Apples! Apples! Apples!

We began our week of celebrating Johnny Appleseed's birthday by creating a portrait of him and reading a book about how he changed our world for the better.  We had learned the words present and past last week and talked about how portraits were how people made pictures of others before their were cameras like we have in the present.  We then talked about how Johnny was a good citizen.  He worked to plant as many seeds around the US in the west to make life better for others.  We discussed the many ways these trees would help people.  Some of the reasons these smart kiddos came up with were:

-giving us food to eat
-wood to build stuff with
-protection from the sun/heat
-air to breath

I was so excited to hear them sharing their thoughts.  Many of them even said they wanted to be just like Johnny Appleseed and do good things for others....that is music to my ears!  :)  We will be writing about how they can do just that and be good citizens themselves.


Here are some pictures of our portraits and the apple projects some of these creative kiddos brought in this morning.

Math Workshop

We have meetings in small group to work on different skills focused on for the week.  We just finished our first chapter in math on addition.  The kiddos are having fun learning the different strategies and ways you can manipulate numbers and objects to "add to" and "take from" a group.  One of our kiddos even used our vocabulary while eating snack.  :)  He said, "look Ms. Rains, I am taking away with my skittles.  I have 4 skittles, I eat 1, not I have 3.  It was so exciting to see him make that connection.  Loving out time in Math so much!

Here are some pictures of us in our small group meetings while the others are in centers.  We were using cubes to show taking away.

Writer's Workshop

We have been working on building up our writing stamina by spending time writing quietly on our own and then they meet with me to work on editing and expanding ideas and illustrations.  Here are some pictures from our writing block.  We end it by having students share their writing.

Marvelous Math Centers!!

We have really gotten into a good routine with our centers!  The kids especially like math centers.  We have been working with building numbers in different ways using cube trains, identifying even and odd numbers, and lots of addition activities to help build our fluency with combining numbers.  Here is a glimpse into what we have been up to in math.

Career Posters

During our writer's workshop today, we talked about creating posters to persuade others to do something or to show how great something is.  We have been talking about pets for a couple of weeks and this week we have talked about careers where people care for animals.  Each child created their own poster with a picture and a sentence to show others how great these many careers can be!  Here are a few of the students with their work.

We love our grandparents!!!

September 10th was grandparents day for us here at school and we had so much fun visiting with the grandmothers who were able to join us!  We also prepared by creating poems to take to our grandparents and we shared what we loved most about our grandparents!  To end our celebration of grandparents, we ate cookies and drank some yummy juice! :)

Chicka Chicka Boom Boom...we are having so much fun in our room!!

We finished up our Kindergarten review the week of August 26th and to celebrate that Friday, we had a Chicka Chicka Boom Boom party!  We made handprint coconut trees, explored a real coconut from the outside in, and had a silly taste test.  It was a fun day to close out our review of the alphabet!