I have the sweetest class

 One of my sweet students brought me cookies and a picture this morning.  

The whole class was great today.  One child fell right after recess and I walked her to the office to get an ice pack, telling the rest of the class to go in the classroom and get out their snacks.  When I came back, they were all sitting down, eating and talking quietly.  :)  

After lunch we had a student read a book about Big Bugs to us.  She did a great job.  Later when I read a book, another student held all the pages as I turned them.

 Here are a few of our centers for the week: beads (fine motor skills)

 building with blocks

 and writing signs

 

(school is broken)

Coloring (more fine motor skills)

 Today we started Drawing Club.  This is something I started last year.  During free choice centers we do an extra drawing activity - just one more way to get kids drawing/writing.  Calling it a club just makes it sound cool.  Technically it's optional, though it will be mandatory for a few students |(but they don't know that yet :) We had 100% voluntary participation this time.  Since I'm not all that skilled at left-handed drawing, today we had an illustrator, Rich Davis, show us how to draw a doodle bug.  Hooray for the projector.  :)

 We also pulled out the balance board for some gross motor fun.
 
My apologies for some of the picture quality.  I'm still working on the one-handed thing.

Some centers this week

We made numbers with playdoh (math PLUS fine motor practice PLUS fun)

 Listening center - I think some children listened to this book 3 times today :)

 Building patterns.  Here two children are working together on a more difficult pattern (AABBB)

Creating patterns in our math journals (and after I took one of these pictures, the child requested that I use my phone and put it on 'that place where everybody in the whole world can see it' - Facebook.  I guess she was proud of her work :)
 And a great filler activity: when you are finished your math journal, go build a pattern with unifix cubes.

And for a little more fun, go to this webiste and click on the mp3 for Jump, Shout! to hear one of the songs we have been singing in our morning devotions.

Friday

Here are a few snapshots of Friday morning. This one utilizes some fine motor activity to clip up the mittens, as well as reading to build a sentence.
Here is a sight word game I semi-invented (I modified it). Roll the die, read the word, move the corresponding car. Guess what? The boys loved it :)
Lego, because it was Ll week. Also good for fine motor :)
And here was our morning message. After we found all the Lls, we boxed some special sounds we could read and circled our sight words. Then we sat back and admired how much we had learned.

Drawing Club

Did any of your children come home and tell you they were in drawing club today? Do they come home and talk about anything besides recess and centers? :)

I don't think I've explained drawing club before, so this is how it started. I realized that a few children could use some specific instruction in how to draw things (because all their people and animals look the same: little circles with 4 lines coming out). Additionally, there are always Kindergarten children who could benefit from fine motor skill development, so any writing or drawing is beneficial.

Rather than just pulling one or two children to work on some of these drawing skills, I invented "Drawing Club" (once a week, during center time). A few children are mandated to attend, but since they have come voluntarily so far, they are currently unaware of their obligation. It's amazing how exciting something is if you call it a club.

Personally, I'm not very gifted at drawing, but this summer I was talking to an artist friend of mine who has taught art to young children, and she recommended a few good websites. One of them, Art Projects For Kids, has some great step-by-step instructions for drawing various things.

I try to mix it up a little, so the first week we drew snow bears and colored them with markers, last week we drew gingerbread people and colored them with pastels. This week we drew cardinals and then painted them (some children just stayed for the drawing part, and that's fine). I think the most exciting part was drawing invisible snowflakes with white crayon and then watching them appear when we watercolor painted the sky.

Enjoy a few pictures from this week:
This child asked if they could make the sky black. Well, of course! I am usually in favor of trying new ideas.

Day 101

Today we made necklaces with 101 Froot Loops (well, technically they were Fruity Os or something like that). First everyone had to count out 100 pieces with the aid of a 100 grid. Then came the fabulous fine motor task of stringing them. Lastly was the fun part: eating!
And in case you ever need to know, a 12 oz box makes 12 necklaces with a few pieces to spare.

Writing

This week we had a fun writing activity with the first letter of our names. At the beginning of Kindergarten, writing time includes a lot of fine motor activities (such as fingerpainting) to build up necessary hand muscles. Also, it took a while, which meant that we used up part of our lunch recess time, which was good since it was too hot to be outside for very long anyway.


It's good to get a little messy sometimes :)Later in the week we had another fun fine motor center (got this idea from another Kindergarten blog this summer) involving beads, pipe cleaners and a colander. I told my class they were doing this to make their hand muscles stronger; they might as well know the rationale, although I think they were more into the activity because it looked like a 'robot helmet'.