70 Santa!

Good Afternoon-

Today we were quite crafty in kindergarten.  We made thumbprint cards and bags for our family's gift.  We made thumbprint trees on the card:

and thumbprint lights on the bag:

Inside you will find a special gift from your kindergartner!

Today was our seventieth day of school!  Can you believe it?!?!  We made 70 Santas this afternoon!  They turned out super cute, but the glue and glitter was still wet, so we will bring them home tomorrow.

Zero the Hero also brought us a cookie treat!

Today was staff ugly Christmas sweater day, so here is Mrs. Huettl (they called me foofy teacher all day!)

Tomorrow is a school-wide pajama day-so don't forget to wear your cozies!  We also have lots of fun activities planned for tomorrow!

Love,
Mrs. Huettl

Gingerbread Houses

Good Afternoon,

Today we started our festivities!  We read the book, Gingerbread Baby by Jan Brett and then created our own gingerbread houses!  There were so many creative ideas, I was blown away.  We had to take a group picture, I couldn't pick just a couple of these to show!!!

During math today we created a graph of our favorite colors!

Lucy and Alex found a creative way to use our foam alphabet tiles at choice time!

Have a great evening!  We have another day of fun planned for tomorrow!

Love,
Mrs. Huettl

Spreading Some Cheer

Good Afternoon!

This morning we work on the letter c and made some words using a game on the starfall website.

We met with Mr. Tinjum this morning and decorated grocery bags that will be used at Jim's Market this upcoming weekend!  What a great way to spread some cheer this holiday season!

In math today we played a game called, The Train Game.  We rolled the green dice and had to build a train up to 20 blocks long.  Then we used red dice to take the train apart.  This game helps to develop beginning addition and subtraction skills.  Feel free to start working on addition and subtraction of numbers at home.  We are working on plus or minus 1, 2 or 3 at school.

So far we have had a very routine week.  Tomorrow things will start to shake up a bit as we begin some holiday themed activities!  Can't wait!

Love,
Mrs. Huettl

A Double Post

Here we go...my attempts at thinking back to last Thursday, and a review of our day today....Got to love home Internet outages!

Last Thursday we discussed main idea.  We took items out of a mystery bag and had to decide what the main idea of the bag was.  Take a look:

Then we read our book and wrote down what was discussed on every couple of pages.  We used these details to determine our book's main idea:

Our fine motor stations for the next two weeks are as follows:

Lacing gingerbread men:

Pushing Ornaments into a tree, and pulling them out:

Picking up small beads and matching them to the colors of the snowmen's buttons:

We shared our journals with partners today.  It was fun to see what our friends are writing about!

On to Monday!

Today was a typical Monday which was reassuring and welcoming after last Friday's tragedy.  We read our new story Bear Snores On.  We also discussed our amazing words, including the word, blustery!

We keep our word work choices new and engaging.  This week's four new choices are:

Nuts and Bolts- screwing nuts with letters printed on them onto a bolt to make our sight words.

Speed Reader- students use a stop watch to record how many seconds it takes for them to read a list of sight words.  There are six trials, and students try to beat themselves each time.

Magnadoodles- Students write their sight words on the magnadoodles.

Roll and Write-Each sight word is paired up with a dice combination.  Students roll the dice and write the corresponding word onto their paper, making a graph of sight words.

Have a great night.  Hug your kiddos, and we'll see you tomorrow!

Love,
Mrs. Huettl

Having Fun!

Good Afternoon!

We had four literacy centers this morning. We explored the starfall.com website.  We all tried out the Gingerbread Man activity!

We matched animals and their babies (or juveniles) from our story this week.

We had to listen to beginning sounds and color pictures accordingly.  We also graphed our results.

We made a pig word wheel.  It was fun to stretch out the different sounds and read the words that popped up on our wheel!

During SMART time we had lots of new activities.  I'll explain some now, and more tomorrow.  We picked a picture from the purple pail and had to walk sideways down the balance beam.  This was a new way of balancing for many of us!  When we got to the end, we had to sort our picture by beginning sound and put it into the correct bucket.

In math today we talked about probability and used different variations of red and blue chips, asking ourselves what are we most likely to grab?  What would we be most likely to grab in this picture:

We also finished up our measurement trees today, complete with ornaments.  These will be hanging out in our kindergarten hallway!

Love,
Mrs. Huettl

A Chill in the Air

Good Afternoon!

We worked really hard durin gour Daily 5 time this morning!  Students were engaged in word work, reading to self, and listening to reading.  In fact, one student proudly cam up to me after one of our choices and said, "Mrs. Huettl, my name has two vowels and and two consonants in it!"  (I wonder which word work this kiddos chose today...)

Mr. Tinjum came in this morning and talked to us about the new word of the week:  Honesty.  We drew some pictures about not blaming others, or how it feels to be blamed for something you did not do.

In math today we order green paper strips by length.  Then we centered them on a piece of red paper and made a tree!  Tomorrow we will add ornaments to our trees.

This afternoon we started talking about adjectives, specifically referring to color.  Students were challenged to use a color word to describe something in their journal today.

Becuase we are talking about grassland animals this week, we have a giraffe project at the easel during choice time!

Each time we get dressed for outside, it takes a little less time.  Now onto organizing the coat room!

Have a great evening.  Stay warm!  See you tomorrow!

Love,
Mrs. Huettl

Let it Snow!

Best thing about practically eating brunch and having the first recess of the day?  We were the first ones to run through the freshly fallen snow!  What fun!  It doesn't get any better than that!

Getting everybody dressed and ready took quite a bit of time today.  The more independent your child can be at dressing themselves for the outdoors, including zipping coats and putting on mittens, the better.  

Happy Birthday Lena!!!!

This morning we read our new story, Animal Babies in Grasslands.  We found so many popcorn words in our book!  We underlined them with wiki-sticks.  

We used the ipads during guided reading today to make some of our sight words:

We had four new word work choices today.  We used whisper phones to read and practice spelling our words. 

We wrote our words in secret code-invisibly with white crayons, then painted over them with watercolors to reveal the words.

We wrote our words in markers-blue marker for consonants, and red marker for vowels.  

Our final word work choice was the crocodile chomp!  This basically means we sort our words according to the number of syllables in the word, but it's more fun with a crocodile head staring at you while you work!!!

This afternoon we worked on a secret project-so no pictures!!!

Hope you had a great evening!

Love, 

Mrs. Huettl 

S is for Skittles

Good Evening!

Happy Birthday Ellie!!! (One day early)

What a fun day!  We started out with a family breakfast for families with last names L-Q.  Here are some of the families from our class that attended this morning's breakfast:

This morning we talked about proper nouns.  A proper noun is the name of a person, place, or thing, or an animal.  Say that sentence to your child and see if they sing it back to you!

We practiced the letter S,s in handwriting.  This letter can be a bit tricky and is commonly reversed.  If you notice reversal of the letter S,s at home point it out to your child and have them correct the direction of the letter.

We met with our buddies this morning.  We shared our poem notebooks with our buddies and we played a matching game with dominos and our number cards.

This afternoon we had a fun math activity.  Since we are talking about the letter S this week, we ssss-orted and graphed SSSSS-kittles!  Yum!  We are showing secure graphing skills.  We do lots of graphing during our morning calendar math, and the practice is paying off!

I hope your family made it home safely...the roads got pretty slick!  Enjoy your weekend and the freshly fallen snow!

Love,
Mrs. Huettl