Welcome to the Kindergarten Pizzeria! 
The Kindergartners took one day to celebrate all of our hard work with number sense, number recognition, and counting! When we walked into our classroom, we discovered that it had transformed into a pizzeria!
   This was no normal pizzeria! At this pizzeria, it was the Kindergartners' job to add all of the toppings- no more and no less than the order stated. 
    Using our recipe cards, the Kindergartners spent an afternoon creating pizzas galore. Mama mia! What a fun time we had practicing our numbers and exploring our imaginations!

​With Thanksgiving approaching, the Kindergartners have been learning all about how the Pilgrims came to America and the first Thanksgiving. To practice our critical thinking skills and our engineering spirits, the Kindergartners were tasked with creating their very own Mayflower! Given only tin foil, the Kindergartners were given a task: create a boat that would hold as many "pilgrims" as possible. 
  Using our problem solving, creativity, and a lot of redesigning, several groups were able to successfully create a Mayflower that held all of our pilgrims without sinking!

Towards the end of our pumpkin unit, we read the book Pete the Cat and the 5 Little Pumpkins. There was an opportunity to connect our literacy lesson to a STEM challenge, and we couldn't pass it up!
  Kindergartners were each given 5 pumpkins and were then asked to create a gate for them using 3 materials: clothespins, popsicle sticks, Keva planks, and Jenga blocks. The Kindergartners easily created several gates and were then given an even bigger challenge...create a gate/structure that holds a real pumpkin! There was building, redesigning, problem solving, and giggles galore during this great STEM challenge. We ended up with some truly amazing structures and the end and some very proud Kindergartners!

​With our last "Mad Scientist Experiment" before Halloween, the Kindergartners got to experience a spooky science experiment! They were given safety glasses, pipettes, beakers full of a potion ingredient, and a glass full of the other potion ingredient. After talking with their group about their predictions about what will happen, they went off to work making their potions!
    The Kindergarten room was full of ooohs and ahhhs as their potions grew, fizzled, and even changed color out of nowhere! Our Kindergarten scientists are becoming experts in observation, making hypotheses, and asking questions about why things happen!

The Kinders were mighty surprised when they walked into our classroom after recess on Friday to discover that our classroom was attacked by spiders! The spiders had set up an obstacle course and game for us to play. The spiders were nice enough to lend us their superpowers by giving us each a spider ring, which helped the Kinders navigate the maze in our room. 
   The Kindergartners were challenged to work in teams to navigate the obstacle course, grab a card from the bags hanging from the spider webs, and then talk with their team to figure out what letter the picture started with. The Kinders were able to have their problem solving and reading skills challenged all at the same time! 
  This activity brought forth several wonderful conversations about letters, a lot of giggles when Kinders were trying to navigate the web, and teamwork that amazed this teacher! 
   What a day it was!

Kindergartners walked into school Thursday and discovered that the room had been transformed into the Serengeti! With zebras, giraffes, elephants, and many more African animals around the room, we decided to go on a Shape Safari!
    On our safari, we searched high and low for all kinds of animals. When we found an animal, we recorded the number on the picture and then flipped the picture over to reveal a shape!
     We then recorded our findings in our field journals and circled all the corners in the shape. It was such a busy and fun way to celebrate our learning and test our 2D shape knowledge. Check out some pictures below to see our safari in action along with some photos with our giraffe visitor, Twiga!

This past week, the Kindergartners have been learning all about a fall favorite fruit...apples! We have been using descriptive words and using our 5 sense to investigate them. One day, we jumped into practicing our reading skills while identifying all of the different parts of an apple! 
  We then transferred our labeling skills to label Miss Keenan! We labeled all the parts of her face and she was covered in Post-it labels by the end of the lesson! This showed the Kindergartners how man things there are that they can label in their writing during Writer's Workshop (and the importance of adding details to our pictures!)
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Kindergartners walked into school this past Wednesday to see a big surprise waiting for them! That morning, everyone's favorite gym teacher installed our brand new Clevertouch board, which is an interactive board. The Kindergartners (and their teacher!) are having so much fun learning about everything that it can do and how it can help us learn even more. We have been using it to practice writing letters, sorting objects, identifying beginning sounds, and and even for GoNoodle!

While the weather is still gorgeous, the Kindergartners like to take a bit of time after our Wednesday mass to play outside. What a great way to get to know our new classmates and get some fresh air!

Welcome Kindergarten 2018-19 families!
    With our new school year up and starting, welcome to our class website!
     This website is a place that you where you can check in on what we are doing in school, see what important things are coming up at NDA and in Kindergarten, and it is a place to see many photos of Kindergarten in action. I usually update our website once a week, with a highlight of something we did. 
​      I look forward to an amazing year of Kindergarten!