The Kindergartners have been busy growing their math skills this year. Our latest skill happens to be subtraction! We decided to make subtraction even more exciting with Hulk hands, play-doh, and a lot of giggles.
   We would roll play-doh into 6 balls, roll a die, and then use our Hulk strength to smash that number of play-doh balls. Imaginative play and math go together beautifully!

   Check out a few pictures of the Kinders in action below!

In Kindergarten, the 100th day school is a huge milestone! It shows just how far we have come in 100 days and it is a great time to celebrate all that we have learned! 
  On our 100th day of school, it felt like we did 100 things! We counted out 100 stickers and put them on remarkable hats, we wrote what we would want to eat 100 of, what we would like 100 of and even what we would do if we had $100!
   We practiced counting all the way to 100 by 5's, 10's, and 1's! We even wrote our numbers all the way to 100. We ended our day with a huge challenge. Kindergartners were split into 3 groups and challenged to build a tower as high as they could with 100 cups. The most important thing that was stressed was teamwork, communication, and problem solving. By the end of our time, there were cup towers that were nearly as tall as the Kindergartners building them!
     We officially can celebrate that we are 100 days smarter!

The Kindergartners have become masters of reading. They are able to identify beginning and ending sounds like the pros that they are! In order to celebrate how far they have come, they were sent on a task. They entered the Kindergarten Hospital and needed to fix some words!
    There were CVC words all over the classroom and each one was sick and missing something important...their vowel! With their doctor coats on and their patient charts in hand, the Kindergartners spent the afternoon fixing each word and celebrating when the patient was healed!
     By the end of the experience, each Kindergartner proved to be an excellent vowel surgeon and all patients were fixed! This was a great way for the Kindergartners to practice their phonics, use their imaginations, hone their fine motor skills, and have a little bit of fun in the process!
     Look below at our slideshow of pictures to see us in action!

The Kindergartners have embraced a new motto for the rest of the school year. We are going to throw kindness around like confetti!
This means that wherever we go, we are going to leave little traces of kindness. We will spread it as far as we can. From smiling at someone in the hallway, to helping clean up a mess that you didn't make. We have discovered that we can leave kindness everywhere!
  To double check on our motto, we decided that we should take the opportunity to see what happens when we throw confetti! It was the start of a wonderful tradition in Kindergarten and we discovered that our confetti landed everywhere around our room! 2 days later and we are still finding pieces of it hidden throughout our room!

​   The Kindergartners love GoNoodle. It is a wonderful way for us to get a few wiggles, sillies, and energy out when we are transitioning to a new activity. One of our favorite part of our brain breaks with GoNoodle are those that involve Koo Koo Kangaroo and their songs.
  Koo Koo Kangaroo recently visited our school and the school had a giant dance party! When the Kinders saw them, they were starstruck, bubbling with excitement and energy. 
After, we were able to meet them, get a picture, and thank them for coming to our school! When we returned to the classroom, there were several comments ranging from "This is the happiest day of my life!" to "Miss Keenan, I didn't know that they were real!"
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    In math, we have been learning all about the different types of shapes, both 2D and 3D. 3D shapes can be pretty tricky to grasp the concept of so the Kinders were challenged to put their knowlege of 3D shapes to use! 
    They were each given a cup of marshmallows, a handful of toothpicks and a challenge...to build the highest, most stable snowball fort possible. 
The Kindergartners quickly discovered how easily it was to create cubes, pyramids, and even rectangular prisms out of the materials.
 By the end of our STEM activity, there were forts that were over 12 inches tall! At the end of the experiment, I had several Kinders commenting on how this was their favorite science project yet!
It is amazing what a group of Kindergartners can create with some problem solving, 4 bags of mini marshmallows and 1,600 toothpicks!
Take a look at a few of their creations!
 

Over the course of the year, there will be additional things added to the book bags but this is what we are starting with! Kinders will need your help with making sure that the book bags return to school each and every day! As the year goes on, it would be great to make this the student's responsibility but they will need a lot of help at first remembering. I gop that you enjoy the book bags just as much as the Kinders!

The Kinders took full advantage of an empty school (while everyone was at a Christmas concert!) and took to the halls, searching for all the sight words we could find!
   Before we left our classroom, we made and decorated our binoculars, reviewed our numerous sight words, and set a goal for how many we thought we could find! By the end of our search around the school, we were amazed by how many different words we could read in our hallways! 
​    We are well on our way to becoming super readers in Kindergarten! 

With December here and the holidays approaching, the Kindergarten room is starting to get a bit festive! We kicked off December with Gingerbread Man/Girl week. We spent the week comparing and contrasting different versions of the story to each other. We discovered that most of them had similar characters, but most versions of the story had a different saying/chant! We ended our Gingerbread week by asking the question "What would happen if the Gingerbread Man swam across the river?"
   We created our own hypothesis and then got off to work on our experiment. We quickly discovered that if the Gingerbread Man swam across the river, he would get soggy, crumbly, and then eventually break. Oh no! 

   We unwrapped a few new things at literacy centers for the Christmas season as well. We are counting syllables with tamborines, writing letters and lists to Santa, and even playing sight word Jenga! We are quickly becoming wonderful readers and writers...we are working so hard and we are so proud!

Before Thanksgiving, we spent a lot of time learning about the first Thanksgiving, comparing our lives to the lives of Pilgrims, and talking about all the things that we are thankful for in our lives.
   One afternoon, the Kindergartners were challenged to create their very own Mayflower. Using only a sheet of tin foil, the Kinders had to create a boat that would hold all of the Pilgrims looking to get to America. We planned out our design, brainstormed with our partner, and then started building! During the first test, there were several ships that only help 5-6 Pilgrims. The Kindergartners then problem solved with their partner, trying to discover a way to build a stronger, better ship. 
   By the end of our experiment, there were Mayflowers that were holding over 90 Pilgrims (which was all that Miss Keenan had!)