I’m still here! :)

Merry Christmas everyone!  I promise to update in the next few days during vacation.  My hubby had knee surgery, so I’ll catch up between taking care of him…which should be sooner rather than later because he’s healing quickly and learning how to function with crutches and one good foot for a little while!  We go to the doctor for a follow up next week and then his bandages can come off and he can start putting weight on his leg again.

I also got this great idea for a grant while looking at one of my son’s presents from Steve Spangler Science…I’m going to ask for the materials that are in the kit:

-Insta Snow

-Ultraviolet beads

-plastic test tubes

-grow creatures

- books about composting, recycling, monarchs, snowflakes, leaves/trees

-jelly crystals

-funnels

-plastic spiders/insects

-color mixing tools

-picture cards of life cycles

-outdoor thermometer for our classroom window

-window birdfeeders

I’ll let you know once it’s posted so that you can check it out!

Kristen

Click here…

I’ve just added a button that will allow you to subscribe to my blog.  Each time I update you will receive an e-mail letting you know, so you do not have to check in everyday and use up what precious little teaching time you have!!!

You will find the button directly under the copyright information on the left hand side.  You will just need to enter your e-mail address and a few other things and you’re signed up to receive e-mail updates from Kristen’s Kindergarten!

So what are you waiting for…click!!

Kristen

Long Overdue Update

Yes, it’s me…waiting until the last possible moment on Sunday to update…keeping you all on the edge of your seats no doubt!

 

The last two weeks have been hectic to say the least and I’ve been snapping photos here and there, so this post will just be a mish-mash of them all.  As always, let me know if you have any questions!

There are a group of Kindergarten teachers from my district getting together tomorrow to start working on planning our first IB unit and then the week after that, several of us are getting together to plan our Holidays Around the World theme, so I’ll  post that for sale, once I get it all together!

 

On to the photos:

One of our standards this quarter is measurement (this will be a stretch!) and this game is from the Developing Number Concepts book (the new one).  This is the build a tower race.  I taught this game to the children so that they would become more familiar with stacks of cubes up to 9 (there is another sheet for 4-9).  The children roll a number die or a dot die and build a tower with that many cubes.  I told my children to play until they filled up one number’s row entirely, then take all the cubes off and start over.

We had our Ice Cream Election the first Tuesday in November and the next few pictures will show you what we did.  I will say that we were able to take a quick tour of the polling place at our school.  I was just going to walk my children through so they could see it, but the Polling Inspector had prepared a 5 minute talk that was just on their level–it was awesome!

 

We read the Little Red Hen the first week of November and I’ll have to take pictures of those charts and things we did that week when I get back to school.  Last week, we read The Little Old Lady Who Swallowed a Pie (along with many versions of the story that I have collected!)  You can see this post for more details.

 

I also changed out my Math Work Stations last week so they reflect Measurement.  When I get back to school, I’ll take some pictures of what is in the tubs this month.

Kristen

I’m still here!

Hi Everyone!

Sorry for the delay in posting…I’ve been taking loads of pictures, but I haven’t found anytime to post them.  I’m busier than usual this November and am having trouble finding time to do much of anything!!!  I’ve taken on several things at school, am preparing for our school Holiday Bazaar, and preparing materials for a few Kindergarten get-togethers.  I am also getting ready to speak at two state conferences in February and March.  I also have a rubber stamping business on the side and I just finished preparing materials for our class on Saturday.

 

If you want to check out what we’re doing, you can check out my posts from last November…we’re basically doing the same things and I will be adding lots of new things for Math very soon.  My plan is to post on Saturday or Sunday this weekend.  It was convenient for me to post at school, but when I tried last week, I found that our firewall is blocking me from doing that now, so I have to find time at home…and with a 5 year old running around…well you know how that goes!!

 

In preparing for the two conferences I am doing in February and March, we will be getting the new Farmer’s Market “Winter Packet” together, so I’ll be posting that along with our PowerPoint that we put together on my Kristen’s Kindergarten Store as soon as that’s done so you can see it too!!

If you’re in the Indiana area, you can see me at ISRA and HASTI in February and March along with some of my colleagues…we’re so excited to be sharing our ideas.

 

See you for an update on Saturday or Sunday!

 

Kristen

Leaves 2009

This week, we are learning about leaves and trees:

I copied several pages from the back of Leaves!, Leaves!, Leaves! and Leaf Man and the children compared the leaves they found on our leaf walk to them and tried to identify what kinds of trees we have on our school campus.

 

The Alphabet Chart that you see in one of the pictures is something I learned at a workshop I attended today.  I’ll share more about that and several other things in a few days–need to review it and process it a little more!

 

Kristen

Spiders 2009

After learning about bats, we moved on to learning about spiders.  During the week, we:

-read our National Geographic for Kids magazine about “Web Weavers” (October 2009 issue)

- created a spider web on the floor of our classroom using numbers to know where to roll the “silky thread” to next

-read several Big Books about spiders (one was by Melvin Berger-you can check last year’s spider posts to see specifics)

-played Halloween Phonics BINGO

-we also estimated the circumference of our pumpkin (because we didn’t get to it before)

-had our Fall Party and made cute bat and spider crafts and played a fun game with some spooky “eyeballs” (ping pong balls that were decorated to look like eyes–it was so cool!!)

Here are some pictures:

We are lucky enough to have a color copy machine, so I made several copies of the BINGO boards so everyone could play.  You spin the spinner that comes with the game and the children look for words that start with a specific letter.  I got this game from the Scholastic book order several years ago.

Bats Wrap-up 2009

Hello Everyone!  Sorry that I’ve been neglectful of the blog lately!  I want to keep updating, but I feel that unless I have some new idea that is different from last year, it seems silly to re-type all that, but then when I think about it, each year is different no matter if I do the same things or not, there are always some new questions that come up and we head off in a different direction! I’m updating with about 3-4 different posts this evening, so be sure to check for more!

 

Here is what we did to wrap up our study of bats:

We acted out the Five Little Bats Flying in the Night story using some bat pictures I posted two weeks ago:

 

Here are some pictures from one of our Morning Messages that week:

We also watched a short movie about bats.  I don’t have the name in front of me, but I do know it was a short 6 minute video and it talked about the importance of having bats and some different types of bats.

 

Kristen

 

Bats Day #1 and Day #2 2009

This week, we’ve been learning all about BATS!!  We have several students in our school who do not celebrate the fall holidays, so I always try to keep things neutral and not offend anyone.  In October, we learn about bats, spiders, pumpkins, and leaves, all kind of tying into the holidays, yet we do not discuss ways in which they might relate–these are just things you might see in our area in October!  Some pictures which are probably self-explanatory!

This is our Big Book this week!  I also created a PDF file to help re-tell this story.  There are 5 bats and an equal and minus signs to help the children understand the math.

5littlebats

These are some other Big Books we will be reading this week.

This is the “-at” cave (not the bat cave mind you!).  We made a list of -at family words in our morning message on Monday and then made bats today and they seemed to belong together–so the “-at” cave was born!

I’m in the process of finishing it, so I will take new pictures once it’s done.

Kristen

Donors Choose Grant

I am so excited to share that our classroom was the reciepient of yet another grant through Donors Choose!!  We got a new camera through a grant we wrote.  Our old classroom camera had to be smacked against your hand in order to be able to see the picture on the tiny screen.  I purchased the camera about 7 years ago, so I guess it had a good happy life!!  It was difficult to figure out how to take a picture to send in our thank you package!  The class finally decided that we would take some photos of things we do everyday so that we could share them with you and their parents through this blog!

P.S. These are pictures of our current Literacy Work Stations–let me know if you have any questions!

Math Work Stations Storage

Here are a few pictures showing how I store my Math Work Stations.  This was the easiest way I could think of that took up the least amount of room; considering we had Literacy Work Stations already going, Math Work Stations needed to be portable.