinders on where to put their houses, some of them where no where near a road...as you can see we LOVE the curvy roads :o)

Next, we added stores! We brainstormed a bunch of different stores in town beforehand...we had a hard time with knowing what stores were actually IN our town and which were NOT. We came up with;  Trader Joe's, UPS, The Boys & Girls Club, Stop & Shop, BP gas station, Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts, etc.

We had to include the essentials like Panera, Walgreens & CVS!