Graphing Day!

Good Afternoon!

Today's Mystery Letter was the letter A,a.  We really enjoyed the song about the letter A,a and the two sounds that the letter makes.  We decorated our letters with apples and acorns to represent both sounds.

We also had SMART time today.  Our activities today were the same pattern as yesterday.  We will continue to get new activities and patterns on Wednesdays and then repeat them on Thursdays.  This repetition helps us to feel successful.

We had two jobs during math today.  First we created a graph of all our birthdays.  We each came up and put a picture of balloons in a column by the month our birthday is in.  When all the birthdays were up, we answered questions, such as which month has the most birthdays?  Which month has the least birthdays? (When April was given as an answer, we discussed why June and August actually have the least amount with zero.)  We identified which months had two birthdays, etc.

We also needed to come up with a name for our graph so that people that walk past it in the hall know what we are talking about!  We came up with the title, Birthdays in Mrs. Huettl's Class.

Our second job was to finish up our number posters by gluing the photo we had taken on Monday onto the poster.  We completed this task and hung our posters in the room.  Here is one section:

We continued to work on assigning goals during our journal time today.  I think we are about 2/3 of the way there.  Hopefully everyone will have their goal by tomorrow and we can start earning those stickers next week!

Have a great evening!

Love,
Mrs. Huettl

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!

Gee...That was a Great day!

Today was Great!  Our Mystery Letter was the letter G!  We acted like gorillas, painted our letters with a glob of gold glitter goop, and sang and read about the letter G.  It was good fun!

Today Mr. Tinjum came in for a kindness lesson.  He showed a video about how kindness can have the ripple effect.  It was a really moving video and the kids picked up on it.  I'm going to post it here on the blog.  Consider watching this with your family and discussing how being kind to others can make the world and our school a great place to be!

During math today we sorted buttons! We sorted by color:

Shape:

Size:

Number of Holes:

There were so many ways to sort the buttons!

This morning our Activboard was acting up a bit, so we had to move our calendar time to the afternoon.  This shortened up our journaling time, but we still had some great writing!  Here are a couple examples of journal entries.

I hope everyone has a wonderful evening.  Enjoy the sunshine and we'll see you tomorrow!

Love,
Mrs. Huettl

A Great Start to a Great Week

I don't know what it is, but I just have a really good feeling about this week.  We started it out with a great day!

Today was our tenth day of school!  This meant we had our first visit from Zero the Hero!  He left us a letter taped to a box of fruit loops.  Fruit loops are in the shape of a zero!  We ate our fruit loops for snack.

Now, when I told you that we "do math" every day, I was not kidding!  After an introductory discussion on place value, specifically the tens and ones place, we went to enjoy some down time with snack.  However, Mrs. Huettl can be tricky, and when I asked to students to sort their fruit loops by color while they were waiting for everyone to be served, I was really pre-assessing everyones knowledge of sorting before our sorting lesson tomorrow.  Sneaky, sneaky!

Speaking of math, we also did some pre-algebra this morning during our "under the sea" work.  Check out the picture below.  That empty box is one of the first steps to algebraic thinking!

This week we will be taking our reading baseline test.  This test is done with paper and pencil and students have to listen very carefully as we go through each question together.  Today we took a practice test to help prepare us for the next couple of days.  We worked on test taking skills, such as following along with the teacher, only circling one item, when you don't know-give it your best guess, and don't shout out the answer so everyone can use their own brains!

Our mystery letter today was the letter Q,q.  We put question mark stickers onto our letters.  We ran out of stickers a lot faster than anticipated, so some letters may look a little sparse...

In math today we started to make posters for the numbers 0-10.  We worked in teams of three to add stickers to our posters.  We were also able to use Mrs. Huettl's camera to take a picture that represented each number.  Can you guess which number these student taken photos represent?

I'm going to have to take some photos of journals tomorrow because I am so impressed with the work I am seeing this early in the school year.  We have some amazing kid writers in this room!!!

Have a great evening.  Sorry for the late post.

Love,
Mrs. Huettl

Kindergarten Picnic and Our Friday!

Good Afternoon!

I'm going to combine both the Kindergarten Picnic and our day today together in this post.  It was so nice to see so many families last night at our picnic.  I'm sure everyone had a great time getting to put names to faces and meeting new families. 

We even got to play some games with Ms. Westman.  It was fun seeing all the parent involvement as well. 

This picnic was just the first of many opportunities for you to connect with other Somerset families.  There truly is a sense of family here at Somerset, so welcome to the family!

Today was a great day in kindergarten!  It was our friend Elijah's birthday!

While singing an alphabet song this morning we were "raising the roof" for each letter.

Our Mystery Letter today was the letter C,c.  We made colorful curls and glued them onto our letters.

We met with our 2nd grade buddies today and did some reading in our classroom.

During math today we practiced counting backwards from 10.  We also played Ten Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed.  We took turns being monkeys and jumped on our giant bed (the carpet) and one at a time we "fell off."  We had fun!

This afternoon during journals we talked about writing lines for each word we want to write.  If our sentence is, "The princess is in the castle," then we need to draw 6 lines on our journal page.  Then we sound out the words one at a time and write down the sounds we hear.  We will be ready for journal volunteers in the next week or so.  If you signed up, you'll be hearing from me, and if your interested but did not sign up, e-mail me and I'll get you set up.

We had our second fire drill of the year this afternoon.  It was during our choice time.  We did a great job of leaving everything behind and lining up quickly!

I hope everyone has an amazing weekend!  I'll see you on Monday!

Love,
Mrs. Huettl

Picture Day!

Good Afternoon!

Today was an exciting day in Kindergarten!  This morning when we came into the classroom there were various materials for us to explore at our tables.  These materials will eventually be used at our word work station.  For now, we just get to explore.  We are rotating these materials to all four tables over the next four days.  One table had daubers.  They were able to create their own designs and take them home.

The next table was full of alphabet puzzles, both upper and lowercase.

Magnet letters and cookie sheets were set out at another table.  Students had fun sticking the letters onto the cookie sheets and some started to spell out names of their family members.

The final table had white boards and dry-erase markers.  These are super fun because your writing can wipe right off!

Ask your child which material they got to explore this morning!

We continue to draw a name out of the magic hat each morning.  When a child's name comes out of the magic hat, we get to celebrate that child's name.  We read their name, spell their name, clap their name, and whisper their name.  Here is Natalie writing her name on the Activboard for us.

Our Mystery Letter today was the vowel O,o.  Again, we talked about how the letter O,o has two different sounds.  Each sound is represented in the decorated letter, short o-octopus, and to represent the long o sound, we colored the letter orange.

We had our first full-out SMART time today.  For a description of SMART, check yesterday's post- We are SMART!  The obstacle course today consisted of hot dog rolls, an eye exercise where you track your thumb moving in towards your body and away from your body for 5 seconds each, the popcorn exercise, bouncing on a mini trampoline while following an alphabet chart, and crawling on the floor while slapping and identifying numbers on poly spots.  We also started with our warm-up and ended with our cool-down.  We had lots of fun!  Many students are looking forward to the balance beam being incorporated. (Sorry, I had technical difficulties trying to rotate my pictures!)

During math today we practiced counting by using our sense of hearing and touch.  First Mrs. Huettl hid her hand in a can and dropped in little discs.  We couldn't see, so we really had to listen to figure out how many discs were in the can.  Then we used the sense of touch.  We partnered up and tapped our partners back, then our partner had to tell us how many taps we did.  We then, of, course, reversed the roles.

This afternoon we were busy with gym and music class.  We also worked in our journals and Mrs. Huettl started to conference with half of the class.  We are almost ready to begin our journal parent volunteers :)

Hope to see you all soon at the Kindergarten Picnic.  I will post again either later tonight or tomorrow with highlights from the Kindergarten Picnic.

Love,
Mrs. Huettl