We are Scientists

If you are wondering why your child is coming home tired, I have to believe it is because of all the things we are getting accomplished each day!  Boy, do we work hard in kindergarten!

This morning we continued our baseline assessment by assessing upper and lowercase letter recognition.  We have quite a few smart cookies in here!  We know our letters!

Our Mystery Letter today was S,s.  We watched an interactive video and made a snake motion with our hand.  Ask your child to see how the snake moves and what sound the letter s makes.  We decorated our letters with sparkly star stickers. 

Our SMART time is up and running.  Students went through two different rotations today.  One rotation focused on eye/hand coordination and fine motor, while the other rotation was geared towards large motor and balance.  In the first rotation we picked up mini pom-poms with a tweezers and put them into egg cartons.

Then we worked out our wrists and twisted and untwisted nuts and bolts.

To work on our eye/hand coordination and tracking we covered one eye and traced this "pizza" with our finger.  We did the same thing covering the other eye, and once again using both eyes.

In the large motor rotation we did hot dog rolls, then crawled across the "creep track" identifying letters on our way across.

We worked our core muscles doing popcorns.  We had to do ten popcorns, and we had to count backwards.  After popcorns, we moved to the trampoline and bounced while identifying some of our Mystery Letters.  Then we went across the balance beam.  Today we worked on moving slowly and putting out our airplane arms. 

After the beam, we did ten helicopter spins, again, counting backwards from ten.

After SMART time, we started science.  We talked about how various things that scientists do.  We received our science notebooks and talked about how we will be scientists that study trees for the next few weeks.  We went outside with our science notebooks to observe a tree and record our observations in our notebooks.

This afternoon during journals, we started to receive our goals.  Each student will receive an individualized goal for his or her journal by the end of the week.  When the student applies the skill in their journal, they will receive a sticker in the "I can" column.  When the student has achieve their goal three times, they will receive a new goal that fits their stage of writing development.  Here are some examples of goals that were given today.

Have a wonderful evening!  See you in the morning!