All About Me

Our This week was kind of all over the place because we still had to fit in 1 more staggered day for a few of our new friends while learning s out being bucket fillers and learning all about us. 

We learned about making good choices and being kind friends so we can be bucket fillers and we made happy little buckets to show that we will be try to make good choices. 

This week we will be learning all about ourselves and our friends and what makes us all special. One thing that makes us special is our names. 

We sang If Your Name Begins With ______ Please Stand Up and as they sold each child was handed the letter their name begins with. After we had everyone's letter we decorated them with stickers. 

We cut out the letter our name begins with from magazines and glued them into the middle of our letters. 

We read a story called Chrysanthemum and practices writing/tracing our names, counting how many letters are in our names. 

We read Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and created our own coconut trees, glued letter coconuts on our trees spelling our names. 

 We met Mat Man and learned all of the different parts of our bodies by drawing self portraits. 

Last but not least we made mosaic names so we could show off what makes us all special. 

We had such a great week at school and we can't wait to meet our first letter friend next week. 

Welcome Back!!

It is that time of year again. The smell of crayons and Lysol is in the air. It has been  a little over a week since the school year started and we have had inservice, parent orientation, and the first 3 days of school. I don't know if it is because I have been doing all of this for quite some time now ( 13 years) or because I am older and wiser, but everything is just falling into place and flowing so smoothly. 

For the first time I was not a nervous wreck at parent orientation. 

We start 4K with 3 staggered days where we have 6-7 of our friends come each of those days to help them get acclimated to the classroom and all of their new friends. I like to make things as fun and inviting the first day because I want them to see school as a fun place that they will want to come back to each and everyday . We started off our day coloring a few back to school pictures, playing fun get to know you games, and we made super cute first day of school hats.

One of my favorite stories for the beginning of the year is The Kissing Hand which is about a little raccoon named Chester who is scared to go to school. This story gives us the opportunity to talk about how we all felt the first day of school. After reading our story everyone worked to make their very own Chester the raccoon to help them remember that school is a fun place to be. 

After learning all about our classroom with a classroom scavenger hunt, we played on the playground and last but not least we played in centers. 

So for everything has gone as smooth as a well blended strawberry and banana smoothie and everyone seems to be having a blast. I can't wait to have our first full day of school and really get this school year started. 

Community Helpers

This week we learned all about Community Helpers and all of the important jobs they do. This was a short week so we tried to cram in as much fun as we possibly could in such a short amount of time.

We had so much fun this week learning our phone numbers and we will continue working on them along with our addresses and birthdays.

 

We learned all about firefighters and police officers and how they help protect us.

For jobs we made Cat C's

Car c's

We worked together in a group to roll 2 dice and add the dots together on both dice then we found the matching number on the road cone and circled it.

And we matched the equipment to each community helper building.

A Camping We Will Go

This week we learned all about the letter Y. You might be wondering what roundabout way we used to connect the letter Y and camping, but I assure it is quite simple. Yawn is one of the y words we learned about and when you yawn it is typically nighttime unless you are a mommy with a child going through a sleep regression then you are probably yawning all day, but I digress. So back to yawning and the letter Y. You typically yawn at night and nighttime is the perfect time to go camping hence the letter Y camping connection. 

We started off our week talking about thins you might bring with you when you go camping like a pack, a sleeping bag, hiking boots, and a lantern or flashlight. One thing I "forgot" to bring was a pair of binoculars so we made our own binoculars and what is the point of binoculars unless you can use them and what better way to use them than going on a nature scavenger hunt. 

One more thing we needed to make sure we had for our camping trip was a campfire. The most important thing you need to have to build a campfire are some rocks and some branches. Each friend searched all over the room to find one of each and once they returned to the carpet we worked together to build our campfire. 

We talked about many of the different creatures we would see while camping and one of the most beautiful is the lightning bug. We talked about the different forms of light God created for us, but nothing is more beautiful than this beautiful natural light. We watched a video of lightening bugs in a park and read The Very Lonely Lightening Bug. Next we created our very own lightening bugs to add to our camping mural.

Since we were learning about daytime and nighttime we thought it would be fun to begin working on telling time. We watched a smart board lesson on telling time to the hour then all of my friends worked on placing all of the numbers on their clocks in order.

Friday was the big day for our camping week because you can't talk about camping and not have a camp out and you can't have a camp out without pajamas so we had a big ole 4K Pajama party complete with smore cupcakes made by one of our amazing mamas! We started off our camp out by reviewing all of the different forms of light God created for us and we read the story of Jesus healing the blind man. We made candles to help remind us that Jesus is the light that leads us.

For jobs this week we made Yack Y's

yoyo y's

We counted firefly's in jars and matched the correct number

We made snakes by placing the numbers 1-10 in order

And we made forest creatures to add to our camping mural

Popcorn Kernels

This year we decided to introduce our students to the wonderful world of  Sight Words. Since they will be jumping right in to this once they start kindergarten we thought it would be fun to go ahead and introduce them to this skill so they won't get too overwhelmed. I know that we are still working on identifying letters and their sounds, but it doesn't hurt that they will at least see these words before they are expected to know them. The kindergarten class uses popcorn words so we decided it would be cute to start with popcorn kernels. We will be working on 2-3 sight words every 2 weeks and I am happy to report that our popcorn kernel words have already been a great success and my friends are loving telling me the password each morning!

5 Senses

This week we learned all about our 5 Senses and the letter X. 

What better way to learn about our senses than to play some games that used each one. We used our sense of sight and played Eye Spy. We used our sense of hearing and played a game where we had to guess what was making each sound inside our mystery box. We used or sense of taste when we tasted sweet, salty, and sour foods. We used our sense of smell when we smelled 4 different cups and decided what was in each one. 

To finish off our week we created a silly little bear to help remind a how we use each sense.

For jobs this week we made a Xylophone X and we placed the colorful bars in order from biggest to smallest

We made x-ray x's and we also placed the bones in order from largest to smallest

We painted with different flavored paints to create pictures we could smell

We created flap books by cutting out pictures and placing them under the sense we could use for each one.

And we sorted different sized bones into small, medium, and large columns

F Is For Farm

This  week we learned all about the farm. We started off our week by singing Old McDonald had A Farm and we learned about the jobs different animals do (cows give us milk, chickens give us eggs, and horses plow fields.

We watched the story of The Big Red Barn and made some cows for our farm

We Read Inside A Barn in The Country and we had a visit from Mrs.  Schmitz our school counselor. 

We learned about chickens and read Tilly Lays An Egg and created these super cute finger painted chickens

We also read Barnyard Animals and we watched a video on all of the different animals that live on the farm. 

For jobs this week we made an F Fox

An f flower

We practiced our gluing skills by makin glue dots on an apple 

 And then we used our glue to plant a pattern of seeds 

We also used unifix cubes to measure farm animals then we cut out the correct number and glued it with the correct animal. 

Last but not least we continued working on counting and number recognition skills by counting sets of farm animals, cutting out the matching number and gluing it with the correct set.