Well, what I heard was it was the best day ever in their entire life, but I find that hard to believe!  Nevertheless, our Snowflake Day was a success.  We started our day watching the Dance of the Sugarplum Fairies from the Nutcracker.  I could not convince them that I was one of the dancers, which was disappointing but understandable.  We also listened to a story about Snowflake Bentley and looked at some of his photographs of snowflakes from so long ago.  We were inspired by his curiosity and by his persistence in finding a way to photograph the snowflakes.  
We needed persistence today!  We did a lot of folding, cutting, painting and designing.  It's really important that the children have lots of opportunities to try on their own before jumping in and drawing, folding, or doing a task for them.  We practiced cutting with some intricate turns.  I reminded the students to be sure to turn the paper instead of their hands as they made turns and sharp angles.  Encouraging them to show their best try sometimes takes a little longer, but it builds persistence and acceptance that not everything is going to turn out the way you planned the first time you try.  The best part of my day was listening in on them encouraging each other and noticing what others were doing.  They reminded each other that mistakes are allowed in our classroom, and reminded those who were wanting help to give it their best try.  Your children are bringing home some of the snowflakes we made today, but I will tell you are room is covered with snowflakes that are drying.  This group doesn't really buy into "less is more" and I'm glad they don't because that would give them a big misconception that might mess up their performance on our math tests!
They LOVED wearing pajamas today, and their stuffed animals and babies were very well behaved.  I hope you enjoy the photos I took today so you can get a peek into what our day was like!
Have a wonderful, safe and fun winter break.  I can't wait to hear all about it when we are back in 2019!
​Miss Wolfe

We had a busy day!  We worked on the Chromebooks this morning.  The children got to explore on ABCya, but seemed to stay mostly in the holiday section!  
We are learning about the life cycle of plants and animals for the next few weeks.  We looked at how mung bean seeds germinate, and a couple other time lapse videos.  The children wanted you to see these so I am posting them below.  We will be having our own little indoor "kinder garden" after break!

We especially liked the dancing bean plant!
In math, one skill we are working on is skip counting.  We practiced skip counting by doing some exercise.  For counting by tens, we lift imaginary weights over our heads and count by ten to one hundred.  For counting by fives, we stand with feet shoulder width apart and alternate arms, punching up in the air across our bodies, crossing the midline, and counting by fives.  Fives are trickier than tens, but for both skip counting by tens and fives, it's the first part to about 30 that is the trickiest!

We have gotten two postcards for our postcard project.  If you haven't sent out your postcards, it's not too late!  We will be letting this project go on for a while and hope to get a lot of postcards.  If you would like additional postcards, please let me know and I will be happy to send more home.  If you are traveling over the break, we would love to see a postcard from where you visited.

Tomorrow is Pajama Day.  Children are allowed to wear pajamas, but no slippers.  They may also bring a stuffed animal or doll no bigger than their backpack.

I would like to thank the class for the Amazon gift card!  What a nice surprise.  I will definitely put it to good use and buy more books for the classroom.  Thank-you again for your generosity!

Have a nice evening!
​Miss Wolfe

Today, we finished our crowns we started on Friday.  We were inspired by the crown the animals gave "the spiffiest giant in town."  The animals gave him a crown of kindness.  As a class, we  came up with why we would give our classmates a crown, then we decorated our crowns.  Enjoy these pictures!

In reading today, we listened to the story A Wish to Be a Christmas Tree, by Colleen Monroe.  This sweet story is about a tree who has never been selected to be a Christmas tree.  He is tall now and is sure no one will ever pick him.  We listened to the story and thought about how the characters' feelings changed throughout the story.  We thought of different feelings and words to describe the feelings, and used key details from the text to support our ideas.  Ask me to tell you what happened to the tree.
In math today, we practiced measuring.  Miss Wolfe was a real trooper and traced one shoe from each child to measure.  We used cubes, paper clips, popsicle sticks and tiny Legos to estimate and measure our shoe.  

Sorry for the late post.  I had an appointment after school!  

Have a nice evening!
​Miss Wolfe

Today we reread a story from yesterday called The Story of Frog Belly Rat Bone, by Timothy Basil Ering.  This is the story of a little boy who goes to Cementland to look for treasure.  We talked about what treasure is and how it can be a different thing for different people.  We read the story and identified the different feelings the main character was having throughout the story.  We broke the words into syllables, then wrote the words on three-part paper.  Then we illustrated each part and wrote a few words that told why the character felt that way in each part of the story.  Ask me to tell you The Story of Frog Belly Rat Bone.
We worked with ten frames in math.  We are working to identify how many dots are on each ten frame without counting every dot.  
We had our Bear Bucks Celebration this afternoon.  We made crowns, inspired by the story The Spiffiest Giant in Town, by Julia Donaldson.  We created titles for each child in the class by thinking of what made them special in our class.  We will finish the crowns Monday morning, and I'll take pictures to post on the website.  They will wear them home Monday!  Creating crowns takes a little longer than I anticipated!

Have a nice weekend!
Miss Wolfe

Today we added books to our library.  The hot books are the Piggie and Elephant books by Mo Willems.  These books are good books for beginning readers because they are some of the first books they recognize as "real books" they can read.  They will read them over and over and over.  I have had to replace these books many times over because of the love they get from the kinders.  
We reviewed finding how many syllables are in words.  The kids love tapping out the syllables of words.  This helps them in their writing as they are trying to put longer words in their stories, and also helps them in reading to start breaking about unknown words into smaller parts.
Just a reminder about all the books coming home now.  Tuesday is library day when we have a lesson in the library and check out new books.  Your child may check books out in the morning before we start instruction on other days as well as long as Mrs. Reiter is available to do that.  Sometimes she is pulled to cover a class or have some additional duty, so there may be times they cannot check out books on other days.  Read to Me, Talk to Me books will come home on Thursday and can be returned Wednesday or Thursday.  Please return them in the Piggie and Elephant bag and encourage your child to keep the book in the bag when they are not reading it.  Reading group books will come home on different days, so when your child has one, please try and read it that night so it can be returned the following day.  PLEASE return the bag as well so I know who returned their book/s.  I can't check all those little books in and out because I just do not have the time to do that, but the bag with their name lets me know who returned their book.

Have a nice evening!
​Miss Wolfe

We had another special field trip on Tuesday.  We studied landforms in Alaska.  We focused on mountains and glaciers.  Then we looked at a video of how mountains are formed.  We wrote a postcard to Mrs. Oglesby telling her about what we saw on our field trip.

In math we talked a little bit about place value.  Some of the students are confusing some numbers, such as 12 and 21.  We watched a Sesame Street clip to show how the order of the numbers is important.  We will talk more about place value and work with manipulatives that will help students understand this important concept.

In case you didn't see the e-mail I just sent out, we are NOT going to have a pajama day on Friday.  I just checked the forecast and it is going to be very cold in the morning, so we will do something messy instead!  The kids picked pajama day for our next reward when we got our last reward, but it's just too cold.  I thought it would be warmed on Friday, and I should not have told them we could do it before checking the weather.  We will have pajama day another time, I promise!  

Have a nice evening!
​Miss Wolfe

We had a busy day!  We worked on postcards for our postcard project.  Be sure to check your child's folder and find a card with four postcards.  These are to be mailed to friends and family around the country and around the world.  The children worked so hard to draw four pictures of our school.  We studied some pictures of our school and noticed the shapes used in the building.  We also noticed the different colors on different sections of the school.  The kids really worked diligently to create the best pictures of our school that will be sent to friends and families.  This is always such a fun project because we use the postcards in our literacy stations for the kids to read and find where they are from on maps.  If you would like additional cards, just e-mail me and I will send home another sheet.

We are working with short i right now.  We read a poem about slippers and thought of words that have ip in them.  Ask me to show you the poem and read the words I wrote.

In math, we started working with double ten frames.  The kids are working to know how many dots the ten frames have without counting, and how many more they need to make ten on one ten frame, and twenty on two.  We also worked with measurement.  We put Cuisennaire rods, little wooden rods of different lengths and colors, in order from smallest to tallest.  Then we worked on trying to find rods to find equivalent lengths.
Here are a few pictures from math today.  Enjoy!

Have a nice evening!
​Miss Wolfe