Learning Lots

Good Evening!

Today was packed full of learning.  We continued with our reading centers so now everyone has participated in all four activities.  For an overview of these activities check yesterday's post.

We had new activities during our SMART time today.  We bounced syllables on the trampoline.

We did different poses on spots that spread across a portion of our room.  Poses included a tree:

V-sit:

We also had three new fine motor stations.  We used a push pin to poke out leaf shapes from construction paper.

We practiced using clothespins and clipped them onto cardboard circles.

The final station was a tricky one.  We had to use tongs to try to flip paper cups over.  It sounds simple enough, but it was tricky!!

In science today we talked about the difference between broadleaf and conifer trees.  We drew pictures in our science notebooks to show the difference.

In math we compared our height to the height of different objects around our classroom.  Somethings were taller, somethings were shorter, and others were about the same.

We drew pictures of the different objects and added them to a chart.

Today we started Art Adventure.  Elijah's mom, Ms. Olivia came in and showed us a photograph of a room from the 1700s.  We compared the picture to a room from 2012 and we found lots of interesting differences, and some similarities too!  Ms. Olivia gave us an outline for a 2012 room to color and design at home.

One of our favorite new songs is the Vowel Bat song.  Here is a picture of us flying to the music!

Noah was the winner of the Readathon drawing today!  Keep reading and turn in those orange reading slips!  Our goal is for 100% of our friends to turn in at least one reading slip during the month.

Happy Reading!

Love,
Mrs. Huettl

Workin' Hard

Hello Everyone!

Today we work hard workers!  We had lots to do.  In fact, we were working so hard today, Mrs. Huettl forgot to take pictures!  I do have a few final product pics though!

This morning we worked together with our table groups to sort coins.

We have four new centers this week.  In the art center we are making Fix-It Ducks.  They are turning out super cute!

For word work, we cut apart the words I and am and then glued them in the right order.  We also practiced writing the words and doing our best coloring.

We had two different types of technology in our centers today.  Students are gaining independence with the ABCMouse program on the laptops.  With Mrs. Huettl we learned how to listen to reading using the ipod touches.  It's amazing how second nature these touch screen devices are for these kiddos!

Our Mystery Letter today was the letter U,u.  We of course needed to represent both sounds the letter U makes, so we decorated with umbrellas and unicorns. 

During journals today we did a fantastic job planning out our stories and counting the number of words we wanted to write!  Yay!

Enjoy your evening.  Keep on reading-all those minutes add up!

Love,
Mrs. Huettl

Fix It Duck

Good Afternoon!

Today we started our new story, Fix-It Duck.  Fix-it Duck means well and tries to fix the problems of all his friends, which often leads to new problems!

Here are some of our amazing words:

We continue to work on reading and writing our "popcorn" words: I and am.  We call them popcorn words because they keep "popping" up in our reading.  Today we took a stick of butter (a highlighter) and buttered our popcorn words in a new book, I am a Shape.  This book uses a combination of sight words and picture clues to help students read independently.  We are also working on pointing to each word as we read.

Starting next week, we will be bringing books home to practice reading with our families.  Remember, this practice time can also count towards Read-a-thon minutes!

In math today we continued working on a lesson from last week involving sorting coins.  We talked about the two sides of a coin: heads and tails.  We also sorted coins on our Activboard.  Tomorrow morning we will sort coins with our table groups.  Identifying the name and value of coins is not expectation yet, but the exposure is great!

We put off our journals today to get in another Mystery Letter.  We should have all our letters complete before the MEA break.  Today we made red, rocky Rs.  Because we worked on these this afternoon, they were not dry enough to take home.  We will bring them home tomorrow, but here is a sneak peek:

Have a wonderful evening.  Stay warm!  See you in the morning!

Love,
Mrs. Huettl

Our First Guest Teacher

Good Afternoon! This morning was our first Family Breakfast.  Somerset PTA sponsors a breakfast four times per year in which families are inviting based on last name order.  This morning families with last names R-Z were invited to breakfast.  Here are some photos of our friends:

This morning we worked on building our reading stamina and we were able to read for 7 minutes!!!  Yahoo!!!

One of our focuses this week was rhyming words.  We passed out various puzzle pieces with rhyming words and had to walk around the room to find our puzzle match.  Once we found our partner, we put our puzzle together and sat down.  Then Mrs. Huettl turned into a dancing fairy and went around the room with her pink fly swatter.  When the fly swatter was above our heads, we read our rhyming words out loud.  This was a super fun game!

Our comprehension skill this week was character.  We talked about our favorite characters from the book, The Little School Bus. We also acted out the story with the help of a few of our friends.

We had SMART time this morning.  We are really starting to get the hang of the different activities involved in this movement time.

We also squeezed in a Mystery Letter.  Today we put number stickers onto the letter N,n.

This afternoon I was at a district-wide kindergarten meeting.  Kindergarteners had their very first guest teacher, Mrs. Fox.  According to Mrs. Fox's note, things went very well this afternoon which makes me super happy!  Way to go kindergarten friends!!!  It's not always easy having a guest teacher. :)

Remember-No School on Friday due to staff development and mid-quarter.  We will see your smiling faces on Monday with your orange reading slips!

Love,
Mrs. Huettl

The Somerset Family

Today was a special day because we took our Somerset Family Picture!!!  We all met on the hill out back by the butterfly garden and took a picture with all students and staff from Kindergarten to 4th grade.  It was a beautiful day for our picture.  Check the window outside the office soon to see our picture.  It will also be included in the Somerset yearbook at the end of the school year.

This morning we finished up our last two rotations of centers.  During centers there are many time when we need to work independently.  We are working on building up our independence.

During SMART time today we introduced the Spooner board.  This board helps with our balance.  We rocked back and forth shifting our weight while counting to 20 today.  We also read sentences while bouncing on the trampoline.

In the fine motor stations, we worked on making designs on peg boards and writing with chalk.  Both of these activities work on our pincer grip which will help us when we hold our pencils for writing.

We had to take advantage of such a beautiful day.  Our kindergarten tree has been delivered, so we went outside to do some observations of our tree.  We noticed lots of things, like the colors and shapes of the leaves, the berries that were in bunched in groups, the red "sold" tag, and the black bucket our tree is sitting in.  We put these observations into our brains, and then came inside to record what we had seen.  We did our very best to include as many details as we could remember.

At one point this morning a group of wild turkeys were hanging out outside of our windows.  We took some time to quietly sneak over and take a peek at them.

Today was the first drawing for the Read-a-thon.  We had two winners in our classroom, Natalie and Dylan!  Congratulations!  Keep reading at home and filling out your orange slips.  Orange slips will be collected again on Monday. 

Tomorrow students are encouraged to wear red and yellow in support of Sibley High School's homecoming week. 

Have a wonderful evening.

Love,
Mrs. Huettl

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

The Little School Bus

Good Afternoon!  This week we are starting our Reading Streets Curriculum.  Today we introduced the sight words: I am.  We created a book using the sight words and color words.  We colored pictures in our book so that we could use the pictures as a clue for the color word.  We also practiced tracking while reading by pointing to dots that were under each word.  Here is a picture of a couple of the pages from our book. Eventually this book will be sent home with your child.

We read the book, The Little School Bus.  This is a great rhyming story about seven different animals that ride the bus to school.

Our amazing words this week are number order words, such as first, second, and third.  We heard these words in our story, and we are using them throughout the week in our classroom.

We continued to build our reading stamina today and boy did we ever!  We read for 6 minutes today!!!  Mrs. Huettl will be able to start pulling small groups next week at this pace!

In math today we finished our pattern stations.  It was also our 20th day of school!  Zero the Hero came and left us a letter and zero-shaped snack, Cheerios.  We had to count our Cheerios into piles of twenty.

It's tough to fit it all into the day, so this afternoon we took a break from our journals and instead we worked on our Mystery Letter for the day, M,m.  We decorated our letters with metallic paper.

Also being sent home today is the first set of Learning Links.  Learning Links are the equivalent of homework in Kindergarten.  These are quick activities you can do with your child at home each night of the week.  Learning Links are meant to bridge the learning happening at school to home.  They do NOT need to be returned to school. 

Remember the school wide Read-a-thon has begun!  Turn in your orange reading slips to the Zebra box each Monday.  If you forgot your slip today, that's okay, bring it tomorrow!  We will take slips at anytime!  The weekly prize drawing will be on Wednesday.

Have a wonderful afternoon!  See you tomorrow!

Love,
Mrs. Huettl