Big Books and the Sea

"The people on the bus go up and down" - a dramatic reading.
We pulled out the big books last week and got to read them.  It's so much fun to watch them read because they are actually reading much of the text!

 Our room has turned into an ocean!  This watery center required students to use the letters to build words.

 Observing shells with eyes, ears, and hands, and then recording some observations.

 ocean puzzle (48 pieces) - good team work!

Working on vowel sorts inside the 'ocean'

Juggling Scarves

Especially on days like today (when we have extra long music since we were practicing for Friday's concert), it is important to incorporate some movement in the day, so between reading and journal time we did a little juggling!

Book Braggy Blogpost

 We have made a few little books recently.  One of the conferences I went to recently showed me a really easy way to make these little books, so we tried it and they were quite popular, so we've tried it a few more times.   The smaller pages are so much less intimidating to children than regular full-sized paper, so some children are much more willing to try to write more.

Yesterday everyone got to write a book about whatever they wanted.  It needed to have a title, an author, and at least 3 pages.  They made these books independently!  So I wanted to show/tell you all the wonderful things they are learning and progress they have made.  (Sorry for the blurry pictures)  It's fun to see them use the print conventions that we have talked about in books we read together.

 This child wrote a non-fiction book about snakes.

 The text is someone screaming (all capital letters, so it sounds exciting!)

 

 Here is a story about Indiana Jones that showed a beginning (he has a hat), a middle (the problem: he loses his hat), and an ending (the resolution: he finds his hat)

 Another non-fiction book, this one about plants and it used a label in the illustration, as many pictures in non-fiction books do.

 Really colorful illustrations:

 This book was a pattern book about different colored hearts.  Notice the period at the end of the sentence.

 This was a counting book about cats.

This book has neat writing and the pictures and words go together really well.  (She read this to me as dinosaur, but I think she actually wrote dragon).

This version of The Three Billy Goats Gruff was great!  The child remembered a title, an author, and used some other print conventions like ...

Plants

We made pictures with parts of plants (wood/seeds).  Most children are finished now, though some glue may still need to dry :)

Weekly pictures

Here are the finished snakes, dangling in our classroom.  The children say it looks like a jungle.  You may notice that all the snakes are hung behind or beside the main work areas...

 We played an umbrella bean bag toss game.  To make it a little more academic, I added some word families.  They had to find a consonant bean bags, and then read the word it made.  (Her hand is covering it up a bit, but this is the word fun :)

 We finished up our unit about plants and seeds.  At this center children were making pictures with wood and/or seeds.

 Math game I learned at a conference last year.  Knowing how many counters are in one hand, they have to figure out how many counters are in the closed hand (I tell them how many there are altogether).  We've played before, but this time, we wrote the addition sentences.  Yes, we're doing ALGEBRA in Kindergarten (except we call it a game).  We mostly stuck to numbers 12 and under, but I threw out a few optional challenges.

 We ended the day by playing games with sponges, balloons, and WATER!

Michelangelo! (and adding shark teeth and hanging snakes)

We talked briefly about Michelangelo and how he painted the ceiling of a church with Bible story pictures.  Today one of our centers was drawing under the tables, kind of like Michelangelo did.  Each child could draw whatever they liked.  It was fun, but hard (especially the logistics of trying to tape their paper to the bottom of the table).

Per student request, the finished drawings were hung on the real ceiling.  Artwork includes the temple with the ark of the covenant, a tornado, some lilies (that look a lot like the Monet ones we drew last week), an alien...

Another center was this fun adding game I found on another teacher's blog recently.  Roll die for the top teeth, then for the bottom teeth, and then say equation, or "math sentence" as we call it.  Here is 5+6=11

Tying into our Arizona/desert study, we made snakes, which we then hung from the ceiling - I hope they don't set off the alarm!

Making butterflies to flutter around our water lilies.

Another center involved spinning the ever-popular tops and then reading the word it stopped on.

 Wrapping Ys with yarn.  I thought it might be really quick since the Y was not really large, but it was actually quite challenging since they were also trying to cut yarn and then figuring out how to attach the yarn (some were almost completely covered in tape :)  Everyone had fun though!

 

And a picture for next week: bring something unusual for sharing on Wednesday.  This is what I brought today to introduce it.  Do you know what it is?

Learning

I love it when parents share those funny school-related stories with me.  Recently, one mom told me about a conversation between her child and and another Kindergartener: 

 

"I just hatched a great idea!"

 

"Are you oviparous?"

 I love when they retain information and vocabulary, and can use it later.  :)

Bible quote

Today we started talking about parables (which we defined as stories Jesus told to teach people about the Kingdom of God) and we began with the Parable of the Good Samaritan.  First of all, parables are somewhat abstract.  The class had a hard time understanding that this story did not actually happen, it was just a story Jesus told to teach us about our neighbors.  But I digress. 

The story went something like this:

A man asked Jesus, "Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?"  Do you know what that means?  [insert blank stares intermingled with children shaking their heads and saying "no."]  He meant, "What do I need to do so I can live in heaven with God?"

"You have to die!"

SPRING ART!

Here are our suncatcher flowers, which the children had lots of fun coloring (maybe it was because they got to use permanent markers :)

Inspired by our upcoming field trip to the DBG, one student free-handed this in the morning so she could give it to the people there. 

 See our beautiful weaving from last week?  Overall I was pretty impressed.  The hardest part was starting correctly.  We mounted them and then used lots of different things - spools, sponges, pencils, glue lids, Perfection pieces - to stamp a border around (some were patterns, others just designs)

 This child decided to stamp the black spaces on her weaving mat also.

 Afterward, some children enjoyed stamping their own designs.

 Here is a more sophisticated circular pattern:

 While some children were doing the printmaking above, others were outside planting seeds.  Later in the day we pulled out the pastels and watercolor paints (it was a messy day) to paint water lilies like the famous artist, Claude Monet, did.  Since Monet was an impressionist we learned that his pictures did not always look exactly like what he was painting.  This gave us the freedom to accept our drawings, even when they did not turn out exactly as we envisioned.  I was really impressed with how they turned out.  Thanks to Kathy at Art Projects for Kids for the idea!

Desert Botanical Garden 3

We really enjoyed our field trip, even though it was around 90 degrees.  We were thankful that it was partly cloudy most of the time we were there, also I think the heat cut down on the crowds a lot.  I only applied 1 bandaid and removed 17 cactus stickers...  Overall, I was really impressed with all the children :)  It is so much fun to see and hear their enthusiasm for God's wonderful Creation.

Near the end of our field trip we had a very scientific lesson: pick a cactus you like for a picture (appreciation is important too!)