March News

Hello to all of our readers!

This post will be more "newsy" and less spot on of an activity that we are doing. 

We have two birthdays in the month of March....  Tiffany will be turning 6 on the 13th and I will be having a birthday on the 18th (which is a day we do not have school)!!

I have started the 3rd Quarter Assessments and conferences will be fast approaching.  Sheets will be coming out soon to communicate the time that you had before, and if that will still work!  I can't believe we are almost  to the end of the third quarter but here we are!  One thing that I am noticing we need to work on is writing our numbers, our months of the year, and counting to 100.  Another thing we need to work on is making our handwriting better and using our lowercase letters.  We talk about it often, now we just have to implement! 

I have sent out the March specials calendar.  I am trying to get the calendar uploaded onto our blog, but I am still working on it.  Hopefully we don't have any more snow days so that we don't have to be "off" schedule!  We have a musical concert coming up on the 15th!  The kids are doing a lot of practice and will do a fantastic job I am sure!  We will have some extra practices coming up during the first recess, which will help so if they tell you we didn't have recess we were just practicing for perfection  :o)

Coming up in March we will be putting up a new PWIM poster that deals with a farm.  We will be talking about spring, growing things like plants, a field trip to a farm and at the very end summer, and summer safety.  I am excited to see what kinds of words we will shake out!  With that we will continue to work on our problem solving with our CGI problems.  We are getting better at the strategies we use and hopefully they will continue to grow for the rest of the year!  The thing about problem solving that is great is that it can be used anywhere!  There are a lot of strategies to solve problems in and outside of the home and to have the skills to solve this is good for life.  I try to ask the students problems that they can relate to or can think about outside of school to hopefully get them thinking when they are not in my classroom.

It has come to my attention that quite a few of my students are not bringing tennis shoes and are borrowing some from the gym.  Please send these with your kids on PE days or have them at school so they can be ready to work it out and learn fun games with Mrs. Drenth. 

All of my reading groups have been working really hard on their word studies and writing.  I want to encourage you to PLEASE practice the words on the refridgerator sheet that is sent home each week.  We practice in the room but it is hard when they are only working with these words for a few minutes everyday.  Along with that, we are working on writing and connecting their letters and sounds with what they hear in their words.  Encourage your child to write at home!  It doesn't have to be spelled correctly but practice using those sounds to make words! 

Lastly...after the evacuations last week.  Please help your child memorize a phone number where you can be reached in case of emergencies.  I have phone numbers from you if they were given at conferences, but if there is a different number you want them to know...please teach it to them!  You never know when these things can happen and being able to get ahold of you is important!

Until next time,
Ms. Mills  :o)

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!!!