We had a great day!

 First, a few pictures of Shapey from last week.  Shapey lives on planet Zoop and he wrote a letter telling my class that he wanted to make a picture of himself for his dad's birthday, but he hurt his arm and couldn't draw, so he just told us what shapes to use (1 pentagon, 4 squares, 2 rhombuses, 4 circles, 5 rectangles, 2 triangles), that he was symmetrical, and that his nose had 4 sizes.  Then everyone went to work.  It was a bit challenging, but we had fun and everyone's picture turned out differently, whether they looked like a cat, had 3 eyes...
  

And now onto today's awesomeness:

We took the letters in Thanksgiving and built words.  This is the first time we've tried this type of activity this year.  Look how many words your brilliant children made!

During math centers we made solid shapes (cubes, rectangular prisms, pyramids, triangular prisms, even 1 pentagonal prism) from marshmallows and toothpicks.

 

 A rare picture of myself; reading a fun Thanksgiving story.

 Here we are on our walking field trip through our school's neighborhood .

And now we are ready to tally the different types of transportation that drive by.  We got pretty enthusiastic.

 A bus driver (my dad) came and read a familiar bus story.

 Science time: can you spot the light source?

 Looking carefully at the photo mosaic of Van Gogh's Starry Night.

I hope your day was as amazing as ours was!

Today

Not pictured: we had a bonus field trip today!  We just put out a bunch of transportation books and then we had a cool tractor thing (Feel free to comment and tell me what it was called) show up at school, so this afternoon we took a few minutes to go look at it in action. We decided it was a slow form of transportation, but it was cool to watch it work.

Alien addition: add some googly eyes :)

New dress-up clothes!  In social studies we talked about different neighborhood helpers and jobs by looking at the many hats that people wear.

During our reading time this week we've been working on alphabetical order.  First we worked with our names, then we did some fall words all together.  Later everyone got their own set of words to put in order.  It was a bit tricky since there were 2 A words and 2  P words, but we did pretty well!

R is for rainbow

Today was brown day, pj day, Columbus Day, and Thanksgiving!

We made a Venn diagram (sorry - no picture) to see who was wearing brown, and who was wearing pjs, or who was wearing both.

We learned about Christopher Columbus during social studies.  Can your child tell you how many ships he had?  How many men were on them?  Where they were trying to go and where they went instead?

To celebrate (Canadian) Thanksgiving we talked about things we are thankful for and ate some candy corn.

But the most exciting part of the day had nothing to do with brown day, pj day, Columbus Day, or Thanksgiving... 

Our new letter of the week is Rr, so we made rainbows in art.  It was somewhat scientific as well since we made our own puffy paint (half white glue, half shaving cream) for the clouds.  

But even better than that, was the snack a mom made for us: rainbow jello!  You should have heard the oohs and aahs when I held it up in front of the window so the light shone through.  It was very cool!

 Yummy too.

 Here is what just one spoonful looks like.  Pretty, eh?  (Had to throw that eh? in for the sake of cultural awareness today)

 Soon, this is all that was left.

 1 more picture for today: some children found a 'new' toy to play with during center time today.

Twin day, and gray day tomorrow!

Capitol, time

Today's social studies topic was symbols. This week in drawing club, we drew the Capitol. I think they turned out pretty cute. 2 children also added an eagle. And I don't know why blogger loaded this one sideways.


Today in math we hip-hopped around the clock (that is just chalk on the carpet). When we had a few minutes before PE, we took turns changing the time and reading the time. Having 12 students worked out really well today :)

Gung hay fat choy!

Happy Chinese New Year! We had a very brief social studies lesson on this today and made a cool Chinese paper craft. The new decorations hanging caused some excitement, but the twirly paper craft was even more exciting.
Another center this morning was practicing writing numbers (stamping and tracing)
And Ll is for lacing cards (also known as fine motor skills)

Special Day!

Today was a special, social studies day. We talked about Canada, Europe, America, and India.

Happy (Canadian) Thanksgiving! Technically, Canada is not part of Kindergarten curriculum, but we enjoyed having a mini-lesson about it. We made a long list of things for which we are thankful (God, Jesus, the Bible, prayer, my mom, my cat, my sister, my house, plants, my brother, the pledge...) The class was sad that we didn't get to eat turkey, but we enjoyed some candy corn.

The class was so excited to hear that our classmate was safely back from India, but sad that she was not at school today. We pulled out a globe and had a quick lesson about jetlag that went something like this: "When the sun is shining over here on us, it's dark on the other side of the world in India, and then when the world turns and it is night by us, it is light and daytime in India, so morning time feels like bedtime if you just came back."

Everybody say "Explorer". Student council dubbed today "Explorer Day" so we made hats to look like explorers and enjoyed learning about Christopher Columbus. Ask your child to tell you something about him.
Here were some centers this morning: reading color words
Making hats:
Roll and color graph:
Measuring and matching pumpkins: