December in Pictures

We had lots of fun and were oh so busy during the month of December.  Enjoy pictures of some of our favorite days!

I hope everyone has a safe and blessed holiday season!  I look forward to seeing the kiddos on January 3rd and hearing all about their winter break!

Thanksgiving Fun!

I am beyond thankful for being blessed with such a fabulous bunch of kindergarten students this year!

When I asked the kids what they are thankful for here are a few answers that I received: My mom and dad, my grandma, God, my brothers and sisters, food, school, and the list goes on!  

We had a blast learning all about fall, turkeys, and Thanksgiving!  We were so busy that I didn't get many pictures of all the fun activities, but I did capture the class favorites!

Our turkeys that are trying to be saved from being eaten at Thanksgiving lunch.  Each kid came up with something for the turkey to encourage you to eat more of.  "Eat more cookies!" "Eat more potatoes!" "Eat more chicken!"

Happy Birthday Jacqueline!  I hope you had a fantastic birthday!  

The day we wore our turkey hats that we made to lunch!

Working hard to create their model Mayflower boats.  Will they float?

Yes!  We were all able to make our boats float!  

What an awesome bunch of indians!

I hope all of you enjoyed the Thanksgiving break and spent plenty of time with the ones you love most!  Mine included family time, Aggie football, and lots of shopping!

My favorite time of the year is here!  I can't wait for the kids to come in the morning and see our Christmas tree all ready for some handmade ornaments!

Apple Activities

Hooray!  Testing is FINALLY over and Report Cards were sent home on Thursday! I am so pleased with the progress that all of my Happy Campers have made!  You should be very proud of your child!

In the midst of testing, we did some fun apple activities!  Here is LeAnna posing with the life cycle poem art activity that we made about apples.  It says "Eat an apple, Save the core.  Plant some seeds and grow some more!"

My'Yame, Herschel, and Kalli showing off their fun apple glyphs that they made based on questions I asked about apples.

We also celebrated Devynn's birthday!  I hope you had an amazing 6th birthday, Devynn!

Check back soon for scarecrow and turkey fun!

Happy Halloween!!

Happy Halloween!!

We have done many fun activities to get us ready for the big day!  Jacob did an awesome job creating a spooky pattern for his haunted house!

The kids really enjoyed learning about spiders.  To wrap up our spider week we did a cool spider experiment (for another post) and made these neat webs by marble painting for our spider creations.

I loved making these Trick-or-Treaters with my pre-k kids, so I knew this was a must do for kindergarten as well!  Aren't they too cute?  Jonathon thinks his is!

And today...FALL FOLLIES PARTY DAY!  What a wonderful, fun, and tiring way to start off our week!! :)  We partied all day long!  The annual Fall Follies parade was this morning, and I think my Happy Campers were the best dressed kids in the parade!

This afternoon we watched a fun Halloween movie, carved our pumpkin, played fun Halloween games, and ate LOTS of junk!

Xitlali getting our pumpkin prepared for carving!

I hope everyone has a great night and rests up for our new unit that starts tomorrow!

Outdoor Garden Fun

We started last week with Kalli's birthday!  I hope you had a wonderful 6th birthday, Kalli!

Also, we went to the garden to have our first Outdoor Learning Lesson with Mrs. Lansley!  She talked to us about the rules of the garden and read us a funny bat story.  Then she showed us the "bat bush" and let us each take a flower for our journals.  It was really cool to see how similar the flower looks to a bat!

  We made bat masks to wear to the garden, but when it was soo chilly we decided to keep them inside!

We have also been busy learning all about pumpkins.  Here is Devynn showing her painted pumpkin bag.  The kids cut out small pictures of the life cycle of a pumpkin and glued them to a piece of yarn on the back of their pumpkins.

Fall Follies will be here before we know it!  Every morning we count down the days until we get to wear our costumes to school!!  7 more days!!

It's Been a While...

One of our favorite color days was pink day because Jacob R. brought pink bubblegum for all of us to chew!  We all tried VERY hard to blow a bubble, but only a couple of the kids were able to show off their rare talent!  Here is Kalli working on a big bubble!

As I mentioned earlier, blue day was fun because the kiddos got to make these cookie monsters!  Kaylie did a wonderful job sorting her cookies!

The kids enjoyed getting to make their shape monsters because they were able to choose their monster's shape, color, and number of eyes!  I love McKenna's blue monster!

This past week we moved on to learning all about bats, and two of the kiddos' favorite activities were making these bats to store their -at word list in and the bat glyphs.  Anything with painting is sure to be a favorite in my classroom!  

Brayden worked very hard creating his -at list using his best handwriting!

Kaylyn is SO proud of her bat glyph!  It is hard to see in this picture, but Kaylyn's bat has a gold smile because she is not afraid of bats!  She filled in the blanks with "the, the, and see."

This week we will be learning all about pumpkins!  There is lots of learning and fun going on in our classroom!

Color Unit Fun!

Our color unit is off to a wonderful start!  I have to admit, seeing the awesome participation of all of my kiddos wearing a "color of the day" is pretty neat!  I had my mind set to take a class picture each day of everyone wearing the "color of the day" and I forgot to take a picture of all the fun activities we've done!  It's already on the to do list for Monday!  We made cute cookie monsters on "blue day", shape monsters, and big green monsters on "green day!"

Here are all the kids wearing orange today!

Another exciting activity going on in our classroom is a Chicka Chicka Boom Boom letter exchange that I signed us up to participate in.  We have been receiving mail from kindergarten classes all over the U.S. with letters that they've created for us.  We place a sticker on our map for each letter we receive and then find the school on Google Maps.  It has been fun to compare our school with others far away from us!  

Our letter was Z, so we painted our Z's to look like zebras, added a wiggly eye, and a yarn mane.  We had some very creative zebras to mail off to our new pen pal friends.  Here are the kids posing with their Z's.

 This is what our map looked like before we added all of the letters we received yesterday!

We should be receiving the rest of the letters to complete our alphabet within the next couple of weeks!  So exciting!!

Farewell Farm

We learned so many new things and did lots of fun activities during our farm unit!  Some of our favorites include:

 Making homeade vanilla ice cream - the kiddos said it was better than Blue Bell!  We saw first hand how a liquid (cow's milk) becomes a solid, and it was super exciting!  I did not get any pictures during this fun afternoon but a special thank you to Mrs. Becky, my mom, for coming and helping with the experiment!  

We celebrated Richard's birthday with yummy cupcakes and juice!  I hope you had an awesome day, Richard!

We made a farm fact book where we thought of facts about each farm animal and chose our favorite one to write.  Brayden, Jacob, Xitlali, and McKenna posing with their favorite page from the book:

 We also made a fun cow glyph where the kids decorated their cow based on themselves.  I'll have to get a picture of them tomorrow!

To wrap up our farm unit we read The Little Red Hen.  Our class loved the story, especially getting to "shake" butter and eat it on my "homeade" bread!  The girls and boys each worked as a team and made their own jars of butter.

  And here is Jacob spreading his butter and enjoying it!  Everyone thought the butter was yummy!

This week we start our two week color unit!  I think it will be one of new my favorites! :)

Busy Kindergarten Days!

We have been busy getting into the routine of kindergarten!  It is hard to believe we have already made it through our first fifteen days of school!!  Last week we did our bear unit, complete with a Teddy Bear parade to finish our study!  All of my kids had such cute teddy bears with unique names! :)

We have really been working hard on making AB patterns!  To show how well we are doing with patterning, we gave our bears a patterned tie made out of small bears.  Here is Kalli with her red and blue patterned tie!

This week we began our farm unit!  This is one of my favorite units!  Everyone drew a self-portrait as a farmer and added animals you see on the farm.  Richard is very proud of his work!

We also focused on the story, The Three Little Pigs.  We made these cute pig pockets to store the book that we made to go along with the story.  Jacqueline did a wonderful job making her pig!

Please do not forget to keep voting for our Limeades for Learning project, "Kindergarteners Flip for Technology"

An Awesome First Week!

Wow!  We had an awesome first week of school!  We got to know our new friends, had fun using the SMARTboard, made some cute activities to go with our "All About Me" unit, and celebrated birthdays!!

Here is Jacob R. posing with our fun torn paper rainbow names.  We learned all about the order of the colors of the rainbow!

And here is Brayden posing with his fabulous self portrait.  Check out his mohawk hair :)!  We talked about the first letter in our names and then something we like that also starts with that letter.  Brayden's says, "B my name is Brayden and I like beavers."

Happy Birthday Kaylyn and Kaylie!  I hope you both enjoyed your birthday!