Apple Field Trip

Here is a slideshow of the Apple Orchard Field Trip. My camera battery died when we got there, so the photos are taken from the flip video camera that I had...I apologize that some of them are pretty blurry! At least you can get an idea of the things we did. The kids had a blast and our guide, Opa Steve, was fabulous!

Make a Smilebox slideshow

A Hunting We Will Go

In the beginning of the year, we make many books that the children can become so familiar with they can read them from memory and start to match words with print. The first one we made was the Very Hungry Caterpillar and the latest is A Hunting We Will Go. We will also be reading familiar stories again and again until the children know them really well (then we have several copies the children can keep in their browsing boxes).

Math Workplaces

In math we are learning how to do stations that we call Math Workplaces. Each workplace has a bin with manipulatives (soon to be some math games!)and the children get to choose which one they want to go to. In the bins right now are teddy bears, polydrons, pattern blocks, bugs, and geoboards. These workplaces continue all year which is a nice consistent routine for the kids. The activities change one at a time to introduce new topics and ideas.

Make a Smilebox slideshow

Beginning of School

It has been so wonderful to return to the classroom! The kids are full of energy, excited about school, and enthusiastic to learn. We start each day with a Morning Meeting where we greet each other, read the message, and do an activity. Each morning we also have a "Sound Circle" time where we learn about words. This week we have talked about how people learn to talk (starting with babies crying, babbling, etc), then we looked at short words vs. long words, and today we counted the words in sentences and represented each word with a person!
Another thing we did this week was decide on rules for our classroom which we could include all of them in three general rules (be safe, be kind, and take care of materials. We also drew pictures of our hopes and dreams for what we would like to learn in kindergarten.

We are having a blast, and I will continue to update you on our blog about things we're doing. Next time I will try to include pictures or a video!