Monthly Archives: October 2010
New Pets
We have several new critters in our classroom this year. They are all part of our Kindergarten Zoo! I’ve shown you the Meal Worms before, but we have also added Hermit Crabs and now Toads!! My sister found some toads when she was cleaning out the window wells at her church during their workday last Sunday. She called and asked if I wanted them and so now we have Toads. I think our Zoo is now complete as I can only remember to feed so many things at a time!! When we got the toads, we talked about how we should go about feeding them. We figured out two ways to do this. Some of the children volunteered to dig for worms in the dirt around the school (we need to get permission first before this can begin–I have a class set of child sized shovels to help us!) and the second way is to just feed them our meal worms and the meal worm beetles. Everyone seemed to be okay with this plan and so our happy little toads are enjoying their new habitat!
This is a picture of one of the happy little guys! We have four of them all together.
Meal Worms
Hermit Crabs
They were in a small tank, but didn’t seem so happy! Now they crawl all over the place and I’ve since added some things for them to climb on.
Updates
The pictures in the slide show are two different things I added to Library Work Station and to Pocket Chart Station. The orange cards are word family cards I created for Pocket Chart Station. The children take the three word family endings and put them at the top of the chart. They then read the rest of the words and put them under the appropriate heading/word family. When they are done, they can turn them over to check them and make sure they all have the same star that is on the word family card at the top.
The other pictures are of our first class book we made. I asked the children to draw a picture of their homes. We used them to make a graph about where we lived (house, apartment, town home). Then I took the pictures and the cards that were once the labels on our graph and bound them together to make a book about “Where We Live”.
Kristen 🙂
Homes and Communities
One of the IB units we have developed centers around Who We Are and that includes homes and communities. Even though we did not officially teach that unit this year (we will next year), we all wanted to try and teach parts of it so that we could get a feel for it and add some ideas to it. We spent two weeks on the homes and communities portion (also included in this 6 week theme is/are: all about me, pets, my family). Here are some pictures from our study of homes and communities:
This was the big book we read during the communities portion of the unit. This book came with our Scott Foresman adoption a few years ago. We used another book titled “Homes Around the World” for our homes study. I recorded both of these books on my computer for the children to listen to at Listening Work Station. I use Garage Band and drop in a quiet music track and some sound effects after reading the book into my computer. It’s really easy–although it still sounds like I am reading in a can…still working on that!!
We used Legos and the maps that came with our Social Studies kits to make communities. I scooped out a big cupful of Legos on to each table and the children created buildings, cars, etc. to create a community. We used the reverse side of the maps during our homes study. I showed the children how to make homes to scale (for our map) and how to add a tab to the bottom for taping it to the map. The children made a variety of homes and we taped them on. They also created some trees after noticing that they were missing from the map.
Grant
We are fortunate enough to have another one of our grants funded through DonorsChoose.org! This grant was mainly to get a new copy of Brown Bear, Brown Bear for our classroom because we had one OLD copy that we were sharing among four classrooms! Here are some pictures of the other things we received within that grant:
We also got these cool color tubes. Each tube has two colors in it and when you shake them, the colors mix to make another color.
I saw this can in the Lakeshore catalog and decided it went along with Brown Bear because of the color activities inside. This can stays in our Science Work Station and the children can mix colors using color paddles, use the flashlight and shine it in the mirrors or thru the color paddles, or they can try one of the simple experiments included on the task cards.
This is a sight word game that we have been using during Work with the Teacher time (within Literacy Work Station time). The children can repeat the simple sentence structures in Brown Bear and manipulate the words and animals on the tiles that are included. I’ll eventually put this out at Work/ABC Work Station so that the children can complete it independently.
Kristen 🙂
Library Work Station
Hi Everyone!
I know it seems as if I’ve fallen off the face of the earth, but I really haven’t!!! I’m still here! Things have been busy lately and updating my blog just kept getting pushed further and further down the list. I’m going to post 5 entries today, the other 4 will be ahead of this one, but if you are subscribed to my blog you will get them in the right order. If you haven’t subscribed, there is a box on the left hand side for you to do that…you don’t have to check here for updates…they will get e-mailed directly to you!
Here are some pictures from our Library Work Station. It is a constantly evolving area. Each time we learn about a new topic, I put books pertaining to that topic into the large front facing bookcase. You can see our farm books in the front facing shelf in the pictures. The baskets on the tall brown book shelf stay the same and the old books from the front facing bookcase get moved to the top of another bookcase. We’ve also just added a basket for Class Books. These are the books made by the children for the children. So far, we have three books in it, “Where we live”, “Homes”, and “Mrs. Wishy-Washy”. I just keep the labels the same on the books that are in the front facing bookcase. They all have green dot stickers on them to help them get returned to their homes. This system is working great!! I find that very few books make it back to their correct baskets.
Kristen's Kindergarten 