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!