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

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

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.

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

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

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!

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.

We’ve been learning and reading all about Pumpkins this week…even though I was out 2 days this week (my son was sick).  We started off the week by taking a picture walk through the Big Book Pumpkin, Pumpkin by Jeanne Titherington.  Then the children heard the story read aloud.  On the second day, the children re-read the story and then re-told the story using their own words.  Today, we looked at the pictures to help us re-tell the story and then we played Guess The Covered Word. I covered the words pumpkin, seeds, pulp, flower, and sprouts.  We would read the sentence and when we got to a covered word, we would try to guess what the word was.  If the first letter was correct, we sounded out the word we thought it might be and would figure out if it fit.  If not, we needed a new word.

Then later in the afternoon, we cut open our pumpkin and checked out the insides.  I scooped out the pulp, we observed it and I put it in a plastic baggie to take home and roast the seeds.  We also have a few smaller pumpkins in our room that were donated by parents (THANK YOU!!!) so we could observe them.  And observe them we did and wrote our findings down on our KOWL chart.  

Kristen

I switched out my Math Work Stations (available for sale here) and updated them from Sorting to Patterning.  I took several pictures and wanted to include them:

The children will be completing the patterns with Unifix cubes.  I drew the patterns on sentence strips with markers and just drew squares.

Manipulatives Work Station-the children will be completing the patterns with pattern blocks.  I created these patterns with die cut pattern block shapes.  The idea is from Math Their Way.

Pocket Chart Patterns-the children will make patterns with the beads in the pocket chart.  I got the bead pattern from a book from Scholastic (you can see it here–looks like you can get a used copy for $9.50 on Amazon.com).

The children will be using dry erase markers to complete the pattern going on their own laminated dot strips. Again, from Math Their Way blackline masters.

Eraser Pattern Station-the children will use the Halloween themed erasers (I got them in the Dollar Spot at Target) to make patterns on these placemats I got at Jo-Anns about 3 years ago.  I cut the placemats in 1/2 because the kids were overwhelmed by the larger size.  They will pattern along the lines of the placemats.

I posted these last year, but I always get asked where I get them from…They are from Scholastic and are little rubber stamps.  The children take grid paper and stamp patterns with them.  The dollar tree has them around Valentine’s Day and other holidays so be sure to check there.  They are only a dollar for 8 stamps and an ink pad!

These are pattern cards I got just last week from the September Scholastic SeeSaw or Firefly leaflet.  You get about 20 plastic shapes/characters and 15 cards and the kids can make various patterns (AB, AAB, ABAB, etc)  They can be purchased with about 200 bonus points.  I got 2 sets and I already had one from a few years ago.  They also have had them in the past for the Winter holidays and Valentine’s day.

I got these playing cards last September at the Dollar Spot at Target.  I thought that the kids could pattern with them or the numbers on the other side.

I couldn’t find my Roll-A-Pumpkin, so I had to make a new one, and this is what I came up with.  I’ll try to get one posted soon!

Hope these give you some ideas!  I have more stations than these, but they are  exclusive to my Math Work Stations handouts! )

Kristen

I just wanted to do a quick update and share some ideas that you could use in your classroom to teach about Apples:  

These are all ideas previously posted, but hey, everything old is new again sometime right??

http://kpoindexter.wordpress.com/2008/09/15/apple-day-activities-day-1/

http://kpoindexter.wordpress.com/2008/09/16/apple-day-day-2/

http://kpoindexter.wordpress.com/2008/09/17/apple-day-day-3/

http://kpoindexter.wordpress.com/2008/09/18/apple-day-day-4/

http://kpoindexter.wordpress.com/2008/09/20/apple-day-day-5/

http://kpoindexter.wordpress.com/inquiry-science/

http://kpoindexter.wordpress.com/2008/09/11/pattern-block-shapes/

http://kpoindexter.wordpress.com/2008/07/01/patten-block-graph/

Hope this helps you with some ideas!  I’ll start posting again regularly in about one to two weeks!  Can’t wait–it’s like waiting for Christmas or something!

Kristen