Today was a great day. I was able to share this Blog and Class Website with our students today so they could see all of the pictures I have posted. They knew I was taking pictures but had not seen the final product yet! They were really excited. We will begin to move in to more collaborative posts on this website to allow students to be more involved in what we post. I was happy to talk with my friend Mrs. Minayo over the weekend. I told my students about her today. She is a teacher who lives in Kenya, Africa. Her husband is also a teacher and they work with students at Cheery Education Centre. I met her about 2 years ago through epals and we completed some class projects. We are planning to do some penpal emails, skype, and other class projects this year. It is going to be very exciting to work together in our learning. The students looked at the Cheery Centre website. Ms. Minayo has already looked at our class website as well. We will be exploring maps of where they live and comparing our culture and daily lives to theirs throughout this process. This is a very exciting opportunity for each of our students. We did a brainstorm list of things that we could tell the students in Kenya about our classroom in our first penpal emails. One student said we need to tell them we love them!!! You can see a picture of all of the conversation ideas that students came up with below. (You will also see our sight words beside the list... we have a quiz on those this Friday!) More pictures to come soon... :-)
Here is some information about what we have been doing in our classroom...
In our classroom, we are a froggy family. Each day we review expectations for how we should treat each other and how we will behave at school. Students are earning dolphin dollars for positive behavior and following expectations. Our dolphin dollars will be spent to purchase our ticket to the upcoming celebrations that are held at the middle and the end of each nine week period. Please check agenda daily for behavior updates as needed. Our morning begins with a morning song. Some of our favorites are the "Have Fun Teaching" videos on youtube to review letter sounds, numbers, and other skills. We also listen and dance to fun songs and brain breaks like the "just dance kids" videos, cupid shuffle, hit the quan, cha-cha slide, and the whip/nae-nae!!! We then work on our rhyme-a-week activities. We have a special rhyme for each week and a different activity to do with that rhyme each day. We read the rhyme, discuss rhyming words, answer riddles, and act out the rhyme. This helps us practice comprehension and fluency. We just finished meeting our LetterLand characters A through Z today. We have been learning 2 new ones each day for the past few weeks. Each character has a special name that helps us learn our letter sounds. We will be using these characters to practice learning to read words. Guided Reading Practice groups are also in progress. We have a lot of work to do to help us reach level D by the end of this year. We have also been practicing our Daily 5 procedures: Read to Self and Work on Writing. We will add Word Work very soon. Math box rotations help us do hands-on activities to practice our numbers 0-10 at this point. We will use Math boxes to practice various skills throughout this year. Students are enjoying their daily center time. We have 10 centers to offer that students rotate through each week: Art, Housekeeping/Dramatic Play, Sand Table, Math, Science/Social Studies, Blocks, Puzzles, Listening/Writing, Computers, and Alphabet Center. Students have also been practicing their weekly sight words along with reading homework. We are working on our second set of words right now. We are definitely hard at work to get ready for first grade! P.S. It has been a very rainy week and we were so happy to see the sun come back out today! We missed being able to go outside! We have had a very busy but good week! Students learned what to do during a fire drill, tornado drill, and code red drill to keep us safe in our school. We have been doing different activities to meet our friends and learn more about each other. Procedures and rules have been a main focus. Ms. Davis and I have been watching and assessing to see what students already know and how we can help them this year. We also began learning with the letterland and daily 5 classroom structures in language arts. Students were introduced to our learning centers. At this point in math, we are working on counting and numbers 0-10. We will be spending much more time in these areas to help build a solid foundation for the rest of the year. I am very excited to see what we can accomplish! Our froggy family is off to a great start!
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AuthorMrs. Andrews & Kindergarten Students Archives
June 2017
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