Filling Buckets

Good Afternoon!  At the end of the day today I asked students "fist to five" and rate their day.  A fist would mean, this was the worst day ever and a five would mean, this was the best day of my life!!!  We had a lot of fives which tells me we are having a blast in kindergarten.  One kiddo showed a fist, so of course I had to ask why.  His response was, "we haven't watched a story on our big screen yet."  Well, we started a story on Tumblebooks right away and his fist quickly changed to a five.  It's the little things. :)

We started our day with some under the sea work that tied into our story of the week.  I asked students how they get to school.  Here are our responses:

This morning we went through two rotations of our centers.  We worked with play dough, did some reading with Mrs. Huettl, continued our individual learning path on abcmouse.com, and made school buses with our volunteer, Mrs. Smutka!  We will continue our center rotations tomorrow.

We started talk about handwriting today.  We read a story about a zoo keeper who invites the animals over to his house as long as they stay in their place!  Uppercase letters are gorillas because they are large and in charge.  Turtle letters are those that stay on the first floor, such as a and e.  Our tall letters that touch both the floor and the ceiling are giraffe letters, such as t and f.  Finally, we have our silly monkey letters that let their tails droop down into the basement.  These are letters like g and y.  We wrote a couple of our friends' names and figured out what kind of letters they have.  We figured out the each name has one gorilla and it's at the beginning of the name!

Mr. Tinjum came in this morning and did a great lesson on being bucket fillers.  Doing kind things and being polite will fill other people's buckets.  Doing mean things or being disrespectful take away from people's buckets.  We call those bucket dippers.  We each made our own kindness buckets today and worked hard to be bucket fillers!

We were busy today, but we also found the time this morning to get in our Mystery Letter, P,p.  We made purple puffy p's using purple crayons and pom-poms or puff balls as many friends called them. :)

Keep reading at home and marking down your minutes.  The orange slips that were turned in from last week will be a part of tomorrow's drawing.  I hope we have a winner!!!

Love,
Mrs. Huettl