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We love Mo, pigeons and hot dogs!!

Our Hot Dog Party
Last week was a fun week in kindergarten. It was the end of our drawing unit in Writing Workshop so we celebrated all week! On Monday we spread out all of our drawings and picked our two favorites. On Tuesday and Wednesday we went out to the Butterfly Garden to share our favorite drawings and on Thursday we had our "Hot Dog Party!" At our party I read the book Don't Let the Pigeon Stay up Late, we did a hot dog craft and we ate hot dogs!!!! Thanks to Maggie's dad, who teaches second grade, for the idea for our craft! Thanks to all the parents that sent in everything to make our parties a huge success!

SMART Board Resources

Here are some links to sites where I have downloaded already made Notebook
files:
3. The SMART Way to Teach (kindergarten notebooks)
(calendar activities for grades K-5)
5. SMART
6. Harvey's Homepage, needs to be used with Firefox
7. Mrs. Meacham's Classroom Snapshots (calendar activities)


These are interactive websites that I use on my SMART Board:
1. SpellingCity.com, a great site to practice sight words
2. National Geographic Kids, a site for researching animals
3. Leading to Reading, a site that reads stories to you
5. Topmarks, an educational search engine

Going Pigeon Crazy!

In Writing Workshop we did an author study on Mo Willems. We watched video of Mo talking about drawing and writing books, learned to draw the pigeon and played silly games on Mo's website. Here are some of our pigeon masterpieces:

My Birthday Pie


Thank you to my afternoon class for the wonderful pie! What a great surprise to find a warm pie on my desk at the end of the day on a Friday! I shared my pie with some of my friends that I went out to dinner with Friday night and everyone loved it. After a long weekend of 6 sports events, one that was cancelled after I drove for an hour in the rain, I was looking forward to sitting down to top off my weekend with a piece of pie and this is what I found:
And this is the adorable pie thief that apparently ate pie all day yesterday while no one was looking.

So, Brian and I thank you for the yummy pie!
Thanks for thinking of me!!



Ewwwww! Cool! Gross! Awesome!

Our visit from Mad Science on Friday was a blast. It was fun to see who loved touching the worms, who finally warmed up to the the idea of touching a worm and who under no circumstances was going to touch a worm. Michael, who is always talking about going fishing, was a natural worm wrangler...so was Isaac, Ana, Madeline and Carter. Maggie posed for her picture, the worm wiggled and she threw it in the air. Sophia would touch her worm and then squeal. Ty told us that the worms freaked him out and I am pretty sure that Katie felt the same way. Enjoy the pictures of the worms and ask your child what they learned about our wiggly visitors.


This Week in Kindergarten

This was our first week of doing work stations and the children have done an amazing job! Each week we will have 6 work stations that everyone will complete by the end of the week by doing 2 a day. This week's work stations were going to Starfall on the computer, listening to Splat the Cat, reading Colors Around Me with me, putting the letters of the alphabet in order, sorting letters and matching everyone's name to their picture.
Here is a picture of how I organize who goes where each day.


The morning names are blue on the left, the afternoon names are red on the right and I take photographs of the stations. The concept of my work stations came from reading the book Literacy Work Stations by Debbie Diller. In our work stations this week we practiced reading color words. You can practice this skill with your child by following the link below:


In math we have been sorting buttons and attribute blocks. We did this fun, quick sorting activity on the SMART Board this week:



Show and Share: My Desk

Michaele, who blogs at
sent out a request to see everyone's desk.
So here is my desk as it looked when I arrived at school today:
I have my weekly organizer from Lakeshore, my water bottle, a picture of my family, my Busy Body Book, post-it notes (I love post-it notes!), my computer ( I love my Mac) and some binders (I organize everything in a binder). But, at the end of the day I took a look at my desk and this is what I saw:
Piles, piles and more piles! My water bottle was replaced with a Diet Coke, there are buttons, letters, and papers that I need to do something with. I decided to take this picture, grab my purse and backpack and head for home.
Hopefully my desk will look like the top picture again soon.
Thanks Michaele for the fun post!

Drawing

We have been very busy during Writing Workshop drawing fabulous pictures! Some of our pictures are of things that have actually happened to us. We found out that Tomie DePaola wanted to be an illustrator when he was 4 years old and he likes to draw about things that have happened to him. We also looked at some of Dr. Seuss' illustrations and talked about how he uses his imagination to draw. This summer I read the book Crafting Writers by Elizabeth Hale and I have been using her ideas about using craft techniques in drawing that are located on page 84 of her book. It is so exciting to see the children trying some of these techniques as well as others we have discussed. In the above drawings Ava and Rosie "filled up the white space" with their drawings, Isaac added the detail of drawing weather in the background of his picture, Madeline used the brand name McDonald's in her drawing, Steven and Carter added words by adding names to their drawings and Madeline and Mattie are starting to add words by adding labels to their pictures. Ask your child about what they are drawing in Writing Workshop.
Looking forward to reading their comments.
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