"Fall" and "Letter Aa"

Happy Fall!!  This week the thematic unit was "fall", we celebrated the first day of fall and learned about all the changes this fun season brings!

Making summer/fall trees.  We learned about the changing leaves, to illustrate this we painted one side a "summer" tree with green hand-print leaves and the other side a "fall" tree with red and orange hand-print leaves.

Everyone enjoyed learning about the changing season, we learned many great things about the seasons.  We also learned great vocabulary words when talking about the Earth's changes, words like "sun", "orbit", "equator", and that it takes the Earth one year to orbit the sun and make the cycle of the four seasons!  What a smart class!

To illustrate the changing seasons, we divided a tree into four parts and illustrated the four seasons in each section.  

Fall leaves to decorate our classroom, everyone is anxious to see the leaves in our town start to change!

Listening Center: "The Lonely Scarecrow"

More great books to teach us about fall!

The letter of the week was "A", A is for apple!

"A" is for ant!  We made and ate "ants on a log" (pretzel sticks (log), peanut butter (mud), raisins (ants))

Great job completing the sentence, "I ate ants on a log!"

Yummy ants!

More ants...Ants on A

"A" is for alligator - Everyone made alligator puppets, alligator puppets that ate an apple!  The students drew an apple in the alligator's mouth then completed the sentence "My alligator ate an apple."

 A is for "alligator"; Alligator tooth "Show and Tell"

I had a piece of an alligator scoot I shared with the students, they really enjoyed Tyler's alligator tooth and the alligator scoot.  And most of all everyone knows that A says /a/, like "a"lligator!

This week everyone received their first phonics reader!  This is their first book, "Hot, Hot, Hot", and what great readers we have.  Everyone worked hard to sound out the words and read, and they were all SO proud to read their first book without much help from me!  Awesome!

They also received a "phonics library" which is a box where they can store all of the phonics readers at home.  They will receive a phonics reader every other week, totaling 16 readers by the end of the school year.  Keep these in the phonics libraries at home and let your child practice reading these books to you at home.  This is an excellent way to build confidence in your child and help them build reading and blending skills.

In math we learned how to read, write and count numbers 0-5, students stamped out these numbers from play-doh and created sets of each number.  

A wonderful week in Kindergarten!  We look forward to the weather changing and feeling like fall.  And everyone is excited to continue to learn how to read more each week!

Student of the Week: Nely

 Coming Up...
Phonics: Nn
Math: Topic 4 - Numbers 0-5
Thematic Unit: Apples

Blog password: apples

All for Fall!!

Yay! Fall is finally here! We were all excited to finally celebrate the first official day of fall on Tuesday, we have been counting down the days. During class we have been learning about all the special aspects of fall, the beautiful leaves changing and falling, the fun holidays, the change of weather and the yummy fruits and vegetables that are harvested in the fall. Everyone is looking forward to some fall weather in the weeks to come, and we are also on the lookout for the leaves beginning to fall and change around us.

A fun science experience we did this week involved acorns. We learned that acorns are the "fruit" of the oak tree, and as the animals prepare for the winter they love eating lots of acorns! Then we did a little science experiment with them. We tested them to see if they would float in water. We tested the ones with the caps and the ones without caps. We soon discovered that the ones with the caps floated! This was fun and the students took home some acorns of their own to try this again with their families.

Another fun happening in the fall is the change of the leaves. We did some fun crafts to decorate our classroom this week. One was to create a summer and fall tree. On one side we created a summer tree with green leaves and on the reverse we created a fall tree with red and orange leaves. These look great hanging in our rooms. We also created red, orange, and yellow sparkle leaves for fall as well. There are leaves falling all around in our class!

In addition to celebrating fall, we learned the letter Aa. We enjoyed many fun activities to helped us learned that Aa said /a/ like /apple./ We ate ants on a log, we never knew ants tasted so good! (Actually, it's a celery stick (log), peanut butter (mud), and raisins (ants)!)

During the week we had an attack from some alligators that were eating apples! Aa's everywhere! The students created alligator puppets, that were eating lots of apples!

Also this week we read our first phonics reader, "Hot, Hot, Hot." This is the first book that the students were able to read independently. With practice they will continue to get more fluent and become great readers. They also received their phonics libraries, here they will keep all their readers they will receive throughout the school year. Take time each week to allow your child to read the phonics readers to you, this will help them become better at blending, more fluent and build their reading confidence. They are on their way to become excellent readers!

Another highlight of the week, was some nursing students from William Carey came to tell us how important it is to wash our hands and to keep all the nasty germs away. Ms. Amanda did a great job and we all learned the best way to wash our hands.

Friday was Ty'Kwan's birthday. We all enjoyed some yummy cupcakes!

Happy Birthday, Ty'Kwan!

Student of the Week: Avery!

Coming up in Kindergarten:
Phonics: Nn

Math: Continue Topic 4: Numbers 0-5

Thematic Unit: Cowboys

Friday, October 2 - Cowboy Day - Dress up like a cowboy or a cowgirl!

Blog Password: Howdy!