Fire Safety Week & L Alphabet Hat

We had another busy and successful week in Kindergarten! This week we learned all about Fire Safety! We started out Monday with a Fire Safety Presentation from the Greenville Fire & Rescue.  They have these Fire Clowns that make the kids go bananas.  Before they leave, they take a black sheet and make it jump around to simulate smoke and have the kids crawl under it.

On Friday, we painted flames, which is one of my favorite art projects.  They turn out super cute.  The kids were SO quiet and focused! We told them to only paint with 1 finger at a time and they did 1 color at a time as Ms. Moore Modeled on the Smart Board.

Baby wipes are necessary when finger painting with more than one color.  We also only put one color out at a time for our impulsive friends.

Modeling using the document camera and Smart Board.  I love Ms. Moore! :) 

In the afternoon we reviewed the letters K and L.  We talked about Kicking King and Lucy Lamp Light and because I loved the Lion Alphabet hat so much, we did that one. :)  Stop by Simply Kinder and grab the Alphabet Hat so you can start having a good time too!

These kids are ridiculously adorable, am I right? :) 

Need some Fire Safety Activities? These are the ones we used :) 

Next week we are on to Bats & Spiders and the letters M and N! :) What do you have going on this week?

Currently October

I'm linking up with Oh' Boy 4th Grade for October's Currently.

Listening: I adore Beverly Hills 90210. I've definitely seen the series about a thousand times, but yet I still watch it.  Gotta love Soap Net!

Loving:  I love, love the weekend!  Especially since I quit my 2nd job!  It's so nice to relax and have time with my family in between Grad School assignments! :) 

Thinking:  It's 11:41pm...I should go to bed.  6am is going to come super early!

Wanting:  A 3 day weekend would be super fabulous :) We have a workshop tomorrow and I'm not looking forward to staying after school tomorrow!

Needing: Elijah is still awake.  He has a tape worm and has been eating everything in sight.  I can't go to bed until he does...dilemma!

Trick or Treat:  Here is a Cute Halloween Write the Room Freebie.  Enjoy!

Head over to Oh' Boy 4th Grade and link up!

Five Senses Book & This Week's Alphabet Hat

This week we talked about our Five Senses.  We did many activities, but we finished off today with a book about the Five Senses similar to the book we did last week with Fall Bugs.

These are the materials we needed.  I used construction paper cut long ways to make the cover and white copy paper cut in half for the inside.  I typed the sentences with lines for the students to cut. The hands are die-cuts we have available here and the other construction paper is just cut.  We glued the sentences in first and then went back and cut everything in a free-form manner to illustrate the pages.

Thought we did Brown Bear, Brown Bear What Do You See? a few weeks ago, we tie the sense of sight back into the book and finger paint the characters for our art project with this unit.  They are super cute!

This week we learned all about Impy Ink and Jumping Jim from Letterland.  We reviewed the letters and sounds today and made our Insect Hats from Simply Kinder.  So cute!

It's been a busy, but productive week in Kindergarten!  Hope everyone has a wonderful weekend!

Dry Erase Circles & Guided Reading

I am SUPER excited.

Only a teacher could get excited about a dry erase circle. I mean really!  Anyway, I ordered these Avery Dry Erase Circles from Walmart.Com on Saturday and they arrived on my doorstep yesterday.  I applied them to my table today and used them not even an hour later. EXCITED.  They come in packs of 3 for just under $7 and shipping is 97 cents per item.  Very reasonable.  I bought 3 packs.  My table is a little unusual and seats 8.  I keep 6 chairs there for Guided Reading, but my math groups are 7-8 so I wanted to have them there for math also.  And because I was so EXCITED I gave myself one too :) 

As usual, we made the sight word we focused on in our book, can, and then the wrote the word using their model and then without.  It was really nice not to have to pass out dry erase boards!

Here's a new activity for you.  We read a book today called "What Can You Do?" All of the sentences in the book were "I can ____."  Yesterday we interactively wrote "I can play." on a sentence strip like I posted about last week.  Today I introduced their Guided Reading Journals. (This is 8 1/2 x 14 paper folded in half and stapled...really simple and it keeps me from having to get paper all the time.) 

Today I wanted them to independently write the sentence we wrote yesterday.  I draw blanks for them as we say the sentence together.  We do this for every child's journal.  This helps them to remember the sentence and hear the words several times so it will be easier when they write.  This was our first time, so it's very step by step for now.  They wrote I and can pretty much independently and we sounded out play together.  Having the blanks helps them to remember space, write left to right and how big or small their writing should be.

Finally I had them illustrate and tell me what they were doing.  One friend told me he and his brother were playing tag - the picture was really cute.  Obviously this cutie is playing outside. 

Hopefully you are learning some activities from my Guided Reading posts - let me know if you have any questions! :)