And Our New Word Is.....Companions!!

The past couple of weeks we have been working with a mini-unit within our snowman poster called Book Club Plus.  Within this we mainly looked at one book called "A Little Bit of Winter".  I really enjoyed doing this because we got to read through this book several times looking at different attributes that all good readers have.  We talked about making predictions and checking up on those throughout the story to see how what we know and can relate will help us guess what the story is about.  We also got to talk about sequencing and retelling.  Also we got to work a lot with our vocabulary for this particular Text Talk book.  One of our words was COMPANIONS.  We had a great discussion on how companions are our friends and they are people we enjoying doing this with in and out of the classroom.  This went along very nicely with Valentine's Day where we talked about what it means to be a good friend and how we use our manners when we open up our Valentines. 

Back Row:  Skyler, Angel, Justin, Tatiana, Faith, AJ, Joseph, Kyli, Ojem

Middle Row:  Evelyn, Tiffany, Hailey, Patrick, Cindy, Brianna,  Anahi

Front Row:  Alexis, Allen, Pablo

The kids really enjoyed spending the afternoon with their classroom companions!  But we must move on...  To talk more about companions each student picked two companions in the class.  We then took their picture with their companions...which was the easy part!  We are currently writing about our two companion friends and why they are our friends using sentences and sounds we hear when we write!  We are trying to get ready for first grade so when your student asks you to spell a word encourage them to use their letters and their sounds!!!  As for the pictures...you will have to wait until you come visit us or at conferences when our writings will be hung up in the hall for our friends to see!

Until next time....

Ms. Mills

100th Day of School!

Greetings to all of you blog readers!  Another week has sure flown by in Kinder #9.  The students have been waiting and counting down the days for this past week because we had our 100th day of school!  There was a lot of work we did to prepare for this day including our counting to 100 which we do everyday! 

Here are some photos of the students working on their hats.  For their hats, I had them cut out the number 100 which they could color any way they wanted to.  The hardest part was they had to write as many numbers as they could with the given time.  I had quite a few who wrote to 100 and wore it proudly on their hats!!



Back:  Alexis, Pablo, Skyler, Allen, Patrick, Cindy, Ojem

Middle:  Daniel, Faith, Tatiana, Joseph, AJ, Angel

Front:  Justin, Hailey, Tiffany, Anahi, Kyli

Luckily most of the students had come back on this day for our "party" which consisted of the kindergarten classes rotating to four different centers which included things with 100.  We had  Snack, Exercise, Block, and Puzzle Centers set up and the students really enjoyed them! 

Here is a picture of all the kindergarten classes at the end of the day waiting to see who has been at school all 100 days.  Sadly no one from my class has been there the whole time, but it was neat to see how many had been there. 

And to leave you...a video!!  We can count to 100!!!

Building a Snowman!

Here is a picture of our current PWIM poster.  We have been working really hard on using our poster throughout the day while we are talking and writing.  The words around the poster are the words that the students came up with and we use daily.  One of the ways we use the words is by sorting them into categories that show similarities.  They like to call it..."See if we can trick Miss Mills."  When I model this for the students I try to use categories such as:  rhyming, same word or letters within the word, or all are visible on the picture to be in the same category.  We are getting better at this and the students seem to really enjoy this activity.

Skyler and Joseph are sorting!

Another thing that we do is use our words that are on the poster and in our envelope to create sentences that can be directly related to the poster, or related through the student by means of experience when dealing with whatever the poster is showing us.  We are really good at creating sentences about the poster and we are trying to work on relating those words to life outside of school. 

Cindy and Evelyn are going through the sentences that we created during group and testing each other to see if they can read the sentence while Pablo is reading his sentences from his PWIM binder that has all of the posters we have done this far in the year.  The students really seem to enjoy going back to see if they can read what they had written in the past! 

This short 19 second video of Faith and Anahi is an example of the students choral reading from their binder.  It is kind of hard to hear at the beginning but they are reading!!!

It is really exciting for me to watch them get so excited about gaining skills through our "work" with the PWIM poster.  I can't wait to see what they will do at the end of the week when we take a few of our sentences and turn it into a story on our smart board!  This will help all of us in writing so we can talk about sentence structure, spelling, capital letters, and punctuation which we have been talking about with our sight words!!

Until next time....

Christmas Break

Greetings to All!

I just wanted to create a short post for all of you followers!  We have been working hard in Kindergarten but I just wanted to remind all of my little cherrubs to practice their letters, sounds, and numbers while they are at home on break!  We are doing such a great job and I am seeing much improvement since I have started!

I hope you all had a Merry Christmas and will have a GREAT New Year's!

Miss Mills

Teeth Time!

For our PWIM unit we were learning about teeth.  We had Ms. Molly come to our room because she is studying how to be a hygienist who could clean our teeth someday!  The class decided to call her Ms. Molly because it was easier than having two Ms. Mills teachers in the room which made them laugh a lot.  We had a lot of fun with her and we all learned how to brush our teeth!  We also learned that before we start losing our teeth we have 20...and we have to take real good care of our permanent teeth because we only get one set of teeth!  (unless they are false of course)

I think the kids enjoyed their new toothbrushes and toothpaste they acquired.  Hopefully they shared with you what they learned!!!

Shortest to Tallest

Greetings!!!

To work on concepts in Boehm  and just a general concept the students need to grasp we did an activity to help us with things that are short and tall.  Table by table we went around the room and grabbed random things of varying sizes.  This was fun for the kids, even though they had no idea what they were doing.  After we had a lot of items on the table, the students came up one by one and they moved an item so that the shortest item was on one end and the tallest was on the other.  This was kind of a hard concept for them at the beginning so with a little help from me :)  we got it done!  Then to challenge them, we decided to make a like in our room that was shortest to tallest.

It took us awhile...but we finally got to the point where we were in a line even if it wasn't perfect!!! 



Our Thanksgiving Festivities

All nine sections of Kindergarten were planning a little get-together at 2:30 on the day before break.  We were going to meet in the commons for a snack and everyone would be wearing their hats with some being Native Americans and some being Pilgrims.  Instead we got out at 12:15 so we had to change our schedule just a bit.  Luckily we made our hats starting the day before! 

The kids really enjoyed doing this craft.  We worked on making patterns on our Native American feather hats and with our feathers.  Check to see if your child has their patterns!!! 

We also worked on our journals. We are trying to get ready for first grade by practicing our writing.  We usually have a topic and try to write as much as we can about that topic.  On that day, we wrote about what we were going to do on Thanksgiving with our families. 













To the right you can see AJ and Patrick sharing their writings!  We are getting better but we are finding things to write harder than things to talk about all the time!!!  Overall, we had fun and the kids enjoyed working with each other on their hats, sharing their snack, and their stories!!

Back Row:  Alexis, Justin, Anahi, Kyli, Hailey, Tiffany, Evelyn, and Cindy

Middle Row:  Patrick, Tatiana, and Faith

Front Row:  Sadisha, Daniel, Pablo, Angel, Skyler, and AJ