What have we been doing??

 We have been so busy since starting the new year and what a great start it has been! So glad to be getting back to normal at home and at school. :)

When we came back to school after our long Christmas break we learned about Winter and Arctic animals.
I found this great idea on pinterest! I mixed shaving cream and glue and we created our own "Snowmen." They turned out so cute! We tore paper to add details and then wrote describing words about our snowmen.

We also learned about ice and how it melts. We played a game called  "melt the ice." Each table was a team and each team member had to roll the dice to see how they would get to melt the ice. Either by blowing on it for 10 sec, holding it for 10 sec, dropping it in water for 10 sec, or dropping a pinch of salt on it. They loved it! If you are still learning about winter I recommend this activity! I have the roll sheet I made, if you need it let me know I can email it to you. We talked afterward which method worked the best! Great science activity!

We learned about two Arctic animals thanks to Mrs. Jump's unit.

Here we are asking and graphing which one you like best and our recording sheet.

We also talked about how we celebrate New Year's and why people make resolutions. We made our own resolutions.

I know the picture is kinda hard to tell but its her face and a party hat. Her goal it to help her mommy clean. How sweet is that. Wish she would come to my house! ;) We are also learning about the Chinese New Year!

We have had so much fun celebrating all the fun Winter brings. Next week we are going to do an author study on Jan Brett and her books The Mitten and The Hat. I have made a few things to go with them and if I can teach myself how I hope to have them up or at least pics of them up soon.  Next week is my schools accreditation week and committee members will be there. Ekk!! :) I know we will do fine! I teach at the greatest kindergarten school I know.

Hope you all have a wonderful wet weekend! By the way we are finished with winter DIBELS and we did Awesome!!! Just like I knew they would, they are SO SMART! Just love my little ones!

Merry, Merry Christmas!

Alright, Christmas gifts are bought and wrapped, house is clean, laundry is done, and I am posting in my PJ's today, its official I am ready for Christmas!!! Now it's time to get a new post up!

We have had lots of things going on in kindergarten since Thanksgiving. Christmas is always a special time in kindergarten. We have seen Santa, made crafts, learned about reindeer, rode the polar express,  wrote our Christmas letters, and even managed to get some regular reading activities and DIBELS done in between! whew!  Here is one of my babies working in a math center. In math, we have been working a lot on patterns, number words, color words and numbers 10-20. In reading, we have been working on ending sounds in words, and focusing a lot on writing letters and our last names.

 

 Our Santa craft from Deanna Jump.

 Our list to Santa also from Deanna Jump. He wants a dinosaur, an alligator, and a car :)

 She wants a barbie house, a dress and pink boots :)

 Wanted to share this pic. This is one of our centers we call beat the clock. After they finish their center work, one child works the timer and the other sees if they can say all the letter names and make it to the star. This has helped with our LNF on DIBELS. So easy right! and they love it!

 My class in our PJ's enjoying the Polar Express.

 We even had hot chocolate! yum!

 We graphed if we liked hot chocolate. Saw this graph on pinterest, don't remember who's it was on. sorry!: /

After all that excitement, our Christmas celebrations were not over. Our awesome school and PTO sponsored our Christmas story telling festival. We got to travel to some awesome stations.

 We made cute paper plate ornaments.

 Our awesome PE coach hosted reindeer games in the gym!

 Our librarian read Gingerbread Friends by Jan Brett. Doesn't our library look amazing!

 We even had a special visit from Mr. C himself. We were so surprised!

He told us we were so good at Big Spring Lake Kindergarten that he brought everyone an early Christmas gift!

As you can see we have had a wonderful and busy few weeks leading up to Christmas. I love this time of year with the kiddos! I hope you all are enjoying your little vacation with your sweeties and taking in all the Christmas magic. I am looking forward to hitting the ground running in January. We are on the downhill slide to being first graders! Can you believe it!? I hope you all have a very Merry Christmas and remember what and who the season is all about. Don't forget to hug those little ones, I miss them like crazy!

My first Blog award!!

So today I was taking some time to look through some emails I have received the past week and look what I found.....  another sweet blog obsessed teacher, Tanya at Ms. Solano's Kindergarten ,nominated my little  blog for a new bloggers award. WOW! Thank you very much Ms. Solano! I am so excited!!!! This is my very first award! :) YEAH! I haven't been blogging very long and I know I have LOTS to learn. Thanks for all the inspiration and encouragement teacher friends!

This award is for newbies, and it's goal is to spotlight up-and-coming blogs with less than 200 followers.  If awarded, you must:

♥ copy and paste the award on your blog

♥ thank the giver and link back to them

♥ reveal YOUR top five picks and leave a comment letting them know

♥ hope your followers will share the love with them :)

Here are my five newbie picks. Enjoy!!

*The Adventures of Room 216

*Mrs. Wills Kindergarten

*Mrs. Bearden's Kindergarten Class

*Miss Chamblee's Kinder Friends

*Mrs. Doyle's Kindergarten Kaleidoscope

 

On an unrelated note, this little teacher has been worn out from all the Christmas fun I was able to have with all my sweet kiddos. The big plan is to be updated in the blog world this week!! :)  But before this I MUST finish Christmas shopping!!!Can't wait to get some much needed Christmas activities and pics up.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I know its been a little while since I updated, but here it goes. :)
We have had so many awesome things going on at BSLK these past few weeks. We have been able to meet great children's authors, learned about Pilgrims, Indians, and Thanksgiving, had a Thanksgiving feast, did an awesome job in our Thanksgiving program, preformed in our PTO program,  took 400+ kindergarten students and teachers to see the Little Aggies Theater preform Little Red, and even went to a real Pow Wow! whew!!!!! And I got very few pictures because my husband took our camera on his hunting trip to Colorado. I know what I am going to ask Santa for Christmas! ;)

Here are a few pics of our Thanksgiving literacy centers. Just so you know, I didn't make all these centers, but all were made by BSLK teachers. I am so glad we share!

 Working on number order with our Pilgrim hats.

 Here is the sheet that goes with the number order.

 Patterns

 rhyming words

 word families, this center had pilgrims with -ap, -at, and -am words written on them. Forgot to get a pic of those.

 Our new lakeshore game! We love it! It's letter of the day. They are able to pick a letter and find things that begin with the letter's sound, practice writing the letter, and learn a song about the letter's sound. We love our board!

Art center

 I hope you are all enjoying your little blessings this week! They are all so special and smart. If you haven't noticed yet, we are beginning to read!!!!!! Its so exciting to see them starting to understand reading and read words on their own. I need to take pictures of their faces when they read words to me at school. I promise you see a little light bulb go off and they want to read everything! So proud of all of them. If you are looking for practice this week while they are off, letting them play on starfall.com is great , letting them draw pictures and sound out words to label items in their pictures, or just reading with them are all great ways to practice.

I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving full of family, friends and memories. I am so thankful to be your child's first real teacher and that you trust me with your most special gift everyday. Hug them tight for me this week.

Happy Halloween!

Since Halloween was on a Monday this year, we were able to have lots of celebrating at school! I have been tell the kids that we were going to be able to investigate our pumpkin and this week we did! We did an experiment to see if we thought our pumpkin would sink or float. We had 9 people think it would float and 9 people who thought it would sink! We were split! We found out that our pumpkin........FLOATS! We talked about why it floats even though it is heavy. We also were able to carve our pumpkin into a Jack-o-Lantern! We voted on our face and mushed our hands in pumpkin guts! YUCK! We lit our Jack-o-Lantern while we had a special Halloween snack. Thanks to all the moms who were able to help. We were even able to trick-or-treat at BSLK! We had a blast making spooky noises in the dark hallways and visiting our lunch room, office, library, and specials teachers and staff. Whew! The kids and I were tired,
but ready to trick-or-treat again that night.

 Making our predictions  if our pumpkin would sink or float.

 Will it sink or float?????

 Some very scary vampires! Thank you Jaxon!

Some kindergarten witches!

We are finally winding down from our candy filled Monday. We are moving right along to studying about Indians, Pilgrims, and Thanksgiving. We will have some very busy weeks ahead of us so parents, please check our folders daily and read our newsletter. I'm so thankful to have all your little sweeties this year.

Have a great weekend and I must say, ROLL TIDE!!

The Pumpkin Patch!

So, this past week we went on our very first field trip of the year! We had a blast at the pumpkin patch!  They were so good on our trip and so happy! I got plenty of great pictures of all the little sweeties! I hope they all told you all about our trip and enjoyed their pumpkins they were able to take home. Also, thank you to all the parents who were able to join us; I couldn't have done it without you. I love field trips, but Mrs. Snead was worn out! :) I am  really looking forward to our trip to the zoo this spring. (p.s. If your child made it home with our green field trip t-shirt on, please wash it and return it to school this week. Thanks )

 Sliding down the hay slide!

 So excited about picking a pumpkin from a real pumpkin patch! We talked about how a pumpkin grows!

 One of my little farmers!

 Riding the cow train!

 Loved playing in the corn crib! We got to take off our shoe! It felt great between our toes!

 Thinking out a game of checkers. Don't you just want to hear their conversation?

On our way back to school, this says it all! What a FUN day we had!

This next week we will be talking about the letter C. We will also be learning more about fall. We are looking at candy corn, pumpkins and leaves this week. Looking forward to another great and maybe a little less busy week! 

Just a quick one!

Hi everyone! Sorry I am just now getting to update. Our week last week was so busy with report card testing, DIBELS, math assessments and fire drills  that we had to squeeze in the letter S and spooky spiders :). Didn't get to take pictures, but we had an awesome week. We learned about spiders to go along with the letter we studied. We read fact books about spiders, sang the itsy, bitsy, spider,  made spiders in our art center, and got to watch one of my all time favorite videos Charlotte's Web (only as a little break and reward for all our hard work testing ;) ). The kids loved it! We didn't get to do as much as I would have liked, but maybe later this month we can come back to that.
Ok, so this week is our field trip to the pumpkin patch!! We are so excited and our pumpkin patch field trip fell on the week we are studying the letter P and pumpkins! What a great way to end a unit of study! We will be learning how a pumpkin grows and after our field trip we will get to do fun experiments with our pumpkin! I am so excited! Looking forward to posting lots of great pics of our trip!