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!

Aliens, turkeys, food

 We started making aliens in art: drop the paint on and blow it around.

 Some children really liked one of our new sight word centers, so they also played it during free choice centers - turkey trot: roll die, read word, move turkey.

 Playing grocery store with real food!

Kinder Garden

Kinder Garden 2012 will be for sale in the silent auction at Fall Festival. Your children are such fabulous artists!

Unfortunately blogger uploaded this sideways, so you may have to tilt your head or your screen

Math Art

 It looks like a collection of junk, but really it's math art!  We picked different shapes (math) to make a collage (art) and let the sun fade the paper around it (science too!)

 Each child had a turn to share their cool project with the class.

 More awesome math: symmetry paintings!  Just paint, fold, squish, and re-open.

Calves, necklaces

We all went into the trailer and peeked at the calves.  We picked up some BIG bottles.

Various children feeding the calves (most pictures are of the backs of their heads because I was trying to act as a buffer between the calves and one scared child)

Going closer and petting them

Say "Moo"!

We went inside and recorded our observations

(It looked scary.  It felt soft.)

(It looked cute.  It felt slimy.)

The picture above has slightly more accurate colors than the one below :)

Later in the day some children worked on spelling words (he's spelling kindergarten)

For art we cut straws and strung them to make necklaces - lots of fine motor fun, and the best part was watching the straw pieces fly when we cut them.

Last week

Did your child tell you how we 'painted' pumpkins with water and tissue paper?  They look pretty cool.  Thanks to Kathy @ Art Projects for kids for the idea.  It took a long time but it was worth it the next morning when everyone took off the dried tissue paper to discover the color underneath.  "Wow!"  "It's like a miracle!"  (Warning: tissue paper can stain tables)

 Someone tried their own picture the next day.

No, it wasn't twin day, but two girls happened to come wearing the same outfit.  So exciting!

 A literacy center this week - listen to Goldilocks and the Three Bears, act it out, then retell it to me later.

We practiced writing sentences using sight words, spaces, and ending punctuation.  We did a good job, so we wore our work proudly.

 More center time fun

Funky Friday

 Today was Funky Friday! 

 In our morning message we found lots of letter r's and tried to figure out all the sounds it made.

Math was delicious this morning! After learning about ordinal numbers we ended our color theme with a Brown Bear activity: coloring, sorting, counting,

graphing

 recording our graphs and FINALLY getting to eat the m&m.

 Thanks to Shannon over at Kindergarten Hoppenings for the sorting mat and graphing page!

 At the end of the day our buddies came over and we drew rockets, painted fire, and then painted our rockets and outlined them with black.  Everyone was working for an hour, but no one complained!  Some of the rockets look really cool.  Next week they will get cut out and glued to the fiery backgrounds.

Oh, and remember those uniform shirts that have been in the closet for the last couple weeks?  Pull them out because next week will be a 'normal' week, whatever that means.  :)