Just another day?!?!? NO WAY! Today was amazing!!!

 

We would like to formally announce the arrival of our first baby chick! There appears to be at least one more baby hatching so we will just have to wait and sewe what happens tomorrow! Can I tell you have very excited we were today? It was a day of celebration! Not only were they chicks hatching but we have officially finished meeting every alphafriend! Keep checking back for chick progress and updates, as well as what we will do next, now what we have finished learning the alphabet! Kindergarten is the place to be!!!

Hey, do you know what "going green" means?!?!?!

Such a BIG question for our little Kindergarten kids! The best part of working with kids is it doesn't matter if they know the answer or not, you will always get an answer! So in honor of Earth Day, we started the day with a question. What does "going green" mean? After the questions, we talked about Earth Day, what we can do to help, and to be in true Kindergarten form learned a song about the 3 R's: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle! Isn't Kindergarten fun?!?!? We just love it! Happy Earth Day to you all!! Enjoy and help take care of our Earth that we like to call home!

HaTcHiNg EgGs In KiNdErGaRtEn!?!?!?

Of course! It is a great way to observe science in action and learn about life cycles and scientific observations and much more!! Our eggs arrived last Tuesday and we put a dozen different types of chicks into our incubator. We have learned so much about our chicks or what we now call the embryo's because we are such amazing scientists! In fact, we are becoming experts about chicks and their cycle of life. For example, it takes around 21 days for our chicks to hatch, they are currently being fed by blood vessels inside of the shell, they have a heart that is beating and the eggs need to be kept in temperatures around 100 degrees. It is such a fun time in Kindergarten! The kids love learning about them and even chose to sing "special" lullabies to them as they are busy growing, instead of playing in housekeeping and with Lego's. Can you believe it? Instead of Legos!!!!

Did you think I wouldn't write about those crazy leprechauns? Silly you!

Around March 17th, something happened to our classroom. When we arrived at school, our classroom was destroyed and noone ever saw anyone going in or out! There were chairs and coloring on the tables, toys left out and taken everywhere. Math games were strung throughout the room and there was even glue on our "must dos", not to mention rainbow drawings as well! Can you believe it? Rumor has it that some crazy leprechauns came into our school and tried to learn but have not been taught how to behave and/or take care of our things. We did try to leave them a letter (making sure to be specific) telling them that we don't mind them coming but there are rules in our room and they are going to have to make sure and follow them. We didn't like cleaning up after them (Just like Mrs. Ryan keeps telling us about her having to pick up after us!!) Of course, those tricky leprechauns left all kinds of "clues" for us to analyze and help us learn about the actual holiday (St. Patricks Day) but not really enough figure it all out. The best thing we came up with was to build traps! So, that is exactly what we did! Take a peek at some of our traps we built! Every studenthad great stories on how they would lure the leprechaun in and what would have to take place in order to catch them.

Oh, by the way, we didn't end up catching a leprechaun. They are so tricky! They were interested and were occupied by our traps leaving footprints all over our room! Believe it not, they even left us a note and some "chocolate gold" coins but no leprechauns were found anywhere! We sure did have fun trying though!

A little note from the teacher!

I need to say how very sorry I am that I haven't been better about updating our blog this past month. My whole family has been quite sick (Including me!) and we have had a terrible time getting over it! For this reason, each night after I got home, I was either too tired to play on the computer or I had sick kids or a husband to take care of. I do hope you know how much I enjoy working with your children and that pictures are taken almost daily, even if they are not posted here! (Please don't worry! I am making each family a little surprise for the end of the year!!) I am feeling much better now and hopefully, we will get back into the routine of posting and keeping you all updated!
Thanks for understanding!!! Thanks again for the opportunity to work with your kids! I love each of them and am so proud of them all!

A Very Special Ceremony!

I am sure that many of you know that the letter q is always followed by the letter u. Some examples are, quilt, queen, quit, quite, quiet and so many more that we cannot mention them all here! For this reason, it only makes sense that our Kindergarten classes would throw them a wedding to be together forever in words everywhere! So this past Wednesday, before our Valentines Party, we had a wedding for these two special letters! We made flags and necklaces for us to be the remaining letters in the alphabet to support the two letter friends and then the ceremony started! Of course, no wedding is complete without singing and dancing to the Chicken Dance, having some wedding cake and punch, and giving a "quilt" to the new letter couple! What a perfect ceremony to hopefully always remind us when we hear the /q/ sound, we will always add the vowel u behind it! We had a wonderful day and we are quite certain that there were even a few tears of joy as the ceremony took place! Who said that learning to read can't be fun!?!?!?!

A BIG thanks to all of the parents that helped with our big day! Also a HUGE thanks to Mrs. Thomas (Intervention teacher~Q for AM ceremony), Mrs. Dines (Intervention Teacher~Q for PM ceremony) and Mr. Harris (6th grade Teacher~U for both ceremonies), Mrs. Knudson (Extended Teacher~Master of Ceremony) for helping us put the wedding and making it a success! Without all of you, the wedding would never have been the success that it was! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!!

Gung Hay Fat Choy!

Monday we learned about and celebrated Chinese New Year! We have been working so hard and learning so much about reading, writing, and math it was nice to work on some other things. For example, foreign cultures, new languages and traditions, fine motor skills (chop sticks!) and of course the ever missed snack! We had a great time! Hopefully, you got to hear stories about our fun-filled day and your child greeted you with "Gung Hay Fat Choy" or Happy New Year! Here are some pictures of our special day!