Monthly Archives: February 2017
Kindness is Cool!
I’m always encouraging my students to be kind to each other. We chant “Kindness is Cool!” as part of our morning meeting each day. My students and I wanted to do something to help other students in our school remember that “Kindness is Cool!”, so that they would keep being kind to others as well. We created the idea of kindness hearts. Each time we see someone doing a kind thing for another person, we give them a heart. These hearts are to help them remember how nice it felt to do a kind thing for another person. We also symbolically wound yarn around our hearts (kind of like a dream catcher), so that the kindness would get “stuck” in the heart and would help the recipient remember that feeling and encourage others to be kind as well.
We are currently working on making enough for the school, so that we can give some to each teacher to give out when they see a student or adult doing a kind thing for someone else. We will also make some extras so that there are plenty in the front office to be passed out by all!!
Click here to read more about how to make your own Kindness hearts!
Snowflake Science
You all know how near and dear to my heart teaching science to my Kindergarten students is! One of my favorite science concepts to share with my students is weather! If I weren’t a Kindergarten teacher, I would have been a meteorologist. I’ve always loved the weather and I’ve taken several classes in high school and college just for my own knowledge. It is neat to me to understand how weather works and how we can tell what the weather is going to be like just by understanding what the sky is telling us!
In Indiana (where I live!), we have a saying…”Wait 5 minutes and the weather will change!” It is SO true! So a few days ago, we were going about our day and when we looked out the window, the weather had gone from a wonderful sunny winter day, to snow!!
At the start of every winter, I get out my winter kit, so that when we get a snow happening while we are at school, we just pull it out and go! We do get outside to collect snowflakes on black paper, and then we come in and have some fun creating our own:
I got a class set of these fingerprint snowflake kits from Oriental Trading, just so we could talk about how each snowflake is unique, just like each and every one of us! We also created our own snowflakes out of pipe cleaners and beads, and we sorted some sparkly snowflakes! Click here to read more about our snowflake science fun!
Kristen's Kindergarten 