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Monday, November 7

Centers

Wow these last couple weeks have been flying by! I have lots of different centers to share that we have done in the past few weeks.

Alphabet Centers:
 Pasting split peas on the letter "Pp." The students did really well with this! I was pleasantly surprised by how carefully they placed the peas on their papers. (Go ahead and count all the "p" words I just used, haha!)
 Matching upper case and lower case letters to make acorns. Nice for a fall center and a good review of the alphabet.
The listening center includes a Language Master and two sets of headphones. The cards for the Language Master have the letters of the alphabet a picture and word to go with the letter. They hear my voice say the name of the letter, the sound it makes, and the word on the card. In the bin there are also sight word and sentence cards included, though you can only see the alphabet cards in this photo.





Sight Word Centers:
 Sight Word Graphing - Ms. Conyers found this idea on Pinterest and made her own. She shared it with the team and my class did this with me at my center in small groups so that I could make sure they understood how to color, count,  and graph properly.
 In this center the students chose a word card, then stamped the word and wrote the word twice. The idea of the tray was to contain the messy stamps but I suppose I didn't explain that very well, judging by this picture, haha.
 This one was a big hit and it was another idea I saw on Pinterest. The students had to search in the corn to find letter tiles to match their sight words which I had traced and written on the red paper.









Math Centers:
 I showed the students how to count and match up the numbers on the dominoes.











At this center, students rolled a number cube, wrote the number in a square and then placed that many stickers into the box. The students really love anything involving stickers!









Science Centers:
 The blue manipulatives have textures on the bottom. Students were told to feel the textures without looking and try to match them up. The wooden boxes with knobs make different sounds when you shake them, they listen and match the ones they think sound the same (they can check their answers by checking the colored dot on the bottom).
 At this center, students got to explore some seashells by using magnifying glasses and a scale. Many of them also held the shells up to their ears.
Most recently, we began to study day and night and the earth in space. At one center they cut and glued a sun (and also traced a sentence about the sun) and at another center that they did with me, they used cotton balls and white paint to make the moon, outlined it with glitter glue and used sticker stars around it. They also filled in some words in a sentence about the moon.

Last week we also did a fun activity to learn about the moon phases by using Oreo cookies. Check our classroom Shutterfly site for photos!

Sunday, November 6

Storybook Parade

On Halloween, the Kindergartners at our school do a Storybook Parade around campus. Each class chooses a different book and dresses up to match the characters or theme of the book. Then we form a long line and wind through all the classes in the school. See below to see the book our class chose - other classes included: The Wizard of Oz, Stripe, Splat the Cat, The Grouchy Ladybug, Go Dog Go, Elmer, Stellaluna, Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and Cowboy Bunnies.

This year, our class chose the book Rhyming Dust Bunnies by Jan Thomas. The book is a very cute and fun book about some dust bunnies that like to rhyme - and one dust bunny that is more concerned about the vacuum cleaner that's about to get them. I dressed as the blue (non-rhyming) dust bunny and the students got to choose between red, green and purple. They wore that color shirt and made a funny hat that matched. They also chose a set of rhyming words that I printed in matching color ink on label paper and stuck to their front and back.

Then we got in line with the other Kindergarten classes and walked around the school. They had a blast! And the teachers and students in the other grades seemed to enjoy watching us. The dust bunnies were a big hit!

There are lots more pictures on our classroom Shutterfly Share Site, be sure to take a look!