Hooray! Hooray! We Had a Great First Day!

Our first day at school went so fast! We were very busy. After recess we put our paint shirts on and marched down the hall to Mr. Procter’s room. Here we are ready to go

During Art the kids learned where their spots were and watched Mr. Procter do a paint demonstration. Then they got to do their first art project: painting with rulers!

               

When we came back to the room we read the book, How Full is Your Bucket? and talked about what it means to “fill a bucket.” I will share their ideas and awesome pictures later this week We had another recess, went to lunch, listened to a story and finally got play time!

  

 

                                        

Before we knew it, it was time to go home! Here is our class picture for the day. I am looking forward to meeting the rest of our class tomorrow, and really looking forward to Wednesday when we are ALL together!

 

Welcome to Kindergarten!

Welcome to our classroom blog! This is a place where you can find helpful information (snack calendar, lunch menu, class list, daily schedule, no school days, etc.), stay involved with what we are learning each day and read your own child’s blog post about what they enjoy in kindergarten!

I hope you will use this resource frequently and share it with your child. They will love to share with you what we are doing and explain what is going on in the pictures posted.

You should have received a letter in the mail stating which day you and your child will come to school. I will meet half of you on Monday and the other half on Tuesday.

Please stop by our classroom Thursday night, August 23 between 5-6 p.m. during our elementary open house. This will be a great opportunity for your child to explore the room and for me to meet them before our official first day! I am looking forward to it—the room is almost ready to go

If you have any questions, please feel free to call or e-mail me.

e-mail: mrichardson@spirit-lake.k12.ia.us

phone: 712-336-2822 ext: 4212

I am excited for a great year! Enjoy your last week of summer and see you soon!

Slideshow

Please click the link to watch our end of the year slideshow!


http://smilebox.com/playBlog/4d7a45334d6a63354e6a4d3d0d0a&blogview=true

In the Ocean

We finished our ocean unit last week and it was a fun one! We studied a lot of ocean life including the coral reef.

We started our unit by reading this story

 

It introduced us to a lot of animals that live in the ocean. We made a huge squid and then wrote about which ocean animal it was bigger than! Such a fun project to get us started.

         (My squid is bigger than a shark.)                                                       (My squid is bigger than a turtle.)

We spent a day talking about different fish in the Ocean. Thank you, Finding Nemo, for giving the students lots of prior knowledge on this subject. We read a series of The Rainbow Fish and wrote about what we would do if we were the Rainbow Fish. Then we made our own!

  

The Coral Reef was our next topic and it was a fun one! We studied all different types of animals in the Coral Reef and watched a Magic School Bus movie about it too. We learned that a lot of the animals in the Coral Reef work together as partners to stay alive. What better to reinforce this concept than to work in partners on our project! The kids worked together in different groups to create lots of different animals in the coral reef.

        

  Working on creating Sea Squirts                              Making the Feather Star

             

  Hard at work making Sponges                                 Adding lots of detail!

                                          Anddddddd…..the finished product!

I love how it turned out  

I missed taking photos of our shark facts and coral reef fan book, but I hope your child showed you and told you all they knew!

Here are some pictures of the kelp we made and the whales we labeled. We finished our unit by making big ocean pictures that should have come home yesterday.

 

 

One week left of school. Oh. My. Goodness. Can’t believe how fast it has gone. I am not ready to say goodbye.

Pictures to come of our last days together!

Catching Up

It’s been awhile since I have let you know what’s going on in our room! I can’t believe it is already May and we only have 3 short weeks left of Kindergarten! I know the kids are excited to be done and ready to enjoy summer! I, on the other hand, am hoping these next couple of weeks go very slowly. I am not ready to say goodbye to these sweet kindergarteners.

In the past couple weeks we have talked about our Earth and what we need to do to keep it clean and healthy! We made our own earth people to remind us what we can do to take care of the earth. I really love the way they turned out!

          

We also planted grass, picked up garbage around our school and wrote about ways we can keep help the earth like riding our bike to school, using less water, throwing away our garbage, recycling and re-using things! It was a fun week and we learned a lot about being good caretakers of the earth.

The kids have been working hard on reading independently and also reading with a buddy! They love sharing their books with their friends and every single person in our class is reading! It is so wonderful to listen to them! Here are some pictures of them doing a great job!

 

 

                               

Here are some pictures of the kids having fun at center time  

                                                       

                                                    

Grasslands

Last week we talked about grasslands!

Charles came in and talked to us all about what we would find there and why they are important. He also showed us some really neat animal furs and a LIVE SNAKE!

Charles had lots of grassland grass for us to weave through paper to make our own craft. It was hard to get started but they got the hang of it!

                  

Our final project was making a big grasslands picture. We talked a lot about sunflowers during the week as well as animals and plants found n the grasslands. The students put it all together into one big poster and they turned out beautiful!

 

 

Use this fun video to see if your child can say the sight words!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-UlyFDIh_A&feature=youtu.be