Apple Week & Friday Alphabet Hats

This week was our apple week.  We learned all about Apples and Johnny Appleseed.  We tasted apple stuff and enjoyed it!  We completed our first Science Notebook about apples.  We had a busy, but great week.  Excuse the picture overload!

 Graphing our favorite type of apple.  Red Wins!

 Apple Taste Test.  This activity came from The Mailbox.  Students taste Apple Juice, Apple Jacks, Apple Jelly, and Apple Sauce.  Most of them liked everything.  A few didn't care for the jelly, but it was the best group I've ever had for liking most of them.   

                       
                       

                        

                       

                        

                        

                        

Our Friday Hats - This week we did the frogs for the letter Ff.  (These hats are from Simply Kinder.) Last week I learned that the students needed a model on their sentence strip of how to write the letter, so this week I made sure to give them a model and it make life so much easier! Their handwriting was so much better!

                       

                        

                        

                        

                        

                        

                         

Our Friday Art Project was painting apples.   It's super simple.  All you do is cut off the sides of a paper plate to make the leaves.  We finger painted, which wasn't too bad at all.  Ms. Moore taught them to use 2 fingers to do the leaves and color on the core and 1 finger to do the dots for the seeds.  After each color, they had a baby wipe to wipe their hands, which prevented them all from having to run to the sink.  Once the leaves and core dry, we staple the leaves on.  They turned out really cute!

Apple Centers - The students did very well with these centers!  It was our first time using Play-Doh and I taught them all about making "snakes" to make numbers and letters.  This was also our first time playing in the blocks center, which is not open every week.  We still need to work on not taking out an excessive amount of blocks, but they did pretty ok :) 

Not pictured - Our Science Notebook.  Our question - Does a yellow apple have more seeds than a red apple?  I don't particularly care for Science Notebooks, but they are required, so I put on my happy face and got my kids excited.  We pretended to put on our lab coats and safety goggles and we completed our experiment.  We found that our red apple had more seeds than the yellow, but I told them that may not always be the case.

The apple centers can be found here:

If you are still with me after all that, I am participating in the September Facebook Frenzy where you can hop from Fanpage to Fanpage and grab lots of super cute freebies.  Mine is an apple counting game from 1-10.  Stop by and grab it along with the others!

Next week we'll be learning all about Fall and doing another fun hat!  Check back to see which one we chose :) 

Our First Alphabet Hat

Today was picture day.  It was so nice to see my friends in their real clothes. (Just in case you didn't know we wear uniforms to school.)  They were absolutely adorable.  They were even funnier to watch as they had their picture taken!  Some of them were smiling like it hurt...cracks me up every.single.time!

On to the fun stuff.  We practiced the letters C and D this week.  We sang songs, we sorted pictures, we wrote the letters.  Today we reviewed the 2 letters and their fun songs and made our first alphabet hat.  One of my favorite bloggers, Greg, from Kindergarten Smorgasboard is a hat-o-holic.  He makes fun hats all.the.time!  So I decided to try them this year.  I used to do a letter a day, but this year I am doing 2 letters a week and Friday seems like the perfect time to make a hat, no?

I used the alphabet hats from Simply Kinder.  I'm so fortunate to have gotten them during a flash freebie in May. She has templates and pictures for every hat.  Each hat is about 2 pages though, so I reduced the size to 78% and copied them on 8 1/2 x 14 paper, which really turned out to be perfect.

We colored our pieces first.

Then we cut them out which was ridiculously a little messy.  Think tiny shards of paper all.over.the.place.

 

After that we wrote the letters on the sentence strip.  This was chaos.  Everything I taught them about writing went right out the window and it was a mad dash to see who could write them the fastest.  This is where we learned a very hard lesson about rushing and having to redo it.  We erased essentially everyone's sentence strip.  A tip I learned for myself is next week I need to give them at least one model on the sentence strip in case they forgot how it should look on the lines.  See the pink highlighted one up there?  Yep...2 seconds too late :)

The final product...adorbs, right?

I gave him basically no notice before I snapped his cutie little picture ;)

As we were ready to go home I snapped another one.  I love these kids, they are so precious :) 

And there you have it...our first hat experience.  LOVE!  Tune in next week to see what hat we make :) 

Special Visitor

We had a special visitor in our classroom today!

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This little guy decided to hop in our room today when the students were lining up for recess.  Ms. Moore and I trying to get it out of the room may have been the most comical thing ever.  We were trying to put something over him but when we did, he would jump.  The frog was crazy! 

Tomorrow is picture day.  I can't wait to see my sweet Kinders in their regular cute clothes!

Curriculum Night & What we've been doing!

It's been a very busy couple of weeks in Kindergarten!  We've been learning rules, routines, friends, a schedule and now we are in full swing with our curriculum.  We are using Letterland to learn our letters and we have learned all about Annie Apple, Bouncy Ben and Clever Cat.  Tomorrow we are onto the letter D! We have worked on the numbers 1, 2, and 3 and learned all about Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and Brown Bear. Here are a few pictures of what we've been up to.

Our Chicka Chicka Boom Boom Frames. 

Making our names with beans.  This was a great lesson about learning to use glue and forming the letters that make our names. 

We made a school bus to help us remember bus safety!

Our Chicka Chicka Boom Boom tree in the hall.  We made the letters in the Art Center and we made our names and counted the letters during writing one day.  Excuse my wonky tree - I'm not an artist by any means :) 

We took some pictures for our frames today with Curious George from Kohl's...I love those little $5 stuffed animals :)  Here are my cuties minus the 3 that were absent today...I will add them in soon :)

We've been doing lots more, but that's what I've captured so far!  More to come later, I promise :) 

Tonight was Curriculum Night.  We had 6 families show up, so many missed my fabulous presentation on all things Kindergarten.  Here's a copy of what we talked about.  It looks a little strange in this form, but it gives you the information you need.

Families, if you are wondering about things you can work on right now, there are a lot!  Here are some suggestions:

Things to Work on Right Now

·        Coloring in the lines

·        Cutting on the lines

·        Letter Recognition (All Upper & Lowercase Letters)

·        Letter Sounds (What sound does A make?)

·        First Sounds (What’s the first sound you hear in dog?)

·        Print Awareness (Front Cover, Where to start reading, Left to right, Going to the second line of a text, pointing one-to-one, Meaning of a period, Where the first and last part of a sentence are, The difference between letters and words, Where a capital letter is, The first and last letter of a word)

·        Number Recognition (0-20)

·        Counting Objects One-To-One

·        Orally Counting to at least 25 but 100 by the EOY

·        Opening Lunchbox and Tray Items (Milk, Snacks, Lunchables, Juice Pouches, Gogurts etc.)

·        Tying Shoes

·        Unbuttoning/Buttoning Shorts/Pants/Skirts

As always, if you have any questions or need anything, please email me or stop by and see me! :)

Many of these activities came from my Chicka Chicka Boom Boom Unit!  Stop by and grab it if you are interested!